Tesla shareholders on Thursday voted to ratify CEO Elon Musk’s mammoth 2018 pay plan, five months after a judge in Delaware ordered the company to rescind the package, finding it had been improperly granted by the board.
At Tesla’s annual meeting in Austin, Texas, the vote in support of the compensation plan, doesn’t override the court’s ruling, but provides a public relations victory for Musk and could help his effort to sway a court to give him his performance options in the future.
Taking the stage after the preliminary results were announced, Musk said, “I just want to start off by saying hot d—! I love you guys.”
The compensation package was previously worth as much as $56 billion in Tesla stock. In January, a Delaware court called the pay “unfathomable.” Judge Kathaleen McCormick found that Tesla’s board members lacked independence from Musk, failed to properly negotiate at arm’s length with the CEO and didn’t to give shareholders the full picture before asking them to vote on his pay plan.
Tesla shares rose 2.9% in regular trading on Thursday to close at $182.47 after Musk posted on X that the proposal was set to be approved. The stock is still down 27% for the year, as Tesla reckons with declining sales tied to an aging lineup of electric vehicles and increased competition in China.
The annual meeting featured final votes on a dozen proxy proposals, including an effort by Musk to move Tesla’s site of incorporation out of Delaware, where most large publicly traded companies are incorporated, and into Texas, home to the automaker’s largest U.S. factory. Shareholders voted in favor of the move.
At the last shareholder meeting, in May 2023, Musk predicted the economy would pick up after 12 months, said that Tesla would deliver production Cybertrucks in late 2023, and informed investors that Tesla would “try out a little advertising” and see how it goes.
Recent inflation and jobs numbers point to some improvement. Tesla held a Cybertruck deliveries event in late 2023, and has been advertising over the past year, including on X, the social media company formerly known as Twitter that Musk acquired for $44 billion in late 2022.
However, during last year’s meeting, Musk promised shareholders he would spend less time on the app going forward, calling the business a “short-term distraction.”
He’s still spending plenty of time on other things. Musk is CEO of SpaceX and brain computer interface company Neuralink. Last year he also started a new company called xAI, which has raised billions of dollars to developing large language models and an AI chatbot called Grok that uses data and data center capacity from X.
An exuberant Musk, calling himself “pathologically optimistic,” promised Tesla shareholders at the meeting that the company is making such great progress on developing “vehicle autonomy,” or systems to turn existing Tesla cars into self-driving vehicles, that he believes they can “10x the value of the company.”
While Musk has been promising that level of autonomous technology since 2016, it’s yet to deliver. Meanwhile, competitors including Pony.ai, Didi and Waymo have developed robotaxis and already operate commercial services.
Musk described the company’s ambition to create a ridehailing network populated with Tesla vehicles equipped with self-driving systems, though he didn’t provide a timeline for development and rollout.
“There’ll be some cars that Tesla owns itself.” he said, “But then for the fleet that is owned by our customers, it will be like an Airbnb thing. You can add or subtract your car to the fleet whenever you want.”
Regarding the Cybertruck, which hit the market in late 2023, Musk said deliveries are picking up. He said the company hit a weekly record of 1,300 shipments.
Musk promised Tesla would move into “limited production” of Optimus in 2025 and test out humanoid robots in its own factories next year. Next year, he predicted, the company will have “over 1,000, or a few thousand, Optimus robots working at Tesla.”
Dogecoin shot higher on Tuesday night, extending its postelection surge after President-elect Donald Trump formally announced the creation of the Department of Government Efficiency, which he referred to as “DOGE” in his statement.
Tesla CEO Elon Musk and Vivek Ramaswamy, former Republican presidential candidate and Strive Asset Management co-founder, will lead the department, Trump said in a statement. Together, they “will pave the way for my Administration to dismantle Government Bureaucracy, slash excess regulations, cut wasteful expenditures, and restructure Federal Agencies.”
Dogecoin was last up nearly 20%. It has been one of the biggest winners in the postelection rally, gaining 153% since election day compared to bitcoin’s 30% rise in the same period. It also shot past XRP this weekto become the sixth largest cryptocurrency by market cap.
Dogecoin jumped after President-elect Donald Trump announced the creation of the Department of Government Efficiency, or “DOGE.”
Memecoins are seen as a gauge of retail interest and risk appetite in crypto. When memecoin activity ramps up, it usually indicates that retail investors are participating and have an appetite to speculate further out on the risk curve.
Trump initially floated the idea of an efficiency commission in September. Since then, Musk — who has called himself the “Dogefather” in the past and has been known to make public comments about the memecoin that influence its price — has posted on his social media platform X, referring to the commission as the “Department of Government Efficiency” or “D.O.G.E.”
Dogecoin gained relevance in 2021 following Musk’s endorsement and continuous hype on social media, which has since become a big catalyst for the coin. In May that year, Musk’s posts fueled dogecoin’s rally to its all-time high of 67 cents, per Coin Metrics. Though his appearance at the time on SNL, in which he called dogecoin “a hustle,” sent its price crashing down.
The rest of the crypto market was on pause from its postelection rally. Bitcoin was trading flat at about $87,000, after briefly touching $90,000 in late afternoon trading. Crypto stocks Coinbase and MicroStrategy were lower by 1% and 2%, respectively, in extended trading.
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Elon Musk embraces Donald Trump during a campaign rally in Butler, Pennsylvania on Oct. 5, 2024.
Anna Moneymaker | Getty Images
President-elect Donald Trump said Tuesday that Elon Musk and former Republican presidential hopeful Vivek Ramaswamy will lead an efficiency group when his second term begins in January.
Trump wrote in a post that the Department of Government Efficiency, or DOGE, will “become, potentially, ‘The Manhattan Project’ of our time.” He also said the group would, “pave the way” for his next administration to “dismantle Government Bureaucracy, slash excess regulations, cut wasteful expenditures, and restructure Federal Agencies.”
Trump didn’t specify where cuts will take place or when the department may be formed. Congress hasn’t created or funded such an office. He said the group’s “work will conclude no later than July 4, 2026.”
Musk’s involvement in the envisioned group was previously promised by Trump and touted by the Tesla CEO, who spent an estimated $200 million backing the Republican nominee’s 2024 campaign, as a reason to put the former president back in the White House. Musk, who also runs defense contractor SpaceX, has reportedly been stationed at Trump’s Mar-a-Lago resort in Florida since Election Night.
Ramaswamy, who challenged Trump in the Republican primary, is co-founder of investment firm Strive Asset Management. He has opposed the widespread adoption of environmental, social and governance, or ESG, principles by companies.
Trump announced a number of other appointments Tuesday, including naming Fox News host Pete Hegseth as his pick for defense secretary and John Ratcliffe as CIA director.
The Spotify logo is displayed on a screen on the floor of the New York Stock Exchange on Dec. 4, 2023.
Brendan Mcdermid | Reuters
Spotify shares rose in extended trading Tuesday after the Swedish music streaming company issued a profit forecast for the fourth quarter that topped estimates.
Here’s how the company did, compared with what analysts expected:
Earnings per share: 1.45 euros vs. 1.72 euros expected by LSEG
Revenue: 3.99 billion euros vs. 4.02 billion euros expected by LSEG
Monthly active users (MAUs): 640 million vs. 639 million expected by StreetAccount
While the company’s earnings and revenue for the third quarter trailed estimates, investors focused instead on guidance for the current period.
Spotify said operating income in the fourth quarter will come in at 481 million euros, exceeding the average analyst estimate of 432.7 million euros, according to StreetAccount. MAUs will increase to 665 million, while analysts were expecting 659.3 million, based on a StreetAccount estimate.
Still, revenue guidance trailed estimates. The company said sales will reach 4.1 billion euros, below the average analyst estimate of 4.26 billion euros, according to LSEG.
Subscribers to Spotify Premium, the company’s ad-free membership service that allows users to select songs on an unlimited basis, increased 12% year over year to 252 million, slightly ahead of estimates.
Spotify shares rose about 8% after the report to $452.35 after rising 2.2% in regular trading. The stock has more than doubled in value this year.