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THE FAKE $1 TRILLION NAIL IN TESLA’S COFFIN  
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Will Lockett
November 10, 2025
Will Lockett Medium
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_ This “$1 trillion” thing is just a PR stunt, a way to make Musk
and Tesla look much more impressive than they actually are. And Musk
shouldn’t be Tesla’s CEO, let alone be given this much wealth. _

Tesla Takedown demonstration, Manhattan, Mar 22, 2025, image: Barry
Cohen

 

So, Musk won the vote for his “$1 trillion pay package”. Truth be
told, I am not that surprised. But what does this mean for Tesla and
its future? Well, in short, nothing good. This is the final cast-off,
solidifying Musk as an untouchable authoritarian king of Tesla,
enabling and exaggerating his already broken delusions — all while
Tesla leaves the shores of reality and sails off into the murky waters
of a demonstrably false unreality. It will all end in tears.

Let’s start off by de-propagandising this mess.

This isn’t a $1 trillion pay package. Logically, Musk would be paid
in Tesla stock, and for this payday to be worth $1 trillion, Tesla
would have to be worth $8.5 trillion, or just less than eight times
its current value. This is more than 50% more than the current most
valuable company in the world, Nvidia, whose value most experts
believe is significantly inflated by the AI bubble. This value
increase isn’t one of the conditions for Musk receiving his payout;
instead, it is assumed this is how much Tesla will be worth if he
achieves the other conditions. However, one of these conditions is
that Musk receives annual revenue up to $400 billion and an $8.4
trillion valuation, which would give Tesla a P/E ratio (the value of
its stock to its earnings) of 21,250, or over 100 times its current,
already _FAR_ too high, P/E ratio. So no — in no fucking world is
this a $1 trillion pay package. You would have to be out of your mind
to believe that for a second. It is more like a $100 billion package.
This “$1 trillion” thing is just a PR stunt, a way to make Musk
and Tesla look much more impressive than they actually are (with more
on that in a minute).

On top of that, the conditions Musk has to meet to receive this payday
are nowhere near specific enough to hold him to account and ensure he
actually delivers growth. I have already written about this, so if you
want to know the details, read more here
[[link removed]].

Take the condition that by 2035, Musk is expected to deliver one
million Bots. (Tesla defines “Bot” as “any robot or other
physical product with mobility using artificial intelligence
manufactured by or on behalf of the company” — yet, somehow, the
company’s vehicles do not count). Firstly, it is odd that they use
the word “delivered” instead of “sold”, given that the number
of sales are a much better metric for growth. In fact, the proper
metric for growth would be how many Bots are in active use and the
duration of this time period. So, for Musk to meet this condition, he
doesn’t even need to sell the Optimus robot he has been parading
around. He can give SpaceX a million AI-powered RC cars, akin to that
weird robot on the Death Star, and technically achieve this condition.
SpaceX doesn’t even have to use them!

Every single one of these pay package conditions is worded in such a
way that Musk can meet them without delivering any actual growth. That
is a giant red flag. But we should have expected this, as Tesla’s
Master Plan 4, which these conditions are based on, still lacks any
real detail — it’s more like a buzzword salad flopped together by
Grok.

So, it isn’t a $1 trillion pay package at all; it is closer to a
$100 billion pay package (even though this is still far too large for
any executive pay), and all of the conditions Musk must meet to get
this pay package are worded in such a purposefully broad way, that
Musk can meet them all without delivering a single ounce of growth.

Okay, but does Musk deserve this money?

Well, I am firmly in the camp that no one should be a billionaire, let
alone have a single $100 billion payday. So, ethically, I don’t
think Musk deserves it. This is a man who could have solved world
hunger but chose to fund fascism instead, after all.

But when you look at the state of Tesla, it’s hard to argue Musk
should even be CEO.

His big projects — the Cybertruck, FSD, and Robotaxi — are
demonstrable failures. The Cybertruck was supposed to solidify
Tesla’s dominance in the EV market, but instead, it is the largest
automotive sales flop in history. FSD was supposed to allow Tesla to
produce the first self-driving car, but the systems is demonstrably
dangerous and light-years behind the competition. Not to mention it
too is a sales flop, with Tesla having to slash its prices to even get
a handful of customers through the door. Likewise, the Robotaxi is
horrifyingly dangerous, which has stalled its rollout, and in the
meantime, competitors like Waymo have continued to rapidly expand.
Each of these projects has cost Tesla billions of dollars, and none of
them are even close to breaking even, let alone making a profit.

And it is all because of Musk’s woeful micromanagement.

Consider that time Musk ignored his executives’ advice not to focus
on Robotaxis, as they discovered that even if they could make them
work, they wouldn’t make any money, and instead they should focus on
building a more affordable EV (read more here
[[link removed]]). Now,
the Model Y has lost its title as Europe’s best-selling car to the
Renault 5, which has almost the same specs and price as the Tesla
Model 2, which Musk scrapped to direct funds towards Robotaxis, was
meant to have…

On that note, Tesla sales continue to crater to this day, largely
because Musk’s political affiliations have destroyed the brand’s
value. This has pushed Tesla’s profit margin down to near zero! In
fact, as costs rise due to Robotaxi and Optimus development, there is
a chance that Tesla will begin to post losses in the near future.

This isn’t a CEO who deserves a raise; it is one who deserves to be
ousted.

So, why isn’t he being ousted? And why have shareholders handed him
this utterly gargantuan pay package, with such flimsy conditions that
a burnt Neuralink test monkey could meet them?

I can see two reasons.

Firstly, blackmail. Tesla’s board repeatedly warned that if this pay
package didn’t pass, there was a serious chance Musk would leave
Tesla. I say warned — that is a direct threat. Gary Black, a hedge
fund manager who heavily backs Tesla, publicly stated that if Musk
stepped down, Tesla’s stock could fall by 20% to 25%. However, I,
and many others, believe this is a massive underestimation. My own
analysis suggests that if Tesla were valued as a car company rather
than based on Musk and his bullshit promises, as it would be if Musk
left, it would lose closer to 90% of its value (read more here
[[link removed]]).
Investors know this, so Musk’s threat to leave is more or less him
saying, “Pay me all the money, or I will make your investment value
collapse.”

You can’t consider a choice “free” if the only options are
“Pay me money I don’t deserve or I will hurt you.”

And guess what, investors, big or small, don’t want to lose money.
That is a damn good reason why many voted in favour. Needless to say,
in many countries, Musk’s and the Tesla Board’s actions here would
be seen as corporate extortion and would be wildly illegal.

But the second reason many voted in favour of the pay package is tied
to why Tesla is worth so much more than it should be. Quite simply,
Musk is a cult leader, and his followers are Tesla investors. He
speaks exactly like a cult leader, constantly using internal coded
language, thought-terminating clichés, and doublespeak, inducing
shame and guilt in outsiders, and using isolating rhetoric. Like all
cult leaders, he plays this off with a painfully bad charisma that
comes across like the spelling mistakes in those Nigerian Prince
emails — a way to filter out the rest and focus on the
easy-to-manipulate, desperate people. Then, he sells his big,
impossible ideas and waits for these people to invest (i.e., hand over
their life savings) in him with the promise that he will make them
wildly wealthy down the line. The world of Tesla investing is a cult;
the only thing it is missing is the weird robes and sex rituals
(presumably).

Sadly, institutions saw this ability and knew they could use it to
make themselves a ton of money. They bought in, leaned into Musk’s
cult and echoed Musk’s manipulations, pulling more followers in and
increasing their investment’s value. That is why analysts like Dan
Ives give nonsensical logic for their support of Musk’s ideas. They
don’t believe what Musk is saying, but they know someone will, and
if they buy in, their investment will go up.

This has caused the public and institutional investors to not look at
Tesla logically. The only thing they ask is, “Is this going to bring
more people into the cult?” Considering the $1 trillion propaganda
line and the fact that the promises Musk is making are on a scale
never seen before, most of them likely thought it would. After all,
billions of people have been reading for months now about how Musk
will be paid a trillion dollars to take over the world economy with
robots. It doesn’t matter if that will actually happen, but whether
it will spread enough fear, manipulation, and FOMO to bring people in.

Before I looked at the numbers, I thought the latter was closer to the
truth. But after, I’m not so sure.

Musk’s pay packet won with 75% of the votes, with Musk’s 15.3% of
the votes not counting. That sounds like a landslide, right? Well, it
isn’t. Let me explain.

Institutional investors, such as mutual funds and investment banks,
own 48.1% of Tesla, public retail investors own 36.3%, and insiders
own 15.4% (which is mostly Elon’s 15.3% stake, so we can ignore them
in this case).

Almost all institutional investors, such as Vanguard, JPMorgan, and
BlackRock, backed Musk’s pay package. Tesla makes up a considerable
portion of its investment portfolio and can’t risk it collapsing, so
almost every single one voted yes purely because of the blackmail. If
Musk left, the cult dissolved, and the public investors sold up, they
would lose billions!

But only 84.7% of shares voted on this pay packet, meaning that this
48.1% bloc of investors made up 57% of the vote. So, Musk had won this
vote before it had ever started.

That also means that of the 36.3% of Tesla shareholders who are
publicly held, they voted almost perfectly 50% yes and 50% no. But
here is the thing: Tesla’s public investors, of whom there are
likely millions, seriously outnumber the few thousand institutional
investors. So, if these votes weren’t weighted based on how much
stock each person/organisation owned, this would have only just passed
by the skin of its teeth!

This shows the cult of Elon is straining. It is being pushed to its
limits, and major figures within its ranks were happy to risk losing
it all rather than indulge Musk in his demented leadership. The
institutional investors who went along with the blackmail will know
this. They will know that another push like this could send the public
investors, the actual members of the cult, scattering, sending the
value of the investment to the floor.

So yes, 75% was a sizeable vote in favour of Musk. But when you
consider the makeup of the voters, the cult of Elon, and the
blackmail, that 25% no vote suddenly seems like an awfully significant
resistance.

Okay, so what about Tesla’s future?

Well, this vote has done two things: severed Tesla’s last connection
with reality and provided Musk with total authoritarian control.

As I have already mentioned, Musk shouldn’t be Tesla’s CEO, let
alone be given this much wealth. But the fact that he was able to
blackmail his own investors into bowing before him has effectively
solidified him as the authoritarian leader of Tesla. No one can hold
him to account now. He can do with Tesla what he likes.

This is a horrifically bad thing, because Musk is about to wheedle the
last drop of reality from Tesla.

For the past few years, while Tesla transformed into the cult stock it
is now, it still had to appear at least vaguely realistic. Its plans
and technology had to at least theoretically be possible (if not a
little moronic). This generated favourable coverage and attracted more
people into the cult. As such, for the past six to seven years, Musk
had straddled a fine line between outlandish, unrealistic claims to
strengthen the cult and a more grounded approach to prevent the whole
thing from collapsing.

But this vote wasn’t just about Musk’s pay but about the future
direction of Tesla. The conditions Musk has to achieve to get this
payday have more to do with self-driving AI and robots than making
cars. So a yes vote was a vote for that direction. But, here is the
thing: Tesla’s self-driving FSD system is demonstrably dead (read
more here
[[link removed]]),
as is Optimus (read more here
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They will never work, let alone be a viable business, or even be a
hyperscale business, as Musk claims they are. Anyone with even a drop
of understanding or expertise in these fields can see that. They are
not a realistic product and not a realistic way forward for Tesla. The
only way they will generate growth is with hype, speculation, and
expanding this cult.

As such, this vote was to force Tesla to entirely let go of reality.
To indulge Musk in his demonstrably dangerous and unviable delusions,
to value speculation and spectacle over material growth or
fundamentals, and to enable Musk to cast out anyone who says
otherwise.

There is only one problem with this plan: reality catches up to
everyone eventually. And when reality comes for cult leaders, things
get ugly. Do I need to ask you to Google the Jonestown Massacre?

I have said Tesla is dying for a long time now. But this is the final
nail in the coffin. There is now nothing to stop Musk’s
self-aggrandising psychosis. The few lifelines that Tesla and Musk’s
sanity kept are being severed. Musk is going to push the entire
company forward on a falsity, and no one can even ask him not to now,
let alone hold him accountable for how reckless and damaging his
actions will be. There was once a chance Tesla could turn itself
around — to actually remain in the real world and succeed as the
automotive giant it was on track to become. But not now. After this,
there is no saving Tesla.

_Will Lockett_ [[link removed]]_ is a climate &
politics journalist who is pissed off that the world is burning,
corrupt and broken, yet no one in power seems to care._

 
 

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