Poll: Should Elon Musk Get His Multi-Billion Dollar Payday?

Shareholders recently voted in favor of a roughly $48 billion award, but should they have?

Tesla is facing a reckoning as sales are slowing in a number of markets and inventories are piling up. If that wasn’t bad enough, Elon Musk seems distracted with countless other things.

However, when he’s paying attention, he sometimes hurts his own company. The Supercharger Network firings are a prime example of this, as the executive appears to have had a hissy fit and overreacted. While the automaker eventually reversed course and rehired some workers, Musk gave Tesla a black eye.

More: Elon Musk Gets His $48 Billion Pay Day Approved By Shareholders

If that wasn’t bad enough, Musk’s antics and attention seeking behavior seem to be turning some people off. That would be fine if people simply didn’t like Musk, but he’s so closely linked with Tesla, both appear to be suffering in popularity and opinion polls.

With all that being said, shareholders voted in favor of a proposal to give a “performance-based stock option award to Elon Musk that was proposed to and approved by our stockholders in 2018.” The vote followed a judge’s decision to rescind the multi-billion dollar award earlier this year, but it still doesn’t ensure Musk will get his huge payday. However, it certainly helps his case and a whopping 77% voted in favor of the move.

The shareholders technically approved a $56 billion pay package in 2018, though that figure was contingent on Tesla’s stock value at the time. However, with the fluctuating nature of Tesla’s stock price, the company later revised the reported value to around $48 billion in its proxy statement.

That brings us to our question (and poll) of the day, should Musk get his huge payout? It’s an unfathomable number and one that seems hard to ever justify.

However, it’s impossible to imagine Tesla having anywhere near as much success without Musk. He’s also made investors very rich over the years, although things haven’t exactly been rosy as of late.

What you do think, should Musk get his massive award?