Topics

Musk’s $1T pay package is full of watered-down versions of his own broken promises

20 million cars … total

Tech and VC heavyweights join the Disrupt 2025 agenda

Netflix, ElevenLabs, Wayve, Sequoia Capital, Elad Gil — just a few of the heavy hitters joining the Disrupt 2025 agenda. They’re here to deliver the insights that fuel startup growth and sharpen your edge. Don’t miss the 20th anniversary of TechCrunch Disrupt, and a chance to learn from the top voices in tech — grab your ticket now and save up to $600+ before prices rise.

Tech and VC heavyweights join the Disrupt 2025 agenda

Netflix, ElevenLabs, Wayve, Sequoia Capital — just a few of the heavy hitters joining the Disrupt 2025 agenda. They’re here to deliver the insights that fuel startup growth and sharpen your edge. Don’t miss the 20th anniversary of TechCrunch Disrupt, and a chance to learn from the top voices in tech — grab your ticket now and save up to $675 before prices rise.

One million robotaxis*

One million “bots”?

Everything else

Most Popular

OpenAI announces AI-powered hiring platform to take on LinkedIn

Tesla’s 4th ‘Master Plan’ reads like LLM-generated nonsense

BMW, I am so breaking up with you

Homicide at Burning Man turns Silicon Valley’s desert playground into a crime scene

Nvidia says two mystery customers accounted for 39% of Q2 revenue

Cracks are forming in Meta’s partnership with Scale AI

Mastodon says it doesn’t ‘have the means’ to comply with age verification laws

Latest

Amazon

Apps

Biotech & Health

Climate

Cloud Computing

Commerce

Crypto

Enterprise

EVs

Fintech

Fundraising

Gadgets

Gaming

Google

Government & Policy

Hardware

Instagram

Layoffs

Media & Entertainment

Meta

Microsoft

Privacy

Robotics

Security

Social

Space

Startups

TikTok

Transportation

Venture

Events

Startup Battlefield

StrictlyVC

Newsletters

Podcasts

Videos

Partner Content

TechCrunch Brand Studio

Crunchboard

Musk’s $1T pay package is full of watered-down versions of his own broken promises Sean O'Kane AM PDT · September 6, 2025 Tesla has proposed a massive new $1 trillion compensation package for its CEO Elon Musk, and many of the benchmarks he needs to hit are simply watered-down versions of promises he’s spent years making about the company.

That’s not the

To be sure, if Tesla accomplishes all that it aims for with this deal, it will look like a much different company at the end of the 10-year period it covers. That doesn’t change the fact that the milestones the company is asking Musk to aim for are less ambitious than his own previously-stated goals.

While the unprecedented pay package still needs to be approved

With that in mind, let’s take a look at what Musk needs to accomplish in order to receive the full payout.

Musk spent years claiming Tesla would be able to make 20 million electric vehicles per year

But Tesla walked away from those promises as sales growth stalled, and then reversed in 2024. The company then pulled the 20-million-per-year goal from its impact report last year, and stopped building a planned factory in Mexico that would have increased production.

Techcrunch event Tech and VC heavyweights join the Disrupt 2025 agenda Netflix, ElevenLabs, Wayve, Sequoia Capital, Elad Gil — just a few of the heavy hitters joining the Disrupt 2025 agenda. They’re here to deliver the insights that fuel startup growth and sharpen your edge. Don’t miss the 20th anniversary of TechCrunch Disrupt, and a chance to learn from the top voices in tech — grab your ticket now and save up to $600+ before prices rise. Tech and VC heavyweights join the Disrupt 2025 agenda Netflix, ElevenLabs, Wayve, Sequoia Capital — just a few of the heavy hitters joining the Disrupt 2025 agenda. They’re here to deliver the insights that fuel startup growth and sharpen your edge. Don’t miss the 20th anniversary of TechCrunch Disrupt, and a chance to learn from the top voices in tech — grab your ticket now and save up to $675 before prices rise. San Francisco | October 27-29, 2025 REGISTER NOW Now, the first “product goal” that Tesla’s board of directors laid out for Musk to achieve on his path to becoming a trillionaire is to deliver 20 million vehicles total. Tesla has already sold eight million cars to date, and even with sales slumping, is moving just shy of 2 million per year.

With the new pay package being laid out over a 10-year period, that means the target has gone from 20 million EVs per year

One of Musk’s most infamous and outrageous promises about Tesla came in 2019, when he claimed that the company would have one million robotaxis on the road in 2020. It’s now 2025, and Tesla has only just begun to trial a robotaxi service in Austin, Texas that has, at most, around 20 or 30 cars with safety drivers on board.

To access his full proposed pay package, Tesla is asking Musk to help the company realize an altered version of that promise, as another product goal listed is to have “1 million Robotaxis in Commercial Operation.”

It’s a goal with caveats. The fine print shows that Tesla is only requiring there to be a “daily average aggregate” of one million robotaxis “commercially operated

Tesla goes on to define “Robotaxi” as any Tesla vehicle, including but not limited to the purpose-built “Cybercab” it’s developing, that is using the company’s Full Self-Driving software to offer rides to people.

This includes customer-owned vehicles, which is another thing Musk has long promised but never delivered. He’s spent years claiming that Tesla could flip a digital switch and turn existing vehicles into fully-autonomous ones, and that owners could add and subtract those vehicles to a larger robotaxi fleet at will.

But Musk has since said many of the Teslas currently on the road don’t have the necessary hardware for the former to happen, and the company has yet to demonstrate the latter. Regardless, Musk now has an even looser timeline to try and make both things happen.

Musk sees Tesla’s future being all about the humanoid robot that it’s developing, called Optimus. Just this week he claimed it could make up as much as 80% of the company’s future revenue.

As he became increasingly focused on Optimus, Musk made some pretty wild promises about what that future would look like. One of his core claims was that Tesla will be making one million Optimus bots per year

And yet, Tesla’s board is only asking Musk to deliver one million “bots” total as part of this proposed compensation plan. Tesla also defines “bots” as “any robot or other physical product with mobility using artificial intelligence manufactured

The directors seem to agree that Optimus has “the potential to be Tesla’s bestselling product,” and they say it reperesents “the clearest example of how Tesla has the ability to make autonomy benefit all of humanity.”

But the board also notes that “commercialization plans” for Optimus are “still in development,” and Musk now has until 2035 to reach the one million mark.

The fourth and final product goal Musk has to achieve is to notch 10 million active subscriptions to Tesla’s Full Self-Driving (FSD) software. It’s arguably the most ambitious product goal. The company does not say how many current owners have paid for FSD, though executives have recently said the adoption rate is in the “teens.” At best, that means anywhere from a few hundred thousand to the low millions of Tesla vehicles have the software installed.

Everything else Tesla’s board is asking of Musk is tied to money. Ultimately, Musk needs to help Tesla reach an $8.5 trillion valuation in order to unlock the full value of the compensation package and become a trillionaire himself.

Musk already had grand designs to accomplish something similar. He has often claimed that Tesla could one day become more valuable than Apple and Saudi Aramco combined. At their current valuations, those two companies are collectively worth around $5.5 trillion. But earlier this year, the CEO claimed Tesla could be worth more than the next five most-valuable companies combined — which at the time meant he was aiming closer to the $15 trillion mark.

Along with the goal of blowing up Tesla’s valuation, Musk is being asked to increase the company’s earnings to, essentially, $400 billion per year — an enormous figure compared to last year’s earnings of around $17 billion.

Lastly, Tesla’s board has asked for two notable assurances from Musk in order to unlock the full value of the compensation package. One is that he must work with the company to develop a plan for how he will be succeeded as CEO of Tesla (and the plan essentially locks him to the company for at least 7.5 years).

The other, buried in a footnote, is that Tesla received “assurances that Musk’s involvement with the political sphere would wind down in a timely manner.”

Taken as a whole, it’s a complex agreement with lots of truly pie-in-the-sky ideas about where Tesla could go under Musk’s leadership over the next decade. The same was said about the previous compensation deal that Tesla struck with Musk back in 2018, and yet the company hit all of those seemingly-outrageous goals. (Musk’s award was ultimately dusted

Still, it’s hard not to notice just how much these new goals appear to come from the company trying to drag its CEO’s promises back down to Earth.

Topics

Sean O'Kane Sr.

Sean O’Kane is a

You can contact or verify outreach from Sean

October 27-29, 2025 San Francisco Put your brand in front of 10,000+ tech and VC leaders across all three days of Disrupt 2025. Amplify your reach, spark real connections, and lead the innovation charge. Secure your exhibit space before your competitor does.Last day to book is September 5

Most Popular OpenAI announces AI-powered hiring platform to take on LinkedIn Maxwell Zeff

Tesla’s 4th ‘Master Plan’ reads like LLM-generated nonsense Sean O'Kane

BMW, I am so breaking up with you Connie Loizos

Homicide at Burning Man turns Silicon Valley’s desert playground into a crime scene Connie Loizos

Nvidia says two mystery customers accounted for 39% of Q2 revenue Anthony Ha

Cracks are forming in Meta’s partnership with Scale AI Maxwell Zeff Marina Temkin

Mastodon says it doesn’t ‘have the means’ to comply with age verification laws Sarah Perez

X LinkedIn Facebook Instagram youTube Mastodon Threads Bluesky TechCrunchStaffContact UsAdvertiseCrunchboard JobsSite Map Terms of ServicePrivacy PolicyRSS Terms of UseCode of Conduct TelsaAnthropicTelexKlarnaMrBeastTech LayoffsChatGPT © 2025 TechCrunch Media LLC.