Copyright truthout
Tesla was already facing a wave of pushback to a proposed $1 trillion compensation package for CEO Elon Musk before the world’s richest man suggested during a quarterly earnings call on October 22 that he needs the package to build a massive “robot army.” If Tesla hits performance targets, the record-setting compensation package would give Musk up to $1 trillion worth of Tesla stock over the next decade and a powerful vote on the company’s board of directors. During the earnings call, Musk said he wants roughly a quarter of the board’s vote share. He also provided an engineering update on Optimus, Tesla’s humanoid AI robot, which he promised investors would be an “incredible surgeon.” “My fundamental concern … is if I go ahead and build this enormous robot army, can I just be ousted at some point in the future?” Musk said. “I don’t feel comfortable wielding that robot army if I don’t have at least a strong influence,” he added. Wall Street is watching for improvement in electric car sales at Tesla, not robots that can replace doctors or form an “army,” and the company’s stock value tumbled immediately after the call. As the public grows increasingly wary of the billionaires pushing AI, Musk’s “robot army” comments have added fuel to the fire for the Take Back Tesla campaign, a coalition of labor unions and watchdog groups urging Tesla shareholders to reject the proposed compensation package at a shareholder meeting scheduled for November 6. When the board proposed the package last month to set performance targets and address Musk’s push for greater control of the company, observers said it would be the largest corporate compensation in history. Randi Weingarten, president of the American Federation of Teachers, called on managers of state pension funds that serve teachers to leverage their power as shareholders and rally against Musk’s “money grab.” “The Tesla board, instead of upholding basic governance standards, wants to green light an outrageous $1 trillion pay package for a CEO who has spent most of the year engaged in childish political brawls, rather than working to create shareholder value,” Weingarten said in a statement on October 22. Take Back Tesla argues that Musk’s recent forays into far-right politics — including the “Department of Government Efficiency,” or DOGE, the outfit that hastily gutted federal agencies and fired scores of government employees after President Donald Trump took office — damaged the company’s brand and caused sales of its signature electric vehicles to slump. “No CEO is worth a trillion dollar pay package, but especially not Elon Musk, who has wiped billions off of Tesla’s share value, trashed the company’s reputation and driven millions of its customers away,” said Emma Ruby-Sachs, executive director of the corporate watchdog group Ekō, in a statement. The Take Back Tesla campaign launched a website this week that allows any member of the public to petition Tesla shareholders to reject the compensation package. With Musk pushing far-right propaganda on X, formerly Twitter, the social media site he bought in 2022 and renamed in 2023, and waxing poetic about robot armies and colonizing Mars, it can be easy to forget that the mega-billionaire runs a company that makes electric vehicles. Tesla car sales slumped as Musk, who spent $227 million on Trump’s reelection campaign, temporarily joined the administration as director of DOGE, where he targeted labor rights for workers and caused bureaucratic chaos but failed to meaningfully reduce government spending. “To reward this destructive behavior with an obscene salary is a slap in the face — not only to the federal workers he’s fired, but to the retirees whose pensions are invested in Tesla stock,” Weingarten said. Musk left the Trump administration earlier this year after a very public falling out with Trump, but labor unions say the billionaire CEO used his time in government to enrich his businesses and box out competition for lucrative contracts. Communications Workers of America President Claude Cummings Jr. pointed to a whistleblower complaint from April alleging DOGE engineers handpicked by Musk sucked up data from the Department of Labor that could be used by Starlink and other companies run by Musk. “Elon Musk is enriching himself by stealing from the American worker — from our infrastructure dollars for rural broadband to workers’ private data from the Department of Labor — and now he wants to steal $1 trillion from our pensions and retirement accounts,” Cummings Jr. said. “Shareholders, unions and working people must all stand together to stop Musk’s corporate heist.” With his looming presence at the White House and on social media, Musk has generated a number of other controversies, including over his support for a far-right party in Germany known for links to neo-Nazi groups. Musk was also accused of making a Nazi-style salute during Trump’s inauguration ceremony, which he denies. The billionaire’s political activity sparked nationwide Tesla Takedown protests as well as a diffuse but effective boycott against vehicles such as the Cybertruck. During the October earnings call, Tesla reported that profits had plummeted by nearly 40 percent in recent months. While the company blamed Trump’s tariffs for $400 million worth of impacts, The New York Times reports that Tesla reduced prices in order to sell more electric vehicles. Despite those losses under Musk’s leadership, Tesla board members on the call argued that the billionaire attracts top engineering talent to the company. However, the proxy investment firms Institutional Shareholder Services (ISS) and Glass Lewis have also recommended Tesla shareholders to reject the $1 trillion compensation package, which would likely be the largest in corporate history. ISS said the Tesla board wants to retain Musk because of his “track record and vision,” but the package “locks in extraordinarily high pay opportunities over the next ten years,” reducing the company’s ability to make future adjustments. Asked about the ISS and Glass Lewis recommendations on the earnings call, Musk called both firms “corporate terrorists.”
