Kimbal Musk, the younger brother of the world’s wealthiest person, said Elon Musk “deserves to be paid,” as Tesla remains locked in a legal saga over its CEO’s pay package.
“I think my brother deserves to be paid,” Kimbal Musk said on CNBC’s “Squawk Box” on Friday. “He has zero pay for the past six to eight years. I don’t think that’s right. I’ll let Tesla shareholders make that decision, but I believe that it does need to be. He needs to be paid.”
Elon Musk isn’t paid a salary or any cash bonuses at Tesla. He is compensated through “performance awards” of valuable stock options that are granted based on Tesla hitting certain milestones.
Earlier this month, Tesla granted Elon Musk an “interim” pay package of 96 million shares, which would be worth about $29 billion. The package includes shares that vest in two years as long as he continues as CEO or in another key executive position.
The pay plan was approved by a “special committee” of the Tesla board, with Elon Musk and Kimbal Musk recusing themselves, board members Robyn Denholm and Kathleen Wilson-Thompson said in an Aug. 4 letter to shareholders.
The award came after a Delaware judge in December ordered Tesla to revoke Elon Musk’s $56 billion pay package from 2018, which was the largest compensation plan in U.S. history for a public company executive.
Before the Delaware ruling on his 2018 pay plan, in January 2024, Musk said he wanted even more pay and control of Tesla in a post on X, which was formerly known as Twitter.
“I am uncomfortable growing Tesla to be a leader in AI & robotics without having ~25% voting control,” Musk wrote at the time. “Enough to be influential, but not so much that I can’t be overturned. Unless that is the case, I would prefer to build products outside of Tesla.”
He was already building products outside of Tesla, including at his newest artificial intelligence venture, xAI, which was formed in Nevada in March 2023.
The new pay package was granted to Musk without a shareholder vote, and will only apply if Musk and Tesla lose on appeal in Delaware.
An investment group that works with pension funds, the SOC Investment Group, sent a letter this week to Nasdaq asking them to investigate Tesla, saying its board should have attained shareholder approval for the new package under Nasdaq listing policies.
In an August letter to shareholders announcing the interim pay package, Tesla board members Denholm and Wilson-Thompson wrote that the special committee is working to “address a longer-term CEO compensation strategy,” which it plans to put to a shareholder vote at Tesla’s upcoming annual meeting in November.
— CNBC’s Lora Kolodny contributed to this report.
