Last week, Tesla shareholders approved an enormous $1 trillion pay package for its controversial CEO Elon Musk.
While that may sound like an Earth-shattering amount of cash, the compensation plan will only be paid out if the EV maker achieves some extremely ambitious company goals — like delivering 20 million Tesla vehicles and one million robots over the next ten years.
That’s not to mention boosting the company’s $1.4 trillion market value to an astronomical $8.5 trillion.
And given the firm’s current state, with sales continuing to plummet and Tesla posting its fourth consecutive quarterly decline last month, that’s going to be an even steeper uphill battle than at face value.
It sounds like nerves inside the company are shaky as well. As Business Insider reports, Tesla’s AI chief Ashok Elluswamy beat the war drum during an all-hands meeting last month, warning the company’s AI teams that 2026 will be the “hardest year” of their lives, a dressing down that was reportedly meant to be a “rallying cry.”
AI division leaders set extremely aggressive timelines for the company’s humanoid robot, Optimus, which is reportedly already lagging far behind Musk’s lofty production goals this year.
The company’s former Optimus lead, Milan Kovac, left the company in June. Elluswamy assumed a leadership role on the project earlier this year, per BI.
The other half of Musk’s reimagined vision for Tesla is the firm’s robotaxi, whose rollout has also been mired in chaos. Glaring issues plaguing the autonomous driving software have resulted in several accidents already. A truly self-driving car that requires no intervention from the driver still appears to be years away, despite Musk’s frequent promises.
Put simply, it’s no surprise that Elluswamy is warning of tough times ahead, with workers expected to deliver on some enormously ambitious goals, once again highlighting the company’s already brutal working conditions and Musk’s infamously extreme and often cruel work ethic.
As critics accuse Tesla of abandoning private car sales — its bread and butter since its inception — Musk is doubling down on robots and AI instead.
During last month’s earnings call, Musk admitted that getting to an “annualized rate of one million” Optimus robots may “take a while” since production will “move as fast as the slowest, dumbest, least lucky thing out of 10,000 unique items.”
Nonetheless, Musk has claimed that Optimus “could become the largest product in history.” Per the mercurial entrepreneur, about 80 percent of the automaker’s value will come from the robot.
Musk also predicted that Tesla is planning to roll out robotaxis in “approximately eight to ten major metropolitan areas” by the end of this year, a moonshot, according to skeptics.
In short, it’s no wonder Tesla executives are warning that 2026 may prove incredibly challenging as the pressure now falls on those responsible for actually delivering on all these extremely ambitious timelines.
Whether Tesla will succeed remains to be seen. For now, investors are seemingly convinced of Musk’s reimagining of the carmaker, propping up a “sky-high” valuation despite plunging revenues.
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