Elon Musk is doing for executive compensation what he did for electric cars
marketwatch.com"Multi billionaire who would never have to work another day in his life, who could quit now and spend a million dollars a DAY for the next say forty years of his life and still have money in bank, agrees to compensation plan based on value added, not increasing his treasure chest."
Or "man who doesn't need more, doesn't ask for more".
But you say this like its a bad thing. He has become a career CEO, if you're a career CEO you're most likely really fucking rich.
Rich CEOs almost always increase their personal wealth, and make it one of their most important goals, even if they don't admit it publicly.
What Elon has done has signaled that making his companies succeed is his most important goal, and has basically called out other CEOs for not doing the same.
> Or "man who doesn't need more, doesn't ask for more".
The article gives the example of Ford CEO Mark Fields who got $18.6 million in 2015.
Does he 'need' more?
Exactly. Most people aren't in a position to waive their salary for a few years on the off-chance a moonshot works out.
IIRC with Musk he put all his fortune into the basket with SpaceX and Tesla at the same time. That's yet another level.
I think this is an interesting compensation plan and agree that this seems like a more modern and practical compensation plan than the example from Ford.
I'm curious what sort of milestones/requirements Musk would put in place as Chairman if he were to hire another CEO. I would guess this might include some sort of environmental requirements to continue things like Musk's strong dedication to 100% electric (no long-range gas tank).
A part of why people are buying Teslas is because of the vision of getting rid of most CO2 car emissions. If the vision would change, people wouldn't buy as many cars which would impact the value of the company quite badly, so it won't happen.
What I like about old compensation package vs this one is that before, they didn't even pretend that CEO's have a huge influence on the quality of product. Now, Musk gets to pretend he had some important role in creating a quality product.
This strawman argument detracts from a bigger point: many people dislike the idea of a CEO getting bonuses no matter whether the company's chips are up or down. It's not revolutionary, but the signaling is still appreciated and important.
Tangentially, I think it's disingenuous to say that Elon Musk hasn't had a large amount of input in Tesla Motors, or any other venture he's a part of. Even a cursory glance of his Twitter shows that he clearly has deep knowledge in the automotive/aerospace fields, and further searching shows he was involved heavily in the Roadster design[1], which was a pretty important piece of establishing Tesla Motors as a bonafide manufacturer - both from a "cars people want to buy and drive" and "cars which are pushing the status quo" aspect.