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Tesla shareholders handed Elon Musk a decisive victory at the company’s November 6, 2025 annual meeting, approving his controversial compensation plan by more than 75 percent. The vote in Austin was a stark rebuke to the corporate commentariat and a clear message: investors, not headline-chasing activists, will decide how to reward performance.
The package on the table is as audacious as its architect — potentially worth as much as one trillion dollars in stock over the next decade, with a net present value the board pegs at roughly eight hundred seventy-eight billion dollars once adjustments are made. That staggering headline number has become a political cudgel, but it’s structured as pay-for-performance tied to long-term milestones rather than a simple cash grab.
Those milestones are not fairy tales dreamed up on a liberal think tank’s wish list; they’re specific, brutal benchmarks: delivering 20 million vehicles, putting a million robotaxis on the road, selling a million humanoid robots and pushing Tesla’s market value toward the stratospheric $8.5 trillion threshold. If you think those are easy, then you don’t understand the scale of what Musk is promising — and neither do the naysayers who prefer safe mediocrity to bold ambition.
Predictably, the usual suspects lined up to oppose the plan: big pension funds such as CalPERS, Norway’s sovereign wealth fund, and corporate proxy advisers like ISS and Glass Lewis raised objections, while even the pontiff weighed in on the social optics of mega-wealth. They can gripe about inequality and optics all they want, but ordinary shareholders — the men and women who actually put money on the line — made a different judgment about value and leadership.
Conservatives should celebrate that outcome. This is what the free market looks like when it’s allowed to work: investors rewarded a risk-taking entrepreneur who has already remade entire industries rather than bowing to the moralizing elites who would rather punish success than emulate it. Remember that Musk was allowed to cast his roughly 15 percent stake after Tesla moved its incorporation to Texas, a maneuver that exposed the thin veneer of corporate governance criticism when the voters on company matters are, in the end, the shareholders themselves.
The left’s favorite word — magical thinking — gets tossed around whenever someone proposes doing something big and American again. Call it whatever you like; risk and reward are the engine of prosperity, and if society wants breakthroughs in energy, transportation, chips and robotics, it must be willing to back entrepreneurs who dream bigger than the status quo. No ambitious project was ever funded by handwringing.
Shareholder approval also cleared the way for related votes, including authorization for Tesla to invest in Musk’s AI ventures, signaling that investors are ready to bankroll an integrated vision of cars, AI and robotics under one roof. Proud patriots who believe in American industry should be cheering this kind of boldness, not joining the chorus of envy — defend the right to risk, build, and win, because that’s how jobs and prosperity are created for the hardworking men and women who actually keep this country running.
