How Elon Musk’s massive pay package stacks up against other CEOs

Furthermore, it’s more than any CEO has ever made in a single pay package — both in terms of the sheer amount of money and the amount of control it would give Musk, whose stake in the company would jump from 13% to more than 20%. (The package, announced in 2018, was also rare in terms of its riskiness: The targets Tesla had to hit were deemed moonshots at the time, and if he didn’t reach them, he’d make nothing.)

“There is certainly no comparable in level of pay,” Jason Schloetzer, a professor at Georgetown University’s McDonough School of Business, told Business Insider. “Even if you divide it by 10, it’s still a ginormous amount of money.”

If shareholders vote in favor of the package, that doesn’t mean Musk will automatically get that ginormous amount of money; the Delaware judge who originally decided the case or the state’s Supreme Court, which would hear any appeal of the case, will make the final decision. And if the pay package does eventually get approved, it’s hard to know exactly how much it will be worth when Musk, who is worth $198 billion, per Bloomberg, actually exercises the options. (Because of the lawsuit, which was filed in 2018, he hasn’t pocketed any of them yet.)

Musk’s pay package was worth $2.3 billion when it was granted to him in 2018, though its value has sky-rocketed as the stock ballooned and the various tranches of options vested. (Its value has actually fallen this year, though, in tandem with Tesla’s share price, from about $56 billion when the January judgment was made.)

That said, no matter how you slice it, it’s an eye-popping amount.

“When you start seeing someone making a couple hundred million — $250 million, $220 million — it seems that’s when questions and media coverage starts to happen,” Schloetzer said. “Any way of looking at it, it’s an astronomical sum.”

To put Musk’s pay package into perspective, we compared it to those of other CEOs. These compensation packages typically include cash and stock options, as well as the value of any perks.

Here’s a look at who has come close to approaching Musk in terms of annual compensation, in order of the size of the pay package at the date granted, according to data provided by Equilar, an executive compensation research firm, which has been tracking CEO pay packages since 2007.