From every house in Hawaii to America’s top oil giants: What Musk’s $1 trillion pay plan can buy

Dubai: Tesla shareholders have approved a compensation plan that pushes Elon Musk into an economic category no corporate leader has entered before. If he meets the targets set over the next decade, the Tesla CEO would unlock stock awards worth $1 trillion, putting his personal wealth above the annual output of many advanced economies and raising questions about what such a figure even represents.

The award is structured across twelve tranches, each tied to operational and financial achievements. The first will be released only when Tesla reaches a valuation of $2 trillion dollars, up from roughly $1.5 trillion today. Musk must also oversee the delivery of 20 million vehicles, deploy one million robotaxis, introduce one million humanoid robots, and help generate up to $400 billion in core profit before the final tranches can vest.

Tesla acknowledged the difficulty of the plan, noting in its proposal that the milestones “will be extraordinarily difficult and challenging for Tesla, and for Musk personally.” The package requires him to remain committed to the company for at least 7.5 years.

The magnitude of the potential payout has compelled analysts to revert to basic comparisons, as $1 trillion is too large for most metrics to retain meaning. On a simple timescale, a person spending $40 per second would take almost eight centuries to exhaust a trillion dollars.

Every house in the state of Hawaii: With roughly 572,000 homes valued at an average of 826,000 dollars, the entire housing stock would fall comfortably within the trillion-dollar line.

Multiple global corporations outright: The entire endowment of the Ivy League could be purchased five times over. Coca-Cola could be acquired with hundreds of billions still left to buy a 12-pack of Coke for every person on the planet.

The world’s biggest automakers: Toyota, Volkswagen, Stellantis, Hyundai, Ford and General Motors could be brought under a single trillion-dollar umbrella.

Industrial-scale infrastructure: A trillion dollars could build more than 300 supertall skyscrapers, each costing about 3 billion dollars, or buy more than 460 ships the size of Icon of the Seas, the world’s largest cruise ship.

A private navy-sized fleet: Several hundred deep-water vessels could be assembled, mirroring the scale of the United States Navy’s active fleet.

Ultra-luxury assets: Jeff Bezos’ 500-million-dollar megayacht could be reproduced 2,000 times, even before considering annual maintenance costs that run into tens of millions per vessel.

Energy giants: ExxonMobil, Chevron and ConocoPhillips, the three largest publicly traded US oil companies, could all be purchased outright.

A nationwide cash transfer: A trillion dollars would allow a payment of nearly 3,000 dollars to every person in the United States.

These comparisons are not intended as hypotheticals but as a reminder of the proportionality. When a single compensation package can be measured against national budgets, global industrial output and institutional wealth, the debate extends far beyond Musk or Tesla.

Musk’s current net worth already exceeds the GDP of countries such as Denmark, Malaysia and Bangladesh. If the full package is realised, he would enter a category where only large economies can serve as reference points. Switzerland’s annual GDP is smaller than the potential award. Saudi Arabia is only slightly larger.

This is the secondary implication of the Tesla vote. Musk is no longer just a corporate leader. His financial position, through equity and valuation, now resembles that of a state actor with the capacity to move markets on scale alone. That influence will grow if Tesla reaches the milestones that underpin the package.