Well, that’s not very subtle.
In an earnings call last night, Tesla CEO Elon Musk said he needs more control over Tesla, as well as a pay package that could be worth nearly $1 trillion, in exchange for building a “robot army.” Otherwise, he could get ousted as CEO, and then, well, who would control the army?
In a sense, Musk is asking Tesla’s shareholders to vote to approve an enormous payday to insure that he — and he alone — remains in control of the company’s legions of humanoid robots (that do not exist). It was a very strange way to persuade investors to vote in favor of the proposal that’s been put forward by the company’s board. And it amounted to an unsubtle threat that Musk could simply pick up his ball and go play somewhere else.
“My fundamental concern with regard to how much voting control I have in Tesla is, if I go ahead and build this enormous robot army, can I just be ousted at some point in the future?” Musk said. “That’s my biggest concern.”
“If I go ahead and build this enormous robot army, can I just be ousted at some point in the future?”
Under the proposed pay package, Musk would need to meet certain milestones in order to receive that eye-popping compensation, such as producing 1 million robotaxis and 1 million humanoid robots, as well as increase Tesla’s valuation by trillions of dollars. Musk, already the world’s richest man, would ascend to new heights of financial untouchability if he is able to achieve these goals. Shareholders are expected to approve the package during the company’s annual shareholder meeting on November 7th.
Musk’s fears of being kicked out of Tesla conflict with his previous threats to simply leave the company if the pay package is not approved. It seems outlandish that Tesla’s board would ever consider ousting Musk, especially after they sat on their hands throughout the year as Musk’s hard-charging efforts for the Trump administration as head of DOGE led to a nationwide protest movement against Tesla and a dramatic drop in the company’s sales. If moonlighting as Trump’s hatchet man couldn’t get Musk fired, it’s hard to imagine what would.
Musk also tried a different tactic during the earnings call: questioning whether the money was even that important to him. “It’s called compensation. But it’s not like I’m going to go spend the money,” Musk said. “It’s just, if we build this robot army, do I have at least a strong influence over that robot army? Not control, but a strong influence.”
It wasn’t so long ago that Musk was sounding the warning about AI’s “threat to humanity.” He famously compared work on AI to “summoning the demon,” and warned time and time again that the technology poses an existential risk to humanity. And he urged governments to start regulating AI before it was too late.
Now he is posing a challenge to Tesla shareholders: Give me the power, or else. This coming from a guy who threw not one but two Nazi salutes at Donald Trump’s inauguration. Whose push to eliminate funding for humanitarian programs through USAID could lead to the deaths of millions of people by 2030, according to a recent study. Who claims to be a free speech absolutist while welcoming back white supremacists and election deniers to his social media platform. And who built a chatbot that declared itself to be “MechaHitler.”
“It’s called compensation. But it’s not like I’m going to go spend the money.”
Of course, Tesla’s Optimus robots are a long way from posing any sort of threat to society. They struggled to hand out popcorn at the company’s diner in Los Angeles. And they were revealed to be under remote control at Tesla’s Cybercab event last year. In the call, Musk acknowledged that it was difficult to build a robot hand that was as dexterous as a human one.
The rest was the normal Musk histrionics: Optimus will be Tesla’s “biggest product of all time”; robot surgeons are a possibility; and the robot is like “an infinite money glitch” for Tesla, insofar as how much revenue it will generate.
Musk said that Tesla will unveil “Optimus V3” during the first quarter of next year. The fourth version will be the one that scales into the tens of thousands of units, he added. “It’ll seem like a person in a robot suit, which is how we started off with Optimus,” he quipped. “It’ll seem so real that you’ll need to poke it, I think, to believe that it’s actually a robot.”
Proxy-advisory firms ISS and Glass Lewis are advising Tesla shareholders to oppose Musk’s pay package, prompting the petulant CEO to call the firms “corporate terrorists.” If past is prologue, shareholders are likely to approve the board’s proposal to gift Musk more control over the company by a wide margin. And if his predictions about Optimus come to pass, we’ll see what the world’s first trillionaire does with his new army.
