Musk exercised his rights and received 780 billion yuan in book profits, earning "a Bill Gates"

The world's richest man, Elon Musk, has officially honored his much-anticipated 2018 compensation package, raising his voting rights in Tesla to nearly 20%! According to Tesla’s latest filing with the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC), Musk exercised all approximately 304 million stock options granted under the 2018 compensation package on June 16. This means that the incentive plan, which has gone through years of legal controversy and is known as the “largest compensation package in history,” has officially entered the redemption stage.

Documents show that Musk’s exercise price is $23.34 per share. Based on Tesla’s closing price of $404.66 on June 16, the above-mentioned stocks have a market value of approximately $123 billion. After deducting exercise costs of approximately US$7.09 billion (the transaction adopted "net settlement", Tesla withheld approximately 1,753 shares to pay the exercise costs), its book income was approximately US$116 billion (approximately RMB 784 billion).

According to the Bloomberg Billionaires List, Microsoft co-founder Bill Gates is currently worth about $102 billion. In other words, one exercise by Musk is equivalent to earning "a Bill Gates."

However, it should be pointed out that this does not mean that Musk immediately received $116 billion in cash.

After deducting exercise costs, Musk received a net of 286 million restricted shares. The shares come with full voting rights but cannot be sold or transferred until January 19, 2028, so they currently constitute paper wealth rather than discretionary cash proceeds.

From a wealth perspective, the value of these shares has exceeded the market capitalization of many large public companies. But for Wall Street, the most important significance of this transaction is not how much wealth Musk has added, but that he has further consolidated his control over Tesla.

In recent years, Musk has publicly stated on many occasions that he hopes to own more than 25% of Tesla's voting rights to ensure that he can long-term dominate the development direction of key businesses such as artificial intelligence, autonomous driving, and humanoid robots. He once warned that if his influence is insufficient, some artificial intelligence businesses may not be developed within the Tesla system in the future.

According to calculations by the Wall Street Journal, after completing this exercise, Musk’s voting rights in Tesla have increased to 19.9%. This also means that as Tesla gradually transforms into an artificial intelligence and robotics company, Musk's ability to control the company's future strategy has further increased.

In fact, the story of this huge paycheck began eight years ago.

In 2018, Tesla's board of directors approved this unprecedented long-term incentive plan. According to the plan design, Musk will give up traditional cash compensation and bonuses, and can only receive stock option awards in stages after Tesla reaches a series of market value, revenue and profitability targets. One of the highest goals set in the plan is to make Tesla's market value reach US$650 billion. When the plan was approved in 2018, Tesla's market value was less than US$60 billion. At the time, many investors thought the goal was nearly impossible to achieve.

In the following years, with the rapid expansion of the electric vehicle market and the capital market's pursuit of Tesla, the company's market value once exceeded US$1 trillion. As a result, Musk achieved all performance goals and received a total of approximately 304 million stock options.

However, this incident caused dissatisfaction among some shareholders. In 2024, the U.S. Court of Chancery of Delaware ruled that the plan had issues such as insufficient board independence and insufficient information disclosure, and declared the remuneration plan invalid.

Tesla subsequently appealed and once again received shareholder support at the shareholder meeting. At the end of 2025, the Delaware Supreme Court overturned the previous ruling and restored the legal effect of the 2018 compensation plan, clearing the way for this official exercise.

In April this year, Tesla signed an implementation agreement with Musk and submitted relevant registration documents to the SEC to prepare for the final implementation of the compensation plan. Two months later, all options were officially exercised.

The transaction occurred at a time when Musk's business empire was rapidly expanding. Not long ago, its American Space Exploration Technology Company (SpaceX) completed a historic IPO, making Musk "the world's first trillionaire" in one fell swoop.