Would You like a feature Interview?
All Interviews are 100% FREE of Charge
Tesla Amazon shareholders voted Thursday to approve CEO Elon Musk’s huge 2018 compensation plan, five months after a Delaware court ordered the company to rescind it, saying it had been improperly approved by the company’s board of directors.
The vote at Tesla’s annual meeting in Austin, Texas, to uphold the compensation plan did not overturn the court’s ruling but represents a public relations victory for Musk and could help his efforts to persuade a court to grant him performance-based options in the future.
“First of all, this is amazing! We love you all!” Musk said onstage after the preliminary results were announced.
Watch Elon Musk’s speech at Tesla’s shareholder meeting now
Tesla said in a filing with the Securities and Exchange Commission late Thursday that 77% of voters supported giving Musk the compensation package.
The compensation package was worth $56 billion in Tesla stock. In January, a Delaware court found the pay “unmeasurable.” Judge Katherine McCormick found that Tesla’s directors lacked independence from Musk, failed to properly negotiate with him and failed to give shareholders the full picture before asking them to vote on the compensation plan.
Tesla shares rose 2.9% to close at $182.47 in regular trading on Thursday after Musk posted on X that he expected the proposal to be approved. The stock is still down 27% so far this year as Tesla counts declining sales due to its aging lineup of electric vehicles and increased competition in China.
The annual meeting included a final vote on 12 proxy proposals, including Mr. Musk’s effort to move Tesla’s headquarters from Delaware, where most large public companies are incorporated, to Texas, home to its largest U.S. factory. Shareholders voted in favor of the move.
At Tesla’s last shareholder meeting in May, Musk predicted the economy would recover in 12 months, said production of the Cybertruck would begin in late 2023, and told investors that Tesla was going to “try out a little bit of advertising” and see how it went.
Recent inflation and employment reports point to some improvement.Tesla is holding a Cybertruck delivery event in late 2023 and has been running an advertising campaign over the past year involving X, the social media company formerly known as Twitter, which Musk bought in late 2022 for $44 billion.
But at a shareholder meeting last year, Musk called the venture a “short-term distraction” and promised shareholders he would spend less time on the app going forward.
He still has plenty of time for other things: Musk is CEO of SpaceX and brain-computer interface company Neuralink, and last year launched a new company called xAI, which raised billions of dollars to develop large-scale language models and an AI chatbot called Grok, using the power of X’s data and data centers.
Describing himself as “pathologically optimistic,” Musk promised Tesla shareholders at the company’s annual meeting that the company was making great strides in developing “vehicle autonomy” — a system that would turn existing Teslas into self-driving cars — and that “we could increase the company’s value tenfold.”
Musk has been promising that level of self-driving technology since 2016, but it’s still not here to stay. Meanwhile, competitors like Pony.ai, Didi and Waymo are building robotaxi and already operating commercial services.
Musk discussed the company’s ambitions to build a ride-hailing network made up of self-driving Tesla vehicles, but did not provide a timeline for development and deployment.
“There will be some cars that Tesla owns,” he said, “but with the customer-owned fleet, it will be like Airbnb. You can add or remove your own cars from the fleet whenever you want.”
As for the Cybertruck, which goes on sale in late 2023, Musk said deliveries are picking up, with the company hitting a record of shipping 1,300 vehicles per week.
Musk promised that Tesla will move into “limited production” of Optimus in 2025 and begin testing the humanoid robot in its factories next year. Musk predicted that the company could have “over 1,000, possibly thousands, of Optimus robots working” next year.
clock: CNBC’s full interview with ARK Invest CEO Cathie Wood