Musk, in his post, indicated that the number of votes in favor of restoring his pay had surpassed a threshold needed to guarantee a victory on his part. The full results are expected to be revealed Thursday at Tesla’s shareholder meeting in Austin.
The shareholder vote does not immediately restore Musk’s pay, but it sends a strong signal that he has the broad support of Tesla’s investors. It also relieves the company of months of uncertainty, as Musk threatened to pull back from the electric vehicle maker if investors did not give him what he wanted. Tesla’s stock jumped by around six percent after the market opened Thursday, adding around $30 billion in market value.
In the months leading up to the vote, investors large and small were split on whether to support the package. While some major shareholders criticized him as a distracted leader who doesn’t deserve such a reward, others lauded him for being a generational genius.
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“Our answer is clear, loud and unequivocal: Tesla is better with Elon. Tesla is Elon,” said Ron Baron, a billionaire and investor in Tesla, who said Musk was indispensable to Tesla and that his compensation must recognize that fact.
Investors and Musk’s supporters, including X CEO Linda Yaccarino, applauded the preliminary results late Wednesday. Musk — who remains among the richest people regardless of whether he keeps the pay package — also pledged in a post Wednesday night that he would make Tesla the most valuable company on Earth.
Brad Lander, the New York City comptroller whose office owns about 3.4 million shares of Tesla and invests on behalf of public employees, said he voted against the package because of Tesla’s struggles and Musk’s divided attention among his several companies. Musk’s Wednesday night Tweet announcing the outcome, he said, was “more evidence of the failure of corporate governance at Tesla.”
“This is not how the votes are supposed to be counted and made public,” he said. “If this unprecedented pay package is approved, as long-term investors in Tesla, we expect a CEO who is deeply committed to the company’s growth rather than other business ventures.”
Ross Gerber, a longtime investor in Tesla and a vocal critic of Musk, said the result of the vote is great for Musk but does not address company’s current woes, including weak sales, global competition and mass layoffs.
“If they put as much effort into selling cars … that would help,” he said.
Musk and a Tesla spokesperson did not immediately respond to requests for comment late Wednesday.
In a January post on X, Musk threatened to pull back from the company and build futuristic technology — such as robotics and artificial intelligence — “outside of Tesla,” before the invalidated pay package threatened to further erode his control. Such a future was a daunting prospect for the electric-vehicle maker, which reported a steeper-than-expected 55 percent plunge in profit for the first quarter.
While several key investors were vocal about their position ahead of Thursday’s meeting, but others stayed silent, leaving the result unclear until Musk’s X post late Wednesday night. Tesla’s largest investors, Vanguard Group, BlackRock and State Street, which collectively own about 17 percent of Tesla stock, did not publicly state their positions. None responded to requests for comment Wednesday night.
“This shows that shareholder votes can matter,” James Park, a professor at the UCLA School of Law, who studies securities regulation and corporate law, said this week before the vote. “Sometimes they are just rubber-stamping what the board has proposed, but this is corporate democracy in action.”
After the decision from Delaware’s Court of Chancery in January, Musk had also unleashed on the state where Tesla — and many businesses — are incorporated.
“Never incorporate your company in the state of Delaware,” he posted, before launching a poll and announcing a decision to hold a shareholder vote on incorporating in Texas instead. In his post Wednesday, Musk said shareholders also approved Tesla incorporating in Texas.
The board had also asked shareholders to vote on whether the company should move its corporate home from Delaware. On Wednesday night, Musk said that measure was getting support by a wide margin, too.
