Tesla Shareholders voted Thursday to ratify CEO Elon Musk's massive 2018 pay plan, five months after a Delaware judge ordered the company to scrap the package, after finding the board had improperly awarded it.
At Tesla's annual meeting in Austin, Texas, a vote in favor of the compensation plan does not override the court's ruling, but it provides a public relations victory for Musk and could help in his efforts to influence the court to give him performance options in the future. the future.
“I just want to start by saying ‘d—!’” Musk said after taking the stage after the preliminary results were announced. I love you guys.”
Watch Elon Musk speak at Tesla's shareholder meeting now
In a filing with the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) late Thursday, Tesla said that 77% of those who voted were in favor of giving Musk the compensation package.
The compensation package was previously worth up to $56 billion in Tesla shares. In January, a Delaware court called the pay “unfathomable.” Judge Kathleen McCormick found that Tesla's board members lacked independence from Musk, failed to properly negotiate with the CEO and did not give shareholders the full picture before asking them to vote on his pay plan.
Tesla shares rose 2.9% in regular trading Thursday to close at $182.47 after Musk posted on X that the proposal was set to be approved. The stock is still down 27% this year, as Tesla expects sales declines tied to an aging lineup of electric vehicles and increased competition in China.
The annual meeting saw final votes on dozens of proxy proposals, including Musk's bid to move Tesla's incorporation site from Delaware, where most major publicly traded companies are consolidated, to Texas, home to the automaker's largest U.S. factory. Shareholders voted in favor of this move.
At the last shareholder meeting, in May 2023, Musk predicted the economy would rebound after 12 months, said Tesla would deliver production of Cybertrucks in late 2023, and told investors that Tesla would “try a little bit of advertising” and see how it goes. .
The latest inflation and jobs numbers indicate some improvement. Tesla held a Cybertruck delivery event in late 2023, and has been advertising over the past year, including on X, the social media company formerly known as Twitter that Musk acquired for $44 billion in late 2022.
However, during last year's meeting, Musk promised shareholders that he would spend less time on the app going forward, calling the work a “short-term distraction.”
He still spends a lot of time on other things. Musk is the CEO of SpaceX and brain-computer interface company Neuralink. Last year, he also created a new company called xAI, which has raised billions of dollars to develop large language models and an AI chatbot called Grok that uses data and data center capacity from X.
An energetic Musk, who described himself as “pathologically optimistic,” promised Tesla shareholders at the meeting that the company is making significant progress in developing “autonomous vehicle driving,” or systems to convert existing Tesla cars into self-driving vehicles, and believes She is capable of it. “10 times the value of the company.”
While Musk has promised this level of autonomous technology since 2016, he has yet to deliver. Meanwhile, competitors, including Pony.ai, Didi and Waymo, have developed robotaxis and are already operating commercial services.
Musk described the company's ambition to create a manned transportation network with Tesla vehicles equipped with self-driving systems, although he did not provide a timeline for development and rollout.
“There will be some cars that Tesla owns.” “But for the fleet owned by our customers, it will be like Airbnb. You can add or subtract your car to the fleet whenever you want,” he said.
Regarding the Cybertruck, which will hit the market in late 2023, Musk said deliveries are increasing. He said that the company achieved a weekly record of 1,300 shipments.
Musk promised that Tesla would move to “limited production” of Optimus in 2025 and test humanoid robots in its own factories next year. He predicted that next year, the company will have “more than 1,000, or a few thousand, Optimus robots working at Tesla.”
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