Most executives who presided over sinking sales and profit and a new product that tanked would be looking for a new job. Elon Musk, the chief executive of Tesla, could instead receive the largest compensation package in corporate history.
On Friday, the chair of Tesla’s board of directors defended the trillion-dollar compensation plan for Mr. Musk that the carmaker unveiled in a regulatory filing last week. In an hourlong interview with The New York Times, the chair, Robyn Denholm, said Mr. Musk was capable of delivering world-changing technology if driven by seemingly impossible goals.
“Putting together any compensation plan, you need to look at what motivates the individual that you’re trying to motivate,” Ms. Denholm said at Tesla’s engineering headquarters in Palo Alto, Calif. “And for Elon, it’s doing things that no one else has done before.”
Ms. Denholm, who has given few interviews in her 11 years on the Tesla board, has become the main spokeswoman for a campaign to convince the company’s investors that Mr. Musk should be given shares that would be worth almost $1 trillion if he achieved a series of moonshot objectives. Shareholders will vote on the package at an annual meeting in November.
In effect, Tesla’s board is arguing that Mr. Musk is a unique human being who responds only to otherworldly challenges matched by otherworldly compensation. In the filing, the board said benchmarking Mr. Musk’s pay package against the compensation of other executives, as is customary, would be irrelevant.
Ms. Denholm, occasionally appearing ill at ease, referred to Mr. Musk’s “unique characteristics, including his track record of being able to deliver against wildly ambitious plans.”
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