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[Rob Maurer @robmaurer]

I have voted FOR the ratification of Elon Musk’s compensation plan. I just reviewed my thoughts from Tesla Daily in January '18 when it was announced:

“To sum it up, I think for existing shareholders this proposal is extremely beneficial, extremely friendly to stockholders.”

Buying In:
“I think instances like this where Musk is able to fully buy into the company and fully predicate his returns on this amazing growth for Tesla — where if that doesn’t happen he gets literally nothing — just goes to show how invested he is.”

Message For Short Sellers:
"When shorts kind of question [Musk's long-term vision], or say that he’s just hyping up the stock for some temporary gains or things like that, stuff like this just immediately proves those sort of arguments to be complete false.”

Amazing Growth
“I believe that if the $650B market cap were to be achieved, for example by 2023, that Elon should definitely be rewarded for that kind of amazing growth. I mean, that would be the market cap increasing by 11x in less than what, six years? Which would be crazy, and certainly worthy of the payment that Elon would receive.”

Market Didn't Believe It:
“I remain extremely positive on this plan, I was actually surprised the stock was not up further yesterday on this news.”

Plan Helped Tesla Recruit Talent:
“I think maybe an under-appreciated aspect of Tesla is their ability to use equity to attract talent. So when prospective talent is kind of weighing their options and deciding potentially between Tesla and another competitor, the opportunity that exists within Tesla's equity is probably much greater than an alternative.

The fact that Musk's compensation plan is tied to these aggressive market cap goals is a strong signal for anyone looking at [equity compensation] and trying to evaluate what their compensation could eventually equate to when including that equity.

That should be a pretty big advantage, certainly against companies like Ford and GM, but even against companies like Google and Facebook, where there's maybe less upside in terms of the market cap and therefore possibly less upside in the equity stake that an employee might expect to earn.

The fact that the CEO's compensation plan directly spells out a path to 11x in terms of the market cap is pretty significant when evaluating those options, I think. For a company like Facebook or Google to grow to that level, they would have to be $6-8 trillion in market cap, and there is no single company right now that's even above $1 trillion, so to expect that kind of growth from those other companies would be pretty unrealistic.

I also think that this provides a similar benefit to investors in terms of spelling out that clear path and those clear growth targets, because part of the bear narrative of Tesla is that it's overpriced and that even if Tesla achieves their wildest dreams, that the market cap should still only be like $60 billion or something, which in my opinion is a pretty ridiculous argument, but with this compensation clearly spelled out like this, it shows that Tesla themselves believe that the market cap is not overpriced and that it does still have tremendous growth potential at these levels. I think that will encourage more people to invest, and I also believe that it will encourage stability as Tesla continues to grow, hopefully to those levels of market cap.”

Back To Today
I have always believed this plan was excellent for shareholders. I was right — the shares I owned when recording these thoughts are up 800% compared to the S&P 500 up 80%. This compensation plan was fundamental to that outperformance in many ways, from securing Musk's leadership, to talent acquisition / retention, to investor confidence, and more. If Tesla would have underperformed, @elonmusk would have received nothing.

What Tesla has accomplished is unparalleled. For anyone to look back in hindsight and diminish how extremely difficult these milestones were to achieve is outrageous. I think the primary reason some shareholders are questioning this vote is due to the share price performance over the last couple years, and I believe that is extremely short-sighted, on top of being irrelevant to this issue.

I held shares from 2013 that were in the red in 2019, six years later. People were also frustrated then, but it would have been wrong to use that as justification to retract Elon's (very similarly structured) 2012 compensation plan. Fortunately, I let my analysis and my ethics determine my actions, rather than being influenced by market sentiment, and it paid off.

I hope other shareholders won't be prisoners of the moment in 2024.