Elon Musk could become the world’s first-ever trillionaire after the Tesla board on Thursday approved a record-breaking $1 trillion pay package for the world's richest individual.
According to AFP, nearly 75% of Tesla shareholders voted in favour of the compensation plan, which had been introduced by the board last September to secure Musk’s continued leadership.
The package, structured around 12 tranches of stock options, will vest only if Tesla meets a series of ambitious operational and market-cap milestones over the next decade.
If fully realised, Musk’s stake in Tesla would rise from 13% to 25%, adding roughly 423 million shares to his holdings — a potential windfall valued at around $1 trillion, assuming Tesla achieves an $8.5 trillion market capitalisation.
This would potentially make Musk, who is already the wealthiest human being on the planet, a trillionaire.
The enormity of the sum $1 trillion (a thousand billions) is hard to describe without a comparison with other things of the magnitude.
To put the figure in perspective, $1 trillion is more than the annual GDP of countries like the Netherlands, Saudi Arabia or Switzerland.
It’s also roughly equivalent to India’s total defence budget for nearly 15 years or enough to buy Apple’s entire global iPhone output for a year — twice over.
If converted into cash, the amount could:
* Erase the student loan debt of all Americans (around $1.6 trillion) by covering more than half of it.
* Build 20,000 hospitals, assuming an average cost of $50 million each.
* Fund NASA’s budget for more than 50 years.
* Provide clean drinking water for every person on Earth — and still leave enough to send several missions to Mars.
* Buy every team in the NFL, NBA, and Premier League, and still have hundreds of billions left over.
According to a rough math by CNN, for a trillion bucks, you could acquire:
- Every single car sold in the United States this year.
- 10,000 CEOs of Starbucks.
- 333 supertall skyscrapers.
- 2,000 Jeff Bezos yachts.
- The entire Ivy League, five times over.
- $2,923 bonus for every American.
- Every house in Hawaii.
- Coca-Cola, plus a Coke for everyone on the planet.
- Toyota, Volkswagen, Stellantis, Hyundai, Ford, and GM.
- ExxonMobil, Chevron, and ConocoPhillips.
Notably, Musk’s potential payout also dwarfs compensation across the world’s largest corporations. By comparison, Microsoft’s Satya Nadella earned $79.1 million, while Apple’s Tim Cook and Nvidia’s Jensen Huang made $74.6 million and $49.9 million, respectively.
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