NEW YORK (AP) — The world’s richest man was simply handed an opportunity to turn into historical past’s first trillionaire.
Elon Musk received a shareholder vote on Thursday that will give the Tesla CEO inventory value $1 trillion if he hits sure efficiency targets over the subsequent decade. The vote adopted weeks of debate over his administration report on the electrical automotive maker and whether or not anybody deserved such unprecedented pay, drawing heated commentary from small buyers to large pension funds and even the pope.
The vote is a convincing victory for Musk exhibiting buyers nonetheless place confidence in him as Tesla struggles with plunging gross sales, market share and income in no small half on account of Musk himself. Automobile patrons fled the corporate this 12 months as he has ventured into politics each within the U.S. and Europe and trafficked in conspiracy theories.
PATRICK T. FALLON by way of Getty Pictures
The vote got here simply three days after a report from Europe exhibiting Tesla automotive gross sales plunged once more final month, together with a 50% collapse in Germany.
Nonetheless, many Tesla buyers take into account Musk as a form of miracle man able to beautiful enterprise feats, equivalent to when he pulled Tesla from the brink of chapter a half dozen years in the past to show it into one of many world’s most precious corporations.
The vote clears a path for Musk to turn into a trillionaire by granting him new shares, however it received’t be simple. The board of administrators that designed the pay bundle require him to hit a number of bold monetary and operational targets, together with rising the worth of the corporate on the inventory market practically six instances its present degree.
