Elon Musk earned more than 65 highest-paid CEOs (combined)
Elon Musk, the man behind Tesla and SpaceX, is working on some very ambitious projects for the betterment(?) of humanity and making a lot of money from them. If a new report is anything to go by, the billionaire-cum-visionary made so much from Tesla in 2018 that his earnings were more than that of 65 highest-paid CEOs combined. Here are all the details.
Musk made nearly $2.3 billion in 2018
Last year, Musk made a whopping $2.284 billion from Tesla, taking the top spot in the New York Times' list of highest-paid CEOs. The pay largely came in the form of stock options and marked a 4,500% increase over 2017 when he just got $50 million from the company. Now, this is what you call a ginormous boost in pay package.
In fact, Musk 'out-earned' next 65 highest-paid CEOs
After Musk, the second spot in the highest-paid list was taken by Discovery's David M. Zaslav. He made $129 million in 2018, but that's way lesser than what Musk got. In fact, if we look closely, Musk's pay alone beats the combined earning - nearly $2.279 billion - of the next 65 highest-paid CEOs on the list.
NYT had to add an 'extra dimension' to their chart
The New York Times claimed Musk's pay package was so large that they had to 'add an extra dimension' to their chart - a large rectangle-like figure instead of standard bars - to demonstrate the increase. Notably, the outlet came to these figures after working with executive compensation consultancy Equilar and looking at the compensation of CEOs at some 200 large publicly-traded companies.
Musk's pay package stems from Tesla's milestones
Musk's insanely large compensation comes from a decision taken by Tesla's shareholders. Back in March, the board of the company had promised Musk $2.6 billion in stock options in 12 tranches if the company hits specific market capitalization goals over a 10-year-long period. Now, his earnings seem to indicate that Tesla is moving on track with the set internal goals.
