After approving Elon Musk's pay package, the company that built the EV era is betting it can build the next one — with robots, data, and belief
Vincent Feuray/Hans Lucas/AFP via Getty Images
With $1 trillion, you could: solve world hunger almost three times over, pay off 1/38th of the U.S. national debt, keep Shohei Ohtani pitching and hitting in Los Angeles for about 14,000 years, buy 666,666,666,666.67 Costco $COST hotdogs, become the richest person in the world — or, theoretically, have the undivided attention of Elon Musk for the next 10 years. On Thursday, Tesla $TSLA chose the final option.
The company just made Musk, the world’s richest man, even richer, after 75% of shareholders approved his (incentive-heavy) $1 trillion pay package, the largest-ever compensation for a CEO. The milestones, set over the coming decade, are as towering as that headline number itself — a market cap of $8.5 trillion, up from about $1.5 trillion today; adjusted EBITDA of roughly $400 billion; selling 20 million cars; and the rollout of one million robotaxis and Optimus robots over the next decade. Meeting these goals would lift Musk’s stake from about 15% to 25%, a transfer of control that would give him the increased influence he has long sought.
Tesla board members, diehard company fanboys and -girls with fiduciary duties, and even Musk himself framed the deal as a necessary bribe to keep him in the company’s driver’s seat and focused on the road ahead. He asked on the company’s latest earnings call why he should even bother building a “robot army” at all if the company wouldn’t give him control of that “robot army.”
Board chair Robyn Denholm said the board was concerned Musk would leave the company if this pay package didn’t pass. And the concern was valid. Musk has spent most of this year in orbit around his own distractions.
He launched, then ditched, the remarkably inefficient Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) after a few chaotic months of bureaucratic austerity cosplay; made best-buddy bracelets with President Donald Trump before their alliance imploded in a contest of egos and airtime; flirted with launching his own political party, the America Party; and turned X $TWTR into a megaphone for the far right. He has launched more SpaceX rockets that couldn’t stay in the sky than quarterly updates to send Tesla’s stock soaring. And he has lavished more praise on xAI — and its Grok model — than on the car business that is still footing the bill.
Tesla has — again, theoretically — bought Musk’s attention for the next 10 years. In a best-case scenario, that means he has 1 trillion reasons to do exactly what the company wants from him: turn a car company into an AI company, turn roads into a living motherboard with lane markings, and unleash a robot army upon the world that keeps mistaking Musk for one. In a worst-case scenario, Tesla has just given Musk 1 trillion reasons to do whatever he wants.
Tesla wants a million robotaxis from its trillion-dollar man. Right now, the company’s grand autonomous fleet amounts to about a few dozen cars crawling around Austin, Texas under human supervision. The ambition still sounds infinite, but the arithmetic keeps shrinking. For investors, it’s a familiar story: a moonshot that can’t yet make a left turn.
If Tesla’s timeline holds, those few dozen cars would have to multiply roughly forty thousand times over to meet Musk’s one-million target in 10 years. That means building and deploying about 100,000 fully autonomous vehicles a year — an expansion that would require new factories, new data infrastructure, and a global regulatory framework that doesn’t yet exist.
And Musk’s timelines can rarely be trusted. In 2019, at Tesla’s “Autonomy Day,” Musk claimed that a fleet — “more than one million” — of his revolutionary robotaxis would hit the road within the year. The prototype was unveiled almost five years later, in 2024. In July 2025, he claimed robotaxis would cover “half of the population of the U.S. … by the end of the year.” Two-ish months later, he walked that back to “eight to 10 U.S. metro areas” within the next two months. Who knows what else he’ll say by the end of the year.
Tesla’s robotaxis remain tied up in regulatory hell. And for all that Tesla wants to claim that it’s coming to the road soon, its competitors in the autonomous vehicles space — namely, Waymo and Baidu — seem better prepared for the future. Heck, Tesla is even taking so long that Nvidia $NVDA has decided it’s time to get in on the action. While Waymo and Baidu are scaling through contained, city-level fleets with regulators watching every mile, Tesla is still perfecting supervised demos in Austin. Its approach is autonomy by open beta, which has made Tesla the most visible player in the field but also the least compliant one. And Tesla is betting on a consumer army of camera-only cars learning on the fly; Musk has called the more conventional LiDAR: lame, stupid, expensive, and unnecessary.
If the trillion-dollar plan depends on robotaxis turning into a networked, money-printing fleet, then the company’s entire AI story rests on getting this gamble right.
In a decade, the roads Musk envisions could look like a seamless, humming grid — Teslas training Teslas, each mile feeding the next algorithm. Or they could look like now, only louder: human drivers babysitting semi-autonomous cars that still can’t tell a pedestrian from a shadow. The robotaxi race is the first real test of Musk’s trillion-dollar leash — whether Tesla bought focus, or just another expensive detour.
If robotaxis are Tesla’s dream of turning roads into revenue, Optimus is its dream of turning people into margins. Musk has called the humanoid robot — a sleek, 5-foot-8, 125-pound biped designed to “eliminate dangerous, repetitive, and boring tasks” — the company’s most important product ever. He has said it could be worth more than Tesla’s entire car business and account for “around 80%” of the company’s long-term value. If the trillion-dollar plan is Tesla’s moonshot, Optimus is the colony it hopes to build there.
For now, the colony is more concept than conquest. The latest prototypes — filmed walking, folding laundry, and handing each other objects — have drawn headlines mostly for how human they still aren’t. Inside Tesla’s Palo Alto engineering hub, employees still train the bots with motion-capture suits, acting out tasks such as wiping tables or stacking boxes so the robots can mimic their movements. Musk insists volume production will begin “soon,” but that’s a relative term from a CEO who has been promising “next year” robotaxi fleets since 2019.
Still, Musk’s humanoid pitch is seductive. If Optimus works — if it can replace line workers, delivery drivers, or even lab technicians — Tesla stops being just a car company and also becomes a labor company. Each robot could, in theory, earn income the way a car might one day earn fares. Factories could run around the clock; households could rent a robot like a Roomba with arms. But the technical gap is cavernous: No existing humanoid robot has mastered balance, dexterity, or cost efficiency at scale.
Investors have heard Musk’s “robot army” talk before, and the real battle is data — not metal. Every new prototype generates a few more viral clips, not a commercial roadmap. Tesla’s trillion-dollar decade depends on turning those clips into contracts. Because if the next 10 years are supposed to be about proving that Musk can build more than he promises, then Optimus — the would-be worker, the brand-new labor class — will be the truest test of whether Tesla still runs on vision, or on faith.
The trillion-dollar story may still rest on the product that started it all — the one Musk now treats like a side quest. And Tesla’s car business, the literal machinery behind Musk’s mythology, is losing torque.
Global deliveries fell 13% in early 2025, and sales in China — Tesla’s once-glittering growth engine — collapsed nearly 36% this fall to a three-year low as BYD and Li Auto continue eating Tesla’s lunch. In Europe, Volkswagen and Hyundai are reclaiming the EV market Tesla once redefined. No one wants to buy the Cybertruck. Tesla’s brief lift this past quarter from U.S. EV credits has already vanished, and the “affordable” refreshes meant to reignite demand landed with a thud; the so-called budget Model 3 and Model Y cost nearly $40,000 apiece, stripped of features and still out of reach for the buyers they were meant to win back.
The company’s operating margins, once near-mythic, have fallen to single digits. The brand that once defined the EV era is now being boxed out by cheaper, faster-moving rivals.
The hits haven’t stopped in the service bay. Legal issues abound. In February, Tesla recalled nearly 380,000 vehicles over power-steering failures, followed by 46,000 Cybertrucks whose stainless-steel panels had a nasty habit of detaching at highway speed. Earlier this year, there was yet another software recall — two million cars this time — to address Autopilot’s driver-monitoring system. Taken together, this reads like a reminder that for all Tesla’s talk of AI breakthroughs and robot labor, the company is still in the messy, mechanical business of manufacturing.
And that business is slowing down. Tesla delivered about 1.8 million vehicles in 2024 and is on track for roughly 1.6 million this year. So to reach Musk’s 20-million-vehicle goal within a decade, the company would need to expand production at roughly 28% a year — a pace that would, by the 2030s, rival the combined output of Toyota $TM and Volkswagen, while spending less and charging more.
Can Tesla afford to build the future while it’s still fixing the present? If the trillion-dollar plan depends on making more Teslas, then the company’s next decade starts here: on the assembly line, where ambition keeps meeting gravity. Tesla can’t deliver on tomorrow if it keeps tripping over today. For all the talk about robots and moonshots, Tesla is still a carmaker with a sales problem. And unless Musk can make the present profitable, his trillion-dollar future might just run out of charge before it ever leaves the lot.
Tesla wants to be valued like a software company while still building cars on a factory floor. Its market cap sits at about $1.4 trillion today — it first crossed the $1 trillion mark in 2021, lost two-thirds of its value the following year, and didn’t regain trillion-dollar status until 2024. Musk’s potential payout is tied to an $8.5 trillion market-cap goal, a number so far beyond the realm of automaking that it functions less as a forecast than a declaration of scale.
That target would make Tesla worth roughly four to time times the rest of the global auto industry combined (assuming no big changes in valuations). It would put the company in a league with Nvidia, Apple $AAPL and Microsoft $MSFT, whose valuations are built on margins, not miracles. Apple’s empire of hardware and services generated $416 billion in revenue and $112 billion in profit in fiscal 2025. Microsoft’s cloud-driven machine earned $282 billion and $102 billion, respectively. Tesla, by comparison, produced $96.8 billion in 2024 revenue and $15 billion in profit, while pouring nearly $10 billion a year into new factories and equipment just to keep pace. But somehow, Tesla has a forward P/E ratio of around 190, a number that assumes the future arrives exactly as Musk describes it.
For context, the rest of the Magnificent Seven — Apple, Microsoft, Nvidia, Amazon $AMZN, Alphabet $GOOGL, and Meta $META — trade at an average of about 19 times estimated 2025 EBITDA and 31 times earnings, according to Bloomberg data. Tesla’s valuation is roughly five times richer on both counts. Those companies mint real profits; Tesla mints faith. If Musk actually hits his $400 billion EBITDA target, Tesla’s multiples would finally look “normal” — but the company would have to multiply its profits about thirtyfold to get there.
Expanding EBITDA from roughly $13 billion today to $400 billion by 2035 would mean Tesla growing profits faster than any automaker in history — and faster than most tech firms ever have. (Only Nvidia has pulled off something similar.)
The math leaves Tesla little room for error. A company already priced above its peers — and its own fundamentals — has to justify a valuation that depends on entirely new businesses. The cars alone can’t get it there. What’s being sold now isn’t just the product line; it’s the promise that Tesla can turn markets into believers all over again. That’s why Tesla’s next chapter matters. A company that’s already worth more than its industry is betting its future on creating new ones — robotaxi networks, humanoid labor, and maybe something even stranger still. The market cap is a promise that Tesla can turn every trillion into another act of reinvention.
In the end, Tesla’s trillion-dollar plan to keep Musk around is less a pay package than a prophecy — one that bets the next decade of innovation on a man who claims he’s living 10 years in the future. The only question is whether the company (and the rest of the world) can afford to keep up. At some point, even rockets come back to Earth.
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