Tesla shareholders voted this week to give Elon Musk a mind-altering $48 billion dollar pay package. I wondered how much that might be if it was distributed among his workers?
According to Statista, as of December 2023, Tesla employed 140,473 people. Dividing Musk’s booty would amount to $341,702 per person.
The majority of shareholders (72%) approved what may be the largest executive pay-package in history, apparently buying the argument that Elon is vital to the company’s future success. But aren’t workers also vital to a company’s success? Among the dissenters was Norges Bank, the world’s largest sovereign wealth fund (in Norway), and California’s public employee retirement fund, the largest US pension fund, entities representing millions of people.
While Musk has been lobbying shareholders to approve his sky-high pay, he’s been fighting tooth-and-nail against unionizing efforts by mechanics at the Tesla factory in Sweden who’ve been on strike for six months. Musk is openly hostile to organized labor – “I disagree with the idea of unions,” he told the New York Times Dealbook Summit. Soon after the strike began, other Nordic workers came out in solidarity and the Danish pension fund PensionDanmark sold its Tesla shares citing the company’s “categorical denial to reach collective agreements in any country.”
Aside from the obscene inequity here, we now have to contend with the fact that Musk has just raised $6billion for a new AI company, called xAI. We are being warned that AI may put people out of work; couple that with a CEO who expects to rake in 341,000 times what he could be paying his workers and the future of “labor” looks bleak indeed.