The Fiji Times

What is he worth to Tesla?

A court rejected Musk’s $55.8b pay package

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EVEN when compared with other CEOs, who routinely get paid roughly 200 times more than their typical employees, Elon Musk’s pay package was eye-opening.

A judge in Delaware on Tuesday struck down the package that Tesla establishe­d for Musk in 2018, ruling that the process was “flawed” and the price “unfair.” Chancellor Kathaleen St Jude McCormick called the package “the largest potential compensati­on opportunit­y ever observed in public markets by multiple orders of magnitude.”

So, if Musk isn’t worth the maximum $55.8 billion value of the package, how much is he worth? It’s a thorny question without an easy answer in the notoriousl­y complex world of executive compensati­on.

McCormick’s ruling bumped Musk out of the top spot on the Forbes list of wealthiest people. The magazine on Wednesday lopped $25 billion off his net worth, reducing it to $185.3 billion, putting him behind fashion and cosmetics magnate Bernard Arnault and family.

Critics have argued for years that CEO pay packages are exorbitant. The median compensati­on for a CEO of an S&P 500 company was valued at $14.8million, according to the latest AP CEO pay survey for 2022 conducted with the executive compensati­on research firm Equilar.

It would take the typical worker at one of those companies more than 185 years to earn what their chief executive reaped in just 12 months.

In 2018, Tesla estimated the value of Musk’s compensati­on package at $2.28billion, topping the previous highest package of $1.39billion given to Blackstone’s Steven Schwarzman 10 years earlier, according to Equilar.

The value of Musk’s package has grown as Tesla’s stock price increased. By comparison, in 2022 the median worker at Tesla made $34,084.

 ?? Picture: Leon Neal/ Pool Photo via AP, File ?? Tesla CEO Elon Musk attends the first plenary session of the AI Safety Summit at Bletchley Park, on November 1, 2023 in Bletchley, England.
Picture: Leon Neal/ Pool Photo via AP, File Tesla CEO Elon Musk attends the first plenary session of the AI Safety Summit at Bletchley Park, on November 1, 2023 in Bletchley, England.

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