Elon Musk is already the world’s richest man, but today he could take a giant step towards becoming the world’s first trillionaire.

Shareholders at Tesla are voting on a pay deal for their chief executive that is unlike anything corporate America has ever seen.

The package would grant Musk, who already has a net worth of more than $400bn, around 425 million shares in the company.

That would net him about $1trn (£760bn) and, perhaps more importantly to Musk, it would tighten his grip on the company by raising his stake from 15% to almost 30%.

The board, which has been making its case to retail investors with a series of videos and digital ads, has a simple message: Tesla is at a turning point.

Yes, it wants to sell millions of cars, but it also wants to be a pioneer in robotaxis, AI-driven humanoid robots, and autonomous driving software. At this moment, it needs its visionary leader motivated and fully on board.

Musk has served his warning shot. Late last month, he wrote on X: “Tesla is worth more than all other automotive companies combined. Which of those CEOs would you like to run Tesla? It won’t be me.”

Not everyone is buying it, however.

With so much of his personal wealth tied up in Tesla, would Musk really walk away?

Bad for the brand?

Others see his continued presence and rising influence as a risk. Norway’s sovereign wealth fund, the world’s largest, which owns 1.1% of the company (making it a top 10 shareholder), has already declared it will vote against the deal. It cited concerns about “the award’s size, dilution, and lack of mitigation of key person risk”.

Several major US pension funds have followed suit. In an open letter published last month, they warned: “The board’s relentless pursuit of keeping its chief executive has damaged Tesla’s reputation.”

They also criticised the board for allowing Musk to pursue other ventures. They said he was overcommitted and distracted as a result. Signatories of that letter included the state treasurers of Nevada, New Mexico, Connecticut, Massachusetts, Colorado, and the comptrollers of Maryland and New York City.

All of them Democrats. Republicans have been more favourable. There is a political slant to this.

The signatories’ concerns with his “other ventures” no doubt include the time Musk spent dabbling in right-wing politics with the Republican inner circle. That made him a polarising figure and, to an extent, Tesla too.

Pay packet dwarfs rivals

Combine this with a mixed sales performance and a volatile share price, and some are wondering whether the carmaker has lost its way under his leadership.

Irrespective of performance, for some, the existence of billionaires – let alone trillionaires – can never be justified. Some may also ask why Musk is worth so much more than the leaders of Apple, Facebook, and Microsoft, or Nvidia, the world’s most valuable company by market capitalisation.

Nvidia‘s chief executive, Jensen Huang, received $49.9m (£37.9m) this fiscal year. So, how has Tesla come up with these numbers? Why is Musk’s pay so out of kilter with the benchmark? Does the company have a corporate governance problem?

The courts have suggested it might. Last year, a Delaware court took the view that Tesla’s board members, which include Musk’s brother Kimbal, were not fully independent when agreeing to a $56bn (£42.6bn) pay packet back in 2017.

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The Delaware Supreme Court is now reviewing the case. It is a reminder that even if Musk meets his targets, a similar fate could befall the current package.

The Tesla board is holding firm, however. Robyn Denholm, the company’s chair, told The New York Times: “He doesn’t get any compensation if he doesn’t deliver,” adding that Musk “does things that further humankind”.

Tesla’s valuation is tied up in its promise to deliver revolutionary AI and robotics products that will change the world. Those ambitions, which include robots that can look after children, are lofty. Some would call them unrealistic, but the board is adamant that if they are to become a reality, only Musk can make it happen.

Under the deal, Musk would receive no salary or cash bonus. Instead, he would collect shares as Tesla’s value grows. To unlock the full package, he would have to increase the current market valuation six times to $8.5trn (£6.47trn). For context, that’s almost twice that of Nvidia.

There are other hurdles. The company would have to sell 20 million additional electric vehicles, achieve 10 million subscriptions to its self-driving software on average over three months, deploy one million robotaxis on average over the same period, sell one million AI-powered robots, and boost adjusted earnings 24-fold to $400bn (£304bn).

They are ambitious targets, but Musk has defied the sceptics before.

The cyber attack on high street department store Marks and Spencer is expected to directly cost roughly £136m.

The figure is only the cost of immediate incident systems response and recovery, as well as specialist legal and professional services support.

Combined with a loss in sales, as the retailer’s online systems were out of action from Easter into the summer, statutory profit before tax at the business has been nearly wiped out for the first half of the year.

This profit measure dropped from £391.9m last year to £3.4m this year. Statutory profit before tax is the official profit figure reported in a company’s financial statements before it paid tax, used for tax and legal purposes.

About £100m is being claimed back in insurance for the cyberattack, M&S said in its market update.

Using a different profit measure – the M&S group’s adjusted profit before tax – the figure is more than half that of a year earlier, down from £413m to £184m.

Sales were hit as online shopping was unavailable from the April attack date until June. Some shelves were also empty in the days after the attack.

Ransomware hackers broke into M&S systems by tricking employees at a third-party contractor.

The attack was just one of a series that struck major British businesses.

The Co-Op, Jaguar Land Rover and Harrods all had operations interrupted by cyber criminals.

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To say this wasn’t the plan is an understatement.

When Rachel Reeves said last year (and many times since) that she had no intention of coming back to the British people with yet more tax rises, she meant it.

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But now the question ahead of the budget later this month is not so much whether taxes will rise, but which taxes, and by how much? Indeed, there’s growing speculation that the chancellor will be forced to break her manifesto pledge not to raise the rates of income tax, national insurance or VAT.

Her argument, made in her news conference on Tuesday morning, is that she is in this position in large part because of other people’s mistakes, primarily those of the Conservative Party.

But while it’s certainly true that a significant chunk of the likely downgrade to her fiscal position reflects the fact that the “trend growth rate” – the average speed of productivity growth – has dropped in recent years due to all sorts of issues, including Brexit, COVID-19 and the state of the labour market, she certainly bears some responsibility.

A problem that is some of her own making

First off, she established the fiscal rules against which she is being marked by the Office for Budget Responsibility.

Second, she decided to leave herself only a wafer-thin margin against those rules.

Third, even if it weren’t for the OBR’s productivity downgrade, it’s quite likely the chancellor would have broken those fiscal rules, due to the various U-turns by the government on welfare reforms, winter fuel, and extra giveaways they haven’t yet provided the funding for, such as reversing the two-child benefit cap.

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Now, at this stage, no one, save for the Treasury and the Office for Budget Responsibility, really knows the scale of the task facing the chancellor. And in the coming weeks, those numbers could change significantly.

But it’s becoming increasingly clear, from the political signalling if nothing else, that the government is rolling the pitch for bad news later this month.

Indeed, for all that this government pledged to bring an end to austerity, a combination of higher taxes and lower spending will be highly unpopular, not to mention deeply controversial. And while the chancellor will seek to blame her predecessors, it remains to be seen whether the public will be entirely convinced.