I'd love to hear from anyone at all who can give me a reason why the shareholders would vote for this. The stock value has been going down for both the 1 year and 3 year time frames, so he's not doing great things today. The company only made a profit of $18B last year, so this is like wiping out 3 years of profitability in one step. This package is over half of the company's total revenue!! In what world do investors think it's a good idea to say one guy deserves almost as much as the entire company brings in for a year?
I'll wait for the financial analysts that I both trust, and I know hate Musk, before I have any confidence in answering that question.
But... my best uninformed guess is that it's less fanboy worship, and more fear that Musk is the only thing propping up the insane stock valuation.
I'm assuming that Musk has a complex web of possibly illegal and highly engineered financial instruments that keep that stock pumping, or at least, not crashing - yet.
Maybe those who voted to approve might be aware, or involved, in that house of cards and believe removing Musk would be akin to blowing on it.
But I'm just pulling all of this out of my ass, so who knows...
It might be as simple as the majority of Tesla shareholders who voted to approve, including the institutional ones, are really just submental morons.
As the holder of roughly $45 worth of Tesla stock, I voted against his pay package and every other shady, bullshit proposal on the ballot. My vote counted for almost nothing and I’d probably be considered an “activist shareholder” anyway, but it was worth the money I’ve lost to get to click that button anyway.
Sustainability doesn't matter. Musk's hype holds the market value up (in the short term), and kicking him out could tank it from the controversy alone. That's all that matters.
I like to think many investors are buy and hold, long term institutional, Warren acolytes or whatever, but in reality the outlook is just so short for so many people now. What matters is the next day and the next quarter, and they can just bail out after that.