Matt Levine’s Money Stuff: Tesla Gives Musk Some Stock

Aug. 4, 2025, 6:16 PM UTC

Tesla

In 2018, Tesla Inc. gave Elon Musk, its chief executive officer and Technoking, a big package of stock options to motivate him to transform Tesla from about a $59 billion company into a trillion-dollar company. This worked. Tesla’s equity market capitalization peaked at about $1.5 trillion last year; it’s hovering around $1 trillion today. Musk’s “moonshot” package of stock options is worth, at today’s prices, about $87 billion. That is both a lot of money and kind of a bargain; it does seem unlikely that a different CEO would have added a trillion dollars of value to Tesla.

And then last ...

Learn more about Bloomberg Law or Log In to keep reading:

See Breaking News in Context

Bloomberg Law provides trusted coverage of current events enhanced with legal analysis.

Already a subscriber?

Log in to keep reading or access research tools and resources.