On the twenty twenty five CEO Performance Award to our founder and CEO Elon Musk, with over seventy five percent voting in favor.
Approved.
The world's richest man just got the world's biggest pay rise, with Tesla shareholders approving a one trillion dollar package for Elon Musk over the next decade. As he accepted the deal, Musk danced on stage with Tesla's humanoid robots and thanked his supporters, saying he super appreciated it.
I super appreciate it. Thank you everyone.
But as the company's stock is known to plummet when Musk intervenes in politics, questions remain about the damage his recent maneuverings will do to Tesla's future. I'm Ruby Jones, and you're listening to seven AM Today Power and Tech reporter at the Guy in Us Nick Robins early on what Mask has been up to since he left the White House and how a trillion dollar pay packer will shape his next moves. It's Tuesday, November eleven, so Nick.
Last week Tesla shareholders approved this one trillion dollar compensation package for Elon Musk. It'll be the largest corporate payout in history. If he does manage to deliver on it. So to begin with, can you just tell me what he needs to do to get the trillion.
Yeah, so there's a lot of milestones that he actually needs to hit in order to get this pay package in full. He has to primarily guide Tesla to this eight point five trillion dollar market cap, which is about eight times what it's worth today. In addition to that, he has to get about four hundred billion dollars in actual earnings for four consecutive quarters. That's kind of a tall order since Tesla's actual earnings for this latest quarter were four point two billion in which was actually down
from last year. So he would really have to turn things around in a very drastic way. It's going to take quite a lot of work to get Tesla to these marks.
Okay, Well, tell me then a bit more about what his vision for Tesla's future is where he wants to take the company.
Yeah. So, Musk has laid out this vision of the future where Tesla's products are basically central to how society runs.
The first car that is specifically built for unsupervisedbul self driving to be a robotaxis called a cybercap It doesn't even have pedals or steering wheel.
Yeah, Tesla's cars would all drive themselves, and they can turn into autonomous robotaxis when you're not using them. There would be millions of these autonomous robotaxis in every city around the world. But there's this big other push that he's been making for Tesla, which is moving into robotics. Specifically, he wants to take the company's Optimus robot. That is this not yet mass produced, still very much tentative in its abilities, humanoid looking robot.
I guess the way to think about it is that every human on earth is going to want to have their own personal R two D two C three po.
So who wouldn't and he wants basically one of these in every home. He wants them in every factory. He's claimed that this is going to be the biggest product of all time.
You know, people often talk about like eliminating poverty, giving everyone amazing medical care. Well, there's actually only one way to do that, and that's with the Optimius robot.
He's gotten into some very kind of sign fiction predictions about how it could replace healthcare workers doctors. During the shareholder meeting, he said that it could replace prisons by having a robot follow people convicted of crimes around twenty four to seven, which sounded particularly dystopian. And then he has also even said that you might be able to download your consciousness into one of these robots in the future.
Okay. And so this deal, seventy five percent of shareholders agree to it. So it seems like there's strong backing for Musk at the moment. Why is that, Well.
Musk does have a huge amount of belief behind him from Tesla's shareholders and from the people who are involved in the companies that he runs. And part of this is that he's made a lot of money through these companies. He's made the people who work at these companies a lot of money. He's made a lot of very rich people even richer. He had the backing of the board as well, which is a board that's pretty personally and financially enmeshed in his success, and they lobbied very hard
for him to get this compensation. By and large, seventy five percent of shareholders said we want this for him. We really want Elon focused specifically on this company and not on his other SpaceX neuralink x endeavors his political fixations. They wanted him dialed into Tesla specifically.
And that's interesting because we know Elon Musk has not been totally focused on Tesla. There's all these other business interests that you mentioned, and then, of course he has also been incredibly active politically. So what impacts his political stance had on Tesla's value.
It's been a challenge for Tesla. There was a Yale study published last month that found that between twenty twenty two and April of this year, Musk's political affiliations, his far right rhetoric, his backing of Donald Trump along with other far right political parties around the world, that had cost Tesla about a million car sales during that period of time. And then if you look at polling from consumers, you see that Tesla's brand loyalty just plummeted. Over the course of this year.
Dozens of cyber trucks at a parking lot in Fort Lauderdale were spray painted with a vulgar term directed at Tesla owner Elon Musk. Some vandals recorded themselves in the act.
There was a massive backlash that we saw over the summer and over earlier this year, where you had people burning Tesla's you had people attaching stickers to their cars saying I bought this before Elon went crazy.
Tesla's are being torched across the country.
Dealerships shot up and set on fire.
There is a real and sizable sea change in the way that a lot of people who maybe once viewed to him as just sort of this tech entrepreneur, began to view Musk in recent years. But when he first stepped away from the White House, a lot of shareholders were really optimistic. Tesla's stock rose. They thought that maybe he would leave his politics behind and dial in on
the company, and that really hasn't happened. He has been both very very vocal politically, but he has also been infusing his companies, especially Xai, with a lot of his political beliefs. So it seems like as much as he promised that maybe he was going to step away from some of his more divisive political activities, it kind of seems like he hasn't been able to.
Solve himself coming up the artificial intelligence being shaped in Musk's image so Nick and April of this year, Elon Musk announced that he would be having back his time with the Trump administration and the Department of Government efficiency. That decision did come after the company it had a huge drop in sales. Tesla stock was pummeting, and at that moment in time, he said that he was done with politics, he was done with political spending. So since then has he stuck to that?
No, I mean not, no, he hasn't. He has maybe spent less time physically in the White House, and he's not running doge anymore. But he's been extremely involved in politics. He's been very, very vocal about supporting far right causes around the globe. He tweets constantly about anti immigration views and election conspiracy is about attacking trans rights. He's been backing parties like Germany is alternative for deutsch Land, which has very explicit history of far right, anti immigration, anti
Islam views. He has even had a kind of more ground activist level, been backing people like Tommy Robinson, the British far right anti immigration activists who claimed this week that Musk had bankrolled his entire legal defense over a terrorism charge. All you have to do is go on his Twitter feed and within seconds you'll see just how prominent this is as part of his online persona.
Yeah, can we talk a little more about that because, as you are saying, it's really not about Elon Musk just sort of, you know, weighing in with his views on a certain thing. He owns x He's pursuing AI. So can we talk a bit more about how his businesses are becoming kind of infused with his beliefs.
Yeah, that's a really good way of putting it. And it's not only x as a social media platform. He's been working on Xai, which is his artificial intelligence company. One of the things that Musk has been worried about for a very long time is this idea that artificial intelligence could become too woke, and it's something that he frequently talks about.
Well, like, the problem is essentially the woke mind virus retreated to Blue Sky. Yeah, but it's where they're just a self reinforcing lunatic.
As sounds, they're all just triple masked.
He was on Joe Rogan in the last couple of weeks and he went at length about this idea that if AI is programmed to think that diversity is more important than anything else, then there would be the possibility that in the future, when AI is more intelligent or more powerful, that it could decide that straight white men were just in essential for the world, and that the AI would then kill them.
Every AI except groc is saying that basically straight white male should die and this was a problem and we should fix it.
And one of the things that Musk has been building as part of his XAI company is this Wikipedia rival, which he calls Grockipedia after his chatbot, which is also called grock And for a long time, Musk has been very, very vocally opposed to Wikipedia, which he accuses of having this leftist bias and being too woke. So in building Grokipedia, he's tried to create this AI driven alternative version of
Wikipedia which is more closely aligned to his views. Immediately, researches have said that there is just a whole raft of falsehoods and misleading information and a bunch of issues with it that make it an unreliable source. If you look at, for instance, the difference between Wikipedia articles and Grockipedia articles on some subjects, you can see that there are right wing narratives in Grokipedia about the slave trade,
about immigration, about trans writes. One example is that there was an entry on Britain First, which Wikipedia describes as a neo fascist party, and Grakipedia refers to it as a patriotic political party.
And we've spoken about how at times Musk's beliefs have hurt his businesses. We spoke about the impact on Tesla, but shareholders there they believe in him. They've ultimately chosen to reward him with this payout, the biggest payout in corporate history. So how do you think that that decision and that trillion dollars is likely to impact, you know, how willing he is to keep pursuing influence like this.
Well, I think to some degree, it shows that he can have a very low personal approval rating, he can face a lot of widespread public backlash, you know. To put it in context, there's been multiple studies this year and surveys that show that he has extremely low favorability within the US, which is probably his biggest base of support out of anywhere. He for instance, in one study was viewed the lowest favorability out of fourteen major political newsmakers.
And that's including net Yahoo, who's facing war crimes charges. It's including Trump, who's a very polarizing figure. It's including you know, JD Vance, who a lot of people dislike, he ranked lower than any of them. There was a separate Quinnipiac poll in June that found that only around two and ten women in the US had a favorable
view of Musk. In the end, none of that really mattered over whether he got this money, whether he was viewed favorably by shareholders, which is one of the biggest, most powerful groups that he actually does need to get the approval of. And so if there isn't really any consequences to these views and the way that he is backing the political far right around the world, then it seems like that there's very little reason for him to stop.
Oh, Nick, thank you so much for your time.
Thank you for having me.
Also in the news, Anthony Alberzi has denied that his appointment of former Labor Premier j Weatherall to the position of top diplomat in the UK is the reason the government has not yet released its Jobs for Mates report whether Ull will replace former Labor Minister Stephen Smith as High Commissioner, a role he's held since twenty twenty three. Albernizi said weather All's work as Premier of South Australia
over six years makes him an entirely appropriate appointment. Labor is facing pressure from the cross bench to release a report into the appropriateness of political appointments, but has so far failed to do so, and New South Wales Speaker Greg Piper says he knew about the weekends Neo Nazi rally in Sydney ahead of time and tried to stop it, only to be told it was not an option to
relocate the protest. His comments come after two female politicians revealed they'd been subjected to death threats and threats of violence by Neo Nazis after they spoke out against the group. Both for Close MP Kelly Sloane and Wentworth MP a Legraspender have referred the threats to New South Wales Police. I'm Ruby Jones. This is seven am. Thanks for listening.