Wall Street’s Favorite Tesla Rumor Could Unlock $824 Billion Pay Day For Elon Musk

A Wall Street Journal study dissected connected the TBPN podcast occurrence Nvidia's $500B Compute Deal, Paramount Threatens CA Exit, Musk's 'Shortcut' to $1T Payday | Diet TBPN is drafting caller scrutiny to an obscure proviso wrong Elon Musk's 2025 Tesla compensation plan. The clause could let the world's richest enforcement to skip the operational milestones that different basal betwixt him and 1 of the largest wage packages successful firm history.

Tesla (NASDAQ:TSLA) shares traded astatine $332.81 arsenic of the astir caller close, giving the institution a marketplace capitalization of astir $1.31 trillion. The banal is down 26% twelvemonth to day and 18.38% implicit the past month.

The Package and the Shortcut

Under the 2025 CEO Performance Award, Musk tin gain up to 423 cardinal Tesla shares crossed 12 tranches. Each tranche requires Tesla to deed some a marketplace capitalization people and an operational milestone. The operational goals crossed the afloat bundle see delivering 20 cardinal vehicles, reaching 10 cardinal progressive FSD subscriptions, producing 1 cardinal Optimus robots, and putting 1 cardinal robotaxis into commercialized operation. The Journal estimates the maximum grant is presently worthy astir $824 billion.

Act now: the expert who called NVIDIA successful 2010 conscionable named his apical 10 AI stocks — and Tesla didn't marque the cut. Grab the names FREE today.

The drawback surfaced by the WSJ, arsenic unpacked connected TBPN: if Tesla undergoes a alteration of control, those operational requirements vanish entirely. As the treatment framed it, "Instead of spending the adjacent decennary hitting a twelve abstracted operating goals, a sufficiently costly acquisition of Tesla could efficaciously state those goals accomplished." For each 12 tranches to unlock done a deal, Tesla's worth astatine the clip of the transaction would request to scope $8.5 trillion, much than 6 times its caller marketplace cap.

Tesla shareholders approved the compensation program successful November, and would inactive request to o.k. immoderate acquisition. Evidence that the grant is already flowing done Tesla's income connection is disposable successful the Q2 2026 8-K filing, which attributes a 47% year-over-year surge successful operating expenses to $4.35 cardinal to AI infrastructure buildout, R&D, and stock-based compensation tied to the CEO award.