Commentary by K.E. Bell

“What Elon did with USAID should be an extinction-level event for his reputation.” So said noted author and philosopher Sam Harris in a conversation with journalist Shane Smith.

Now the man who has blood on his hands for denying aid to the world’s most vulnerable people wants to be paid $1 trillion. Of course, that $1 trillion would come in the form of stock so he can hold onto it and avoid paying taxes. Never let the government get its share to help the people.

Obscene.

This comes while Musk is in the midst of court proceedings over his previous $56 billion pay package — you know the one that aims to pay him about 200 times more than other high-end CEO salaries, which were about 290 times the pay of the average worker in 2023. Now he wants to increase that by a factor of 20. There can be only two reasons to have the temerity to ask for such a package: ego and greed that know no bounds.

I think Musk is evil, and not just because of his greed. His DOGE exploits put thousands of Americans out of work, took the heat off his companies as he scuttled investigations, and very likely illegally gathered data on just about everyone in the country. He threw Nazi salutes at Trump’s inaugural, he’s a far-right internet troll, and he says empathy is a “fundamental weakness of Western civilization.” He is to be derided, not praised.

But none of that is enough for people to distance themselves from him because he may pad their pocketbooks. After all, integrity no longer matters in the age of Trump.

Over the Last Thursday, shareholders approved this disgusting pay package. That’s because capitalism is more than just an economic policy in this country. It’s a religion.

Capitalism is amoral. That’s not to say it’s immoral. Morality just doesn’t even factor in. Sure, companies can choose to act morally, but when dumping the mercury in the water is cheaper than handling it responsibly, capitalism says go the cheap route. 

It also says “maximize the earnings,” and that’s the goal with Musk’s new pay package. Tesla is a meme stock built on the cult of personality that holds that Musk is a genius. Tesla stock currently trades about 300 times earnings in a market that aims for about 20:1 when healthy. Its stock price is currently about $445. If it were a normal, profitable company it would trade at about $30 a share. That stock price would gives Tesla a valuation of about $1.5 trillion. 

To get his pay Musk has to raise Tesla’s valuation to $8.5 trillion. It’s a big bet on AI and robots, and the shareholders don’t care if a man completely lacking moral character is the one who leads them there, as long as their bank accounts rise.

The cult of Musk is currently good for a factor of 15 in Tesla’s valuation even after he played shadow president to advance his own agenda. It would have to account for far more than that to get to the goals of this new pay package, goals he very likely won’t achieve. But he’ll goose the stock on a regular basis by making outlandish claims, most of which will never come to fruition. 

Musk got his win. He demanded the moon and his adoring shareholders gave him the win, or at least the façade of a win. They said he’s worth a trillion dollars. That should feed the ego, even if the goals are unrealistic.

Musk should be considered so toxic that his presence is a negative for the company, not an outsized positive. I hope that this bet against integrity costs the shareholders in the end.

Bell is a left-column contributing pundit to The Hustings.