Tesla shareholders back $1tn pay for Elon Musk

Big numbers can feel slippery. Here’s a real one to practise with. On 6 November 2025, Tesla shareholders approved a pay plan that could hand CEO Elon Musk up to $1 trillion in stock if he meets strict targets over the next decade, according to PBS/AP reporting.

The vote passed with more than three-quarters of ballots in favour at the company’s meeting in Austin, Texas. It’s equity-based, not a cash transfer, and Musk only receives shares as milestones are met; miss the goals and he gets nothing. That context matters when you see the headline number.

So, what is a trillion? It’s one million million: 1,000,000,000,000. If you counted one number per second without stopping, you’d reach a trillion after roughly 31,700 years. If you only counted for eight hours a day, it would take about 95,000 years. That’s why our brains protest at figures this large.

Quick check you can do in class or at home: if you saved $100 a day from age 18, how long to reach $1 trillion? Work it through. At $36,500 a year, you’d need about 27 million years. The point isn’t the exact total; it’s training your sense of scale so news like this lands properly.

What would Musk have to achieve? Reporting in the Guardian points to targets that push Tesla far beyond today’s size: moving towards roughly an $8.5 trillion market value within a decade, selling around 20 million cars a year, and building out robotaxis and humanoid robots. These are stretch goals by design.

Not everyone cheered. Big investors including CalPERS and Norway’s sovereign wealth fund opposed the plan, and proxy advisers ISS and Glass Lewis urged a ‘no’ vote. Shareholders backed it anyway with more than 75% support, signalling continued belief that the incentives could lift long-term value.

What it means: this is an incentive plan, not a guaranteed pay-out. The headline figure is a maximum based on future share awards. Those shares will only be created if Tesla hits demanding operational and financial milestones. In other words, the $1 trillion is a possibility, not a cheque in the post.

Another sense-check we like: divide $1,000,000,000,000 by the world’s population of roughly eight billion and you get around $120 per person. It’s a blunt comparison, but it helps you feel the size of the number before you debate whether a single executive should ever be in that territory.

Try this mini-quiz as you read: is $1 trillion closer to the annual value of a very large company, a medium-sized country’s GDP, or every Premier League club added together? Make a guess, write it down, then verify with a trusted source. Estimation first, checking second-that’s media literacy you can use anywhere.

Keep asking who says what and why. Our key facts on the vote and conditions come from PBS/AP coverage, and details on the targets come from the Guardian. Hold two ideas at once: this is a staggering potential reward, and it’s also a maths lesson in how to handle numbers that stretch our intuition.