Tesla Offers Mammoth $1t Pay Package to Musk, Sets Lofty Targets
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Tesla
Elon Musk
Compensation Package
Valuation
Autonomous Technology
Tesla proposes a $1 trillion pay package for Elon Musk, contingent on achieving lofty targets, sparking debate among HN users about the feasibility of these goals and Musk's leadership.
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*or at least the sort of operational milestones that make for the kind of pithy headlines that prop up the stock price
With all due respect, what in the world are you on about?
Tesla's sales are down, revenue is down, profit is down, and Tesla continues to lose EV market share.
Eh, betting against Musk generally seems to be a losing proposition. Starlink alone would have given me faith in his abilities, what Tesla's done with Models 3 and Y and SpaceX with Falcon 9 gives me all the more reason to believe him. Yes, despite the absurd timelines, which I'm generally okay with. (Not OP)
I will never bet on Musk, but I’m also not dumb enough to bet against him, given TSLA’s stock growth. The board has set a wild target for him before, and he hit it.
It’s too easy to say “he’ll never achieve that!” from the comfort of an armchair internet comment.
Ok, if you really believe that, step up to the line and place your bets. Because if you don’t believe it enough to put money on it, you probably don’t believe it that much.
You literally echoed his reasons, not sure why you said this.
But leave it to the pedantic internet commenters to take issue with even a minor inconsistency.
I promise to do better next time, thank you for your feedback. I know I’ll make you proud one day, dad.
I'm not trying to insult you, but think about this. Musk has a reputation of actually delivering on the things he showcases- Cybertruck is real, it also failed, but he delivered it. Starlink is real, and it is winning spectacularly and probably has saved countless Ukrainian lives at this point. Yes FSD is not there yet, but I can pretty much guarantee you that it will be the first car that (is not a taxi) that has it.
And breaking apart my own statement slowly for you:
So please stop with the MDS so we can actually discuss the REALITY of the world.By comparison the Vegas Monorail cost 5x as much, took 1/3rd longer to build, and takes roughly a third of the passengers that the Boring tunnel does. This is a huge win for Las Vegas, and they continue to build out because it's worked out well for them.
So are modern subways. Cost is a major point tho, subways are designed to move waaaaay more than 30k people a day for much less, but costs of building are much higher.
This is only 1.7 miles and a novelty, I would not know If the differences hold for Tesla on other places or when scaling up. My suspicious is that it does not.
I also wonder that if you use the same tunnel they did but modify the cars to run by themselves using traditional techniques, would the operation get cheaper but the shortcomings be more glaring.
30k a day is a nearly a million a month and costs are low by comparison (no expensive subway cars etc).
That's like saying a car is slow because it's not a spaceship.
Please go look at Encore station on Vegas Loop. And come back telling me it is below ground... And that is not only place. Overall it looks like right mess. Including very scalable solutions like single tunnels to some stations...
https://youtu.be/VPjODKUxV5g is where I'm coming from. The section of the system, where there's one tunnel, so the previous car has to clear the tunnel before the next vehicle can go, seems particularly stupid.
There are other stuff to do in the world both as far as technological advancement and leisure that could fill that time and man hours and produce a tangible ROI as opposed to "we are failing but at least we are trying"
By the same token the next goal set by Musk would be creating a wormhole if he hasn't said it already considering the amount of drugs that he takes.
Many people conflate the reasoning that is prevalent in SV for founders where they say "there is no price for failure". That is maybe true for the individual not when trillions of man hours and trillions of dollars are allocated.
They haven't hit your personal standard. Who cares? Investors are happy with their progress and at the end of the day that is more important than people like yourself who probably do t have skin in the game
It is one thing to fail independently say at your own startup, complete different thing is having choose between keeping your job or do something that you feel like it's a dead end or it is deceiving the public even tho you are not convinced just because the higher ups ordered so.
THat's how trillions of dollars and most importantly trillions of man hours are set on fire
When they lose of course people are gonna call them out regardless of the monetary purse that they were awarded for losing the fight.
And that is the way it should be considering you are dangling in front of people a huge improvement in their quality of life and then constantly failing to ship it.
For all its flaws Microsoft shipped Windows 95 after talking about it for 10 months before the launch. Not 10 years. And that was really a big quality of life improvement for basically billions of people.
Finally people don't care about what the marketcap of Tesla is or what Musk net worth is, those discussions happen among the fanboys and those who have false idols. People care about how a company can improve their life and despite all the fanfare, Tesla Motors have produced very little improvment through its history, and thye are not a startup either considering they are 2002-2025
There is a much better chance of me fathering a child with Madonna than this
inertia (IMU), vision (CCD), skin pressure (not sure?), absolute offset/absolute rotation (optical encoders)
so now the question is: how do we convert this bag of signals into mimicking a human. this question has been asked for text already, and the answer is LLMs which can, at the very least, mimick humans pretty well.
if a humanoid can be made to mimick a cook, or a cleaner, or manual labor, be able to navigate human geometry (stairs, ramps, etc.) that is already huge.
i agree that it would be the most advanced consumer grade product - the only thing that might beat it, is a domestic nuclear reactor.
people will eat this shit up though, next 11 years every earnings report will say robots will be cooking at michelin star restaurants “soon”
For Tesla shareholders being the "first" with the idea has incredible value.
So far I've only seen these things in clean and dry environments, where they fold dry laundry, badly.
It looks like an absolute and expensive maintenance nightmare. Also, I'd worry about prompt injection or malfunction. Better carry an axe at all times:
https://www.theguardian.com/sport/2022/jul/24/chess-robot-gr...
Obviously no chance in hell that Tesla hits that market cap legitimately just based on the performance of the past four years.
However, if the administration succeeds in killing the Fed’s independence and sending inflation to the moon, he might get that payday early! It will in be Zimbabwe dollars, but he will get that trillionaire title (along with many others).
Again.
The right is now split into a faction that rejects foreign interventions and wants to withdraw, if not total isolationist then something in that direction, and another faction. At the elite level this other faction is ascendant. The lesson they have drawn from US military failures from Vietnam to GWOT is different from the former faction. In their view the problem is that we were not aggressive enough, we were too constrained by overly legalistic and conservative rules of engagement and various ideological goals which polluted the prosecution of the wars and prevented us from "winning". They DO want a more cruel, more aggressive force posture. They admire and defend Israel in large part because they see it as a model of a force which really believes in "winning". A substantial portion of the voter base is attracted to this, enthused by the prospect of aggressive campaigns in Latin America with relaxed rules of engagement, and sees the renaming to Department of War as a "based" declaration of this doctrine. The country is moving more in this direction and the more isolationist (kind of "Buchananite") wing is getting purged again, but with some concessions made to them.
I am not sure the left has any answer to this right now because it has discredited itself with so many, especially losing a lot of younger men (those under 21 heavily favor Republicans), and generally the country may simply be moving in this direction. I think be clear eyed what you are facing.
It’s going to be a bad time real quick
https://www.reuters.com/world/us/trump-orders-return-us-war-...
I thought you were joking. Wtf.
(Congress established and must approve any DoD changes)
Such actions are increasingly common and remain effectively unchallenged, stalled all the way to a compliant SCOTUS that falls in line rather than be ignored should they rule against.
Give US forces 48 hours of free reign in Venezuela and they will set the world on fire. Coupled with the right framing by the right reporters, Congress will give near unanimous approval for further escalation.
World War seems nigh inevitable at this stage. Better prepare to hunker down in that bomb shelter: refresh your stock of rations and gear up for the long haul.
That was the department's name for 150 years.. until doublespeak became popular in the 1940's
Given that market can remain crazy longer than I can remain solvent I’d rather be invested in it.
[1] https://www.tesla.com/sites/default/files/downloads/TSLA-Q2-...
They have already released multiple revolutionary products including the first real electric car and then the model y which is the best selling car in the world.
Tough economic situation for a car manufacturer. If you consider running a profitable company during a tough situation and unprecedented tariffs to be "driving into the ground" that's up to you.
Considering Ford and everyone else is absolutely getting clobbered in electric vehicles I do find that comical
Which products? EVs are a commodity. Self driving technology is better at Waymo, and in China, the latest Huawei version of self driving, installed in Avatar cars, is on par with Tesla’s and even better in some cases. What’s left? The Optimus robot? Unitree from China and Boston Dynamics (owned by Toyota), are ahead of Tesla. Not to mention the hundreds of startups in China working on the same thing, all using essentially the same transformer based architecture with only minor tweaks. There’s no moat this time. What Tesla still excels at is marketing and hype, but even that has its limits.
How many cars in the US is haiwei self driving in right now?
How many robots is Boston Dynamics selling?
You are arguing that vaporware is better than what Tesla has.
A willingness to ship at a much lower level of technical readiness and safety, and a reasonable chance of achieving enough regulatory capture to be allowed to do so.
Their only option is to desperately ride on, hoping to stay ahead of the tide until they find some higher ground. Who knows: dangling a giant carrot in front of their mule might help?
“please don’t notice the bubble please don’t notice the bubble please don’t notice the bubble”
"Look, you'll miss out on trillions if you pull out now! Please, we're so close!"
I have to conclude that members of the board are in full support of this behavior.
Given that, the only real issue is the valuation targets - and that folks, that's an open invitation for stock manipulation for the master manipulator himself.
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