Tesla Shareholders Approve Elon Musk's Performance-Based Compensation Package

"...No, Elon Musk is not getting a trillion dollars from Tesla. It's not happening. Not a real thing. I'm sorry...."

"...even though it has about as much chance of coming true as Musk has of developing a healthy relationship with another human being...."

"...targets that are ludicrous in themselves but also designed in a way that perfectly spotlights Musk's specific weaknesses and those of the corporate culture he's built at Tesla...."

"...Musk is not—I'll put this as politely as I can, since I disagree with his stance that empathy is for the weak—a finisher...."

"...His failed predictions about self-driving Teslas are so numerous that they have their own Wikipedia page...."

"...resulting in the needless deaths of hundreds of thousands of people...."

"...He says things like this because experience has taught him that people will do what he wants when he says things like this, and that he will face no consequences when the things he says fail to come true...."

"...And every news story that blurs over this obvious fact is doing publicity work for Musk by spinning yet another grand narrative depicting him as a trailblazing visionary...."

"...News organizations are willing to get dog-walked in this fashion because you will click on a headline about Musk's trillion-dollar contract, while you will probably not click on a headline about the implications of narrative overreach in the tech sector...."

"...Tesla has been slumping under his leadership for years, thanks in part to his increasingly techno-fascist personal brand...."

"...So why would so many Tesla stockholders vote to keep their faltering, distractible, immature edgelord of a CEO in the job?..."

"...Tesla's stock price, in this view, is like a balloon: It falls when deprived of hot air...."

"...Musk, maybe even more than Sam Altman, is the storytelling economy's chief exponent...."

"...It seems to me that his new pay package is less a blueprint to build a functional company than a license for him to indulge in all his worst instincts...."

"...He gets paid by driving share prices up? OK, he'll use all his tricks to keep the market detached from reality: make bigger promises, tell more lies...."

"...He gets paid by flooding the streets with self-driving taxis? Fine, he'll tune the X algorithm to throw support to politicians who will approve them for road use, whether or not they're ready...."

"...He gets paid by constructing a robot army? Cool, I hope whatever government agency gets stuck with this army after Musk donates $30 million to the Trump library likes half-finished, semi-functional robots...."

"...This all seems like an extremely high price for Tesla shareholders to pay just to be led by a pitchman whose pledges seldom come true...."

"...They must be used to riding in a vehicle piloted by an overhyped intelligence that's not optimized for the real world...."