Will Elon Musk become the world’s first trillionaire?

0:02Hi, I'm Charlie Duffield, and welcome back to The Standard Podcast. If you're new here, hit follow and give us a rating. For all the latest news, head to standard.co.uk. Coming up later in the show. Spoilers ahead as we discuss last night's finale of the Celebrity Traitors. But first, Elon Musk has a shot at becoming the world's first ever trillionaire. Figures from Forbes magazine suggest the 54-year-old already has a net worth of$493 billion, or£375 billion. And while that means he has more money than anyone else on the planet, he isn't the richest person in history just yet. That title belongs to John D.

0:52Rockefeller, the railroad titan, who had a wealth of£480 billion back in 1913 when adjusted for inflation. But back to Musk. On Thursday, he won a shareholder vote that would give the Tesla CEO stock worth$1 trillion, or£760 billion, if he hits certain performance targets over the next decade. The controversial plans were approved by 75 % of the company's shareholders, making it the largest corporate payout in history. The compensation is more than the entire GDP of countries such as Ireland, Sweden and Argentina. Chants of Elon erupted in the room at the knees of its approval before Musk briefly danced on stage alongside the company's Optimus robots.

1:43Sixth and finally, on the 2025 CEO Performance Award to our founder and CEO Elon Musk, with over 75 % voting in favor, approved.

2:08The plan ties Musk's payout to ambitious goals, including expanding into AI, robotics and a US robo-taxi network. For example, over the next decade, he must deliver 20 million Tesla vehicles and one million robots. Reacting to the news, the Tesla CEO posted on X, time to pull a lot of rabbits out of the hat. Fantastic group of shareholders. Hang on to your Tesla stock. The Tesla board argued that Musk might leave the company if it was not approved and that it could not afford to lose him. But the scale of the potential payout has drawn criticism. In a statement, the protest group Tesla Takeover said, Elon Musk just got$1 trillion for failure.

2:57Sales are down, safety risks are up, and his politics are driving customers away. This isn't leadership. It's the world's most expensive participation trophy. Joining us now is Anne Lipton, a law professor at the University of Colorado, who specializes in corporate governance and securities regulation. Can you remind us what happened at this shareholder meeting? Tesla shareholders were asked to vote on whether to give Elon Musk a new pay package for his work at Tesla going forward from now. The package that was proposed and that shareholders granted was a very dramatic sort of package where he gets nothing unless he hits some fairly dramatic milestones in increasing Tesla's stock price valuation.

3:42So the first milestone, he would have to hit$2 trillion valuation. it's currently at 1.4, 1.3 now. The next milestone is$2.5 trillion milestone valuation. And if he hits these milestones, if he hits them for each one, he's granted a tranche of new Tesla shares. And if he hits all the milestones, he has something like 10 years to complete it, he will get literally a trillion dollars worth of Tesla stock. And would you say this is a vote of confidence in Musk? Or is there more to it than that? And will he be able to actually reach these targets that have been set? I don't know how much of it exactly is a vote of confidence in Elon Musk.

4:17It's a complicated situation in that. Certainly, I think the shareholders believe and probably accurately that the company's future right now depends very much on Elon Musk's vision. Part of the selling point for the pay package was he doesn't get anything unless he hits these milestones. So it's not so much we believe he can achieve them so much as it is, well, he doesn't get anything if he doesn't achieve them. So this is a fair deal. I think that's kind of the logic. But they are very, very high milestones. But in 2018, there was a similarly structured package that also had fairly outrageous stock price increases that would give him payouts on a similar kind of manner.

4:51Nobody thought he could achieve any of those. He had 10 years to do it, and he did it in three. So whether he can do this, I honestly could not say. So how common are these types of incentive-based contracts? They're actually not uncommon if we think about private companies or venture capital-backed startup kind of companies, but they are unusual for the public companies. And that's exactly why a Delaware court struck down the original 2018 package. Among the reasons was that in other companies where the CEO already holds a terrific amount of stock, you don't really need to incentivize them to increase stock prices with more stock price grants because their own wealth increases dramatically.

5:30A lot of it's conditional, but let's say 15 % of the stock right now. So that means that his own wealth is dramatically increased if he hits these milestones without any new shares at all, raising the question why he needs to be incentivized in exactly this way. It's not like he doesn't have plenty of incentives to lift Tesla's stock price anyway. And what challenges does Tesla face as a company? Yeah, so it used to be essentially the only player in the space of electric cars. And that's just clearly not true anymore. There are a lot of companies now in that space, a lot of Chinese companies, especially that have been developing more technology that have been innovating past Tesla's line, which has gotten a little stale.

6:06There are other companies in the self-driving space that are further along than Tesla is. So Musk's sort of pitch to investors is, well, don't think of Tesla as a car company. You should think of Tesla as a robot, whatever company. And of course, part of the problem with thinking of Tesla as a car company is that Elon Musk's own behavior on the world stage recently has been, shall we say, controversial. That has apparently very much damaged Tesla's car sales. But Elon Musk is essentially saying, well, you don't have to worry about that because Tesla isn't a car company. We do robots, we do AI, we do self-driving robo-taxis.

6:38And if you believe that story, then maybe the competition in the core car business is not as important. Maybe his political polarization isn't as important. But if you think actually Tesla's future is electric cars, then all of those aspects of Elon Musk are probably problematic. That said, Tesla's stock price right now is not based on the expectation that it's a great electric car company. Its stock price right now is valued based on Elon Musk's vision of this futuristic robots company. Let's talk more about this controversy because he's a polarizing figure, isn't he? Oh, yes, very much so. And it's definitely damaging Tesla's core business, its sales.

7:16And one of the criticisms of this pay package is it doesn't really put any limits on his political activity or even the time he spends at his other companies. The theory of the board is, well, if we incentivize him with lots of stock, then that will incentivize him to not do things that will damage Tesla's stock price. He'll not want to engage in polarizing political activity because he knows that these stock price increases are tied to whether or not he sells cars or sells robots or whatever. And he won't want to do anything to damage that. I mean, that's the theory. The board isn't actually giving him a limit.

7:46They're just sort of assuming that he'll be incentivized not to engage in all this political activity. But of course, while the package was pending for a shareholder vote, he was still out there making his controversial comments about both US politics and English politics. So I'm not sure that this pay package is really going to have that particular effect. We had those cheers in the room for Elon, but elsewhere, what has the reaction been like? The shareholders who are opposed to it, a lot of institutional shareholders, are still not happy with it. And you have to understand that the answer is not, well, just don't invest in Tesla, because Tesla is in some major indexes.

8:18And if you're an index investor, you don't really have much of a choice. There was also mention of securing his successor, wasn't there? Someday there will not be an Elon Musk. What happens to Tesla then? But the problem, and this is the problem for both the company and Elon Musk is I think it's almost like a hostage situation between Musk and the company. The company is really valued based on his singular vision. And the board could come up with succession plans, but it's very difficult to imagine who can replace him given that so much of Tesla's stock price is based on reliance on Elon Musk's potential specifically.

8:48At the same time, Elon Musk is, of course, very tied to Tesla. So the board was giving a lot of noise about if you don't give him this pay package, he'll leave the company or he'll step down. And that's kind of hard to believe, given how much of his wealth and liquid wealth is tied up with Tesla. I think they're both kind of very tied to each other. Is there anything else you want to add? So much attention is on this pay package. I think it's important to understand there were other items up for a vote that are, I think, really interesting as well that also passed. So one of the other proposals was his case is still pending in Delaware.

9:17They took away his 2018 pay package, and that case is still pending in Delaware. And one of the items up for a vote that apparently passed, though we don't know the exact figures, is that whether shareholders would restore that pay package, that 2018 pay package, if the Delaware Supreme Court keeps it rescinded. That is to say, if he loses in Delaware, shareholders were asked if they would replace that package, and they voted yes on that as well. Either way, he's going to get that 2018 pay package back. He'll either get it because he wins in Delaware or if not, shareholders voted to replace it.

9:47But I think with that case pending, the atmospherics and the political pressure on the Delaware court, now that the shareholders have voted again to both restore the old pay package and give him a new one with a similar structure, I mean, the political pressure on that court is probably quite intense, even though technically this vote is not legally relevant to that case. And finally, can you think of anyone in a comparable position? I don't think there's anyone who's quite comparable, but there have been these superstar CEOs in the past. It's really almost an era change in that there was a period of time when that was sort of expected of CEOs, like CEOs ruled their companies with an iron fist, and that was sort of the model of corporate governance, and then sort of shifted to an idea that there should be more board-centric governance, and there should be more oversight of the CEO.

10:29And now he seemed to be shifting back to an ideal of a singular founder who really controls everything. Elon Musk is probably in a category of his own, but also people like Zuckerberg, people like Bezos, who really built companies that nobody expected and that have essentially taken over the world in many ways. Let's go to a break. Coming up in part two, we're reflecting on the must watch show of the autumn, none other than the celebrity traitors. We'll see you back here in just a moment.

11:06Welcome back. And another reminder that there's spoilers ahead if you're listening and have been watching The Celebrity Traitors. Last night in a thrilling finale full of twists and turns, Alan Carr fooled the Faithfuls to traitor his way to victory. He said it was amazing to be crowned the winner and joked that he had gained a taste for killing. The series has been a resounding success and bonded the nation in a time of doom and gloom. And I'm joined now by the standards commissioning editor and culture writer Vicky Jessup, who has been watching along. So Vicky, what was your verdict on the Traitors finale?

11:43An appropriately explosive ending to a series that has been surprisingly good. I know people have been clamouring for a celebrity Traitors for so long now. And when the BBC finally said they were going to do it, people were excited. I was also a little bit nervous. It could have gone either way. This is a show. It's kind of warts and all. You're seeing people in very stressful situations. And celebrities might not want that. That might be bad for their brand if it turns out they're actually like really bad under pressure or a raging narcissist. But everything actually went well. We had some great personalities.

12:18Alan Carr, I think, has especially been standout this series. Just, I don't know, just being very fabulous and all of his one-liners. I'm sure I was not alone in screaming at the television last night. I don't want to give away too many spoilers, although they're probably circulating on the internet. Gorgeously unexpected. Great ending. Do you have any standout moments from the series? I think the moment I was sold on the series as a whole was in the first episode when we see Alan walking down the corridor of the castle at night in his cloak, his traitor's cloak, carrying a lantern, trying to look menacing, but his glasses are propping up his hood.

12:53I howled with laughter, kind of set the tone. So yeah, Alan brutally murdering his best friend Paloma Faith was a moment. Tom Daly's side eye at Kate Garroway when she was kind of being all hammy and disbelieving. I'm flabbergasted at Paloma's death and Jonathan Ross getting away with murder about five million times in a row and just somehow not being voted out until episode, I think it was seven. Like he held on for a long time and that ending speech where he said, I can't quite quote it, but I've always been faithful to the traitors and everybody losing their minds about that. We've also had kind of Celia Imri being a gem.

13:30Some people are saying she's become a national treasure. I would argue she has always been a national treasure but certainly more people now know who she is. Her farting in this task and sending everyone into hysterics, apparently the BBC producers offered to cut that and she very gamely said it could be kept in which were all the better for it. Her waley like a banshee during a task as well. There were too many moments to count really. Those are some of my favourites. People were sceptical about an all-star show but it's proven a huge hit. Why do you think it's been such a success? definitely I think it was estimated that about 15 million people tuned in to watch the finale which is a staggering amount given that we have on-demand television now like this is appointment viewing and I think the number of viewers has gone up the show premiered with I think maybe about 6 million viewers and went up to 10 as the show went on it has been a massive success I think it's been so good because a people love watching celebs do stuff I think be the celebs that they got were actually good celebs can i say that you know people that we know alan khan stephen fry jonathan ross palema faith these are kind of like pedigree names and see i think all the celebs were such good sports about it this could have been an ego fest it wasn't everyone clearly loved the show and that's why they'd agreed to sign up and play it there were not any egos everyone was like really into it really invested kind of wanted to have the traders experience which i think really added to the whole thing.

14:56And I think sometimes it is fun watching celebs get taken down a peg, I suppose. The very first moment of the celebrity traitors was them rolling up to the castle and then suddenly the cars leaving the castle, taking them to a graveyard where Claudia tells them to dig in the mud of their own graves for a shield. And watching Stephen Fry scrabble around in the dirt for a shield, it's kind of the ultimate like celeb humbling exercise. So I think maybe there's a tiny bit of schadenfreude in there as well. The series has really become appointment viewing in a way that I think very few television shows these days are.

15:30And what happens next? Do we have any news about the future of the show or the winner, Alan Carr? The BBC knows it's onto a winner at this point, I think. We got given a very coy little teaser at the end of the Celebrity Traitors finale, hinting that the Traitors will be coming back in 2026. I think that's going to be regular Joe Traitors. The Traitors tends to air in like January. So I think we'll be getting a Traitors series in January. As for the Celebrity Traitors, I think a Celebrity Traitors season two has not been confirmed yet. But to be honest, I would be very surprised if it didn't happen.

16:04This has been such a massive success. The only thing I really know about Alan Carr is that he left the country for the finale and joked that he was the most hated man in Britain. I would argue the opposite. He's brought so much joy to this series. He did breakdown in tears said it's really been weighing on him but he's like handled himself so well endless jokes like he's definitely been the mvp here

16:27and that's the standard for all the latest news head to standard.co.uk if you'd like to get in touch please do drop us a line at podcasts at standard.co.uk we'll be back here on monday at 5 p.m we'll see you then you