Why is everyone talking about Musk's money?

Planet Money

NPR

Business, News

4.6 • 29.8K Ratings

🗓️ 19 June 2024

⏱️ 29 minutes

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Summary

We've lived amongst Elon Musk headlines for so long now that it's easy to forget just how much he sounds like a sci-fi character. He runs a space company and wants to colonize mars. He also runs a company that just implanted a computer chip into a human brain. And he believes there's a pretty high probability everything is a simulation and we are living inside of it.

But the latest Elon Musk headline-grabbing drama is less something out of sci-fi, and more something pulled from HBO's "Succession."

Elon Musk helped take Tesla from the brink of bankruptcy to one of the biggest companies in the world. And his compensation for that was an unprecedentedly large pay package that turned him into the richest person on Earth. But a judge made a decision about that pay package that set off a chain of events resulting in quite possibly the most expensive, highest stakes vote in publicly traded company history.

The ensuing battle over Musk's compensation is not just another wild Elon tale. It's a lesson in how to motivate the people running the biggest companies that – like it or not – are shaping our world. It's a classic economics problem with a very 2024 twist.

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Transcript

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0:00.0	This is planet money from NPR.
0:04.0	Yeah, so, okay.
0:08.0	We're here to talk about, I mean is it overstating it to say like the most expensive highest stakes vote in like I don't know publicly traded company history or something?
0:19.0	I think that's fair. I mean this is a really unusual situation. This is reporter Dana Hull. She has been
0:26.4	covering the Tesla company for more than a decade. Worked at Bloomberg now. Regular
0:30.8	Voice on their Elon Inc. podcast.
0:33.0	Yeah, we wanted to talk to Dana because Tesla and Elon Musk have found themselves or really put themselves into the middle of a story that sounds more like the plot of HBO's succession
0:46.0	than real life. The basic story is this.
0:48.0	Elon Musk, Tesla's CEO, helped to take his company from the brink of bankruptcy to one of the biggest
0:54.9	companies in the world and his compensation for that was an unprecedentedly
0:59.8	large pay package that turned him into the richest man in the world.
1:04.0	But, but then a judge undid the entire compensation plan, taking away Musk's entire
1:09.5	unprecedentedly large pay package, that decision of of course, also unprecedented,
1:15.0	which then set up the also unprecedented
1:18.0	high stakes vote we mentioned earlier,
1:20.0	where shareholders got to weigh in
1:22.0	on whether they agreed with the judge's decision.
1:25.0	You know, Tesla is the largest automaker on the world in terms of market cap.
1:31.0	Elon Musk is this kind of once in a lifetime singular CEO. It's really a remarkable
1:36.7	corporate story. Yeah, you know, we've lived amongst Elon Musk headlines for so long now that I feel like it's easy to forget just how much he sounds like a fictional character.
1:47.0	He runs a space company and wants to colonize Mars.
1:50.0	He runs another company that just implanted a computer chip into a human brain.
	...

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