Imagine if they had instead hired 500,000 people on $100,000 each. They could have bought the entire city of Detroit and had it making Teslas, instead they've got one coked up narcissist.
Musk is not getting billions worth salary. You can't hire 500,000 people using his package. Unless you believe that these workers should be eating shares instead of food.
There is currently a huge labor shortage in the united states, particularly for engineers and skilled craft and trades people. There's no fucking way they would be able to hire 10,000, let alone 500,000 people. Hell, my company has had two engineering positions open for 2 years and we have had zero applicants. Zero!
Everybody just wants to be retired or be a social media influencer these days, with that amazing side hustle as a door dasher.
It is a hard labor market, but we've been able to hire engineering positions. If you're not getting applicants, get a better recruiter.
The real issue is our backwards immigration system. We should be expanding immigration when labor is short, not talking about restrictions. If they wanted, they could lobby for better immigration with that $56B instead of giving it to someone who already has hundreds of billions.
Also, many Teslas aren't built in the US anyway, so there's not much stopping them from looking elsewhere for labor.
Ok, imagine the following scenario. Tesla decides not to pay Musk and hire all these people instead. Would you join the workforce? They will give you share options with a three year vesting period and zero salary. Go on, join them on these conditions!
You can offer shares to employees to supplement salary, its very common. It could be used to attract or retain staff by offering less salary but a larger overall package than their rivals and tie in the employees for a period of time till the shares vest.
I've read that all they're doing is diluting the current shares, so in essence the current shareholders are screwing themselves over by devaluing their own shares.