Tesla (TSLA) CEO Elon Musk made an unusual plea at the end of the company’s earnings call, urging shareholders to approve his new $1 trillion pay package and claiming, among other things, he wouldn’t be comfortable building “a robot army” without control over it.
During the Q&A portion of the call with investors following the company’s Q3 miss, Musk was asked about the present challenges in bringing the Optimus robot to market.
Musk mused that Tesla was uniquely qualified to do this because of its manufacturing and tech prowess, the immense amount of work done in developing a dextrous hand, for instance. But then he veered into his own influence.
“My fundamental concern with regard to how much voting control I have at Tesla is, if I go ahead and build this enormous robot army, can I just be ousted at some point in the future? That’s my biggest concern,” Musk said on the call.
“It’s called compensation, but it’s not like I’m going to go spend the money,” Musk said. “It’s just, if we build this robot army, do I have at least a strong influence over that robot army? … I don’t feel comfortable building that robot army if I don’t have at least a strong influence.”
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Musk currently holds a 13% stake in Tesla after various share sales over the past couple of years. Most of the share sales were used for funding his purchase of Twitter, now X, in 2022.
Near the end of the conference call, when CFO Vaibhav Taneja asked for Tesla shareholders to approve Elon Musk’s compensation plan (which he also claimed shouldn’t be called a “compensation package”), Musk chimed in again.
“The point is that I just, like, there needs to be enough voting control to give a strong influence, but not so much that I can’t be fired if I go insane. I think that sort of number is in the mid-20s, approximately,” he said.
Then Musk went on the warpath against his current nemesis: proxy adviser firms.
“I just don’t feel comfortable building a robot army here and then being ousted because of some asinine recommendations from ISS and Glass Lewis, who have no frigging clue. I mean, those guys are corporate terrorists,” he said, referring to the two proxy adviser firms that have recommended that shareholders reject Musk’s latest proposed pay package.
Musk’s past pay package from 2018 is embroiled in a lawsuit in Delaware, where shareholders alleged they didn’t have enough information to properly vet the compensation awarded by the board, and a trial judge agreed. The Delaware Supreme Court is currently weighing the merits of Tesla’s appeal.