Gigapay
December 19, 2025
Alex KiersteinDoes it surprise you that the board members of Tesla, with its Gigafactories and astronomical valuation, nabbed an astonishing pay package?
The figures in this recent report on the compensation packages paid to Tesla board members over the years are hard to comprehend. Kimbal Musk, Elon’s cowboy-hat-wearing brother, has earned close to $1B since 2004, according to a report by Reuters, and others in the hundreds of millions of dollars range.
All told, by Reuters’ tabulation, the board members have taken in “more than $3 billion.” This is despite none of them taking stock options since 2020; this is just the value of prior awards inflated by the bloated value of the stock. Some of the stock options are still held, and some were previously sold, but the calculation of the total compensation takes that all into account.
This pencils out to about $12M/year on average per board member. And it only represents the earnings of five of its eight current members. Three board members joined after compensation rules changed.
To try and put this in perspective, an Alphabet board member ( the next highest-compensated among the rarified tech elite) makes one-eighth the amount a Tesla board member makes.
One-eighth. That’s 12.5%.
The question I am asking, and you are asking most likely, is, “what about a Tesla board member is worth 87.5% more than an Alphabet board member?”
As Reuters reports, in response to questions posed about board member compensation during the lawsuit over Elon Musk’s proposed $132B pay package from 2018, Tesla insisted the board members’ exemplary performance justified the structure. In a statement, Tesla said that board members 58 full-board or committee meetings in 2024, which is more than members of other boards.
From Reuters:
Tesla’s board also paid itself in stock options instead of shares, a rare practice criticized by some corporate-governance specialists because it magnifies directors’ upside potential with no downside risk. Tesla directors have exercised tens or hundreds of millions of dollars in options to date but also continue to hold similarly large amounts, Equilar found.
“Stock options are the right to buy the company’s stock after a specified period for a preset price. Option holders face no risk, corporate-governance experts say, because they’re not required to buy the stock if its value drops below the preset price. If it appreciates, they can buy the shares at a discount and immediately unload them at a profit.
…
Four corporate-governance experts who reviewed Equilar’s analysis for Reuters said the Tesla board’s extraordinary compensation undermines directors’ independence in overseeing Tesla and its CEO Elon Musk.
‘Tesla directors are ridiculously overpaid,’ said Douglas Chia, an independent corporate-governance consultant at Soundboard Governance LLC. “Are you actually incentivized to do a better job by being paid this much? Probably not.‘”
Meanwhile, Tesla’s overall valuation has reached monumental heights lately on the strength of analysts’ expectations for its autonomous taxi offerings and AI business. But the business that is actually making money, auto manufacturing,is making significantly less than before. And the real cash cow, its sale of regulatory credits, is dead.
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