Elon Musk Is Holding Tesla To Ransom (Again)

And the reason why is terrifyingly pathetic.

Elon Musk — WikiCC

Elon Musk’s $1 trillion pay package is moronically stupid in every conceivable way. But Musk and his cronies know that. They know that anyone with even the tiniest drop of sanity would throw out this proposal. So what do they do? Well, because, like all billionaires, Musk lacks originality, he is holding Tesla to ransom exactly the same way he did with his denied $55 billion pay package. Will this work? That is the question everyone is asking as November 6th approaches, the day shareholders vote on this package. But that isn’t really the question we should be asking. Instead, we should ask why Musk wants this. So, let’s do that instead.

If you don’t know about this $1 trillion pay package and the ways in which it is idiotic, read my previous article here, as you will need the context for this article.

Firstly, how is Musk holding Tesla to ransom?

Well, Musk has threatened to step down as Tesla’s CEO if the pay package isn’t approved. Tesla’s board of directors has supported this statement and issued a warning to shareholders: vote to approve Musk’s $1 trillion pay package or risk losing him as CEO. Tesla’s board has also filed documents with the SEC stating that it is prepared to name a new CEO from within if shareholders reject Musk’s pay package and he steps down, proving there is bite behind this bark. In the lead-up to the vote, Robyn Denholm, the head of Tesla’s board, has engaged in a substantial lobbying campaign, repeatedly stating that Musk will likely leave if this package is rejected.

But is Musk leaving Tesla a bad thing?

Well, if you look at what Musk has done over the past five years, the answer is a resounding no.

What made Tesla so valuable? The Model S, X, 3, and Y cars; the charging network that enabled them; and Tesla’s potential to lead the self-driving car race. While Musk was a slick PR man who could successfully drive hype for these products, he actually had very little input into their design or development. We know this because the engineers who legitimately did the legwork have since fled to rival companies or started their own.

Nowadays, these products are nearly a decade old, and honestly, not much better than they were back then. So, why the stagnation? It is because, from about 2019 on, Musk took a far more proactive role in Tesla, micromanaging every little aspect to the ground. This ego-driven behaviour got so bad that Musk repeatedly overruled executives and engineers to woefully detrimental effects. As such, since 2019, the only things Tesla has delivered are broken promises, fever dreams, dangerous products, total flops, or cancellations.

For example, Musk overruled Tesla engineers to take their Full Self Driving (FSD) vision only, which has made it insanely dangerous and kept them miles behind in the self-driving race (read more here).

The 4680 cell, which was supposed to make Teslas thousands of dollars cheaper to build, has failed to materialise because Musk tried to use unproven proprietary dry-coating technology, which he bought, and then failed to effectively support the development team. Consequently, you can get better, cheaper batteries from elsewhere, and Tesla has no advantage in the battery market at all.

The New Tesla Roadster, which Musk spearheaded, has failed to materialise because what Musk originally promised was both impossible and completely irrational to build. A sports car with an insanely heavy 200 kWh battery? Colour me shocked that there are now better EV sports cars on the market.

The Tesla Semi, which Musk also spearheaded, has failed to make it into proper production because the battery is so heavy it can only carry an incredibly light load, and even then, it never met the efficiency target Musk promised. With both the new Roadster and Semi, these flaws were painfully obvious at the point of conception. Musk should have never greenlit them in the first place.

Musk was heavily involved in the development of the Cybertruck, turning it into the epitome of elite projection, and bet all of Tesla’s vehicle sales growth on its success. Well, thanks to its horrifically poor design, it is now a $10 billion hole in Tesla’s books, making it the largest sales flop in automotive history.

Musk ignored his executives’ calls to focus on developing affordable models and avoid abandoning the company’s core business to chase AI self-driving unicorns, leading to him cancelling the “Model 2” and dumping all of Tesla’s development dollars into a Robotaxi money pit that will never yield returns.

Not to mention Tesla’s Robotaxi rollout is an embarrassing mess, with the cars being caught driving wildly illegally multiple times during just the first few days of operations. Since then, there have been no visible signs of improvement, to the point where Tesla can’t get a licence to operate autonomous cars in cities that already have the likes of Waymo.

Under Musk, Tesla has engaged in some seriously shoddy business practices, leaving it and him incredibly vulnerable to legal recourse. Musk pushed Tesla to oversell the capabilities of FSD, consistently marketed it as a safe, fully autonomous system when it wasn’t, and hid any data that suggested otherwise. This led to Tesla and Musk being investigated for wire fraud for defrauding investors and customers by lying about their technology and even manslaughter, as there have been a sizeable number of deaths caused by people relying on FSD. Indeed, the only reason Musk isn’t facing jail time or Tesla isn’t facing fatal legal action is because Trump won in 2024, allowing Trump and Musk to use DOGE to squash these investigations.

Speaking of DOGE, Musk’s political moves have decimated Tesla’s sales, sparking a global boycott and widespread brand damage. Some estimates suggest Tesla lost a million sales this year as a result of Musk’s actions. In other words, Tesla sales this year are more than 60% below where they would be had Musk not engaged in politics (but he had to in order to avoid potentially facing jail from these federal investigations). Tesla had an annual production capacity of 2.35 million vehicles by the end of 2024 and was in the process of expanding that to just shy of three million by the end of 2025, but this drop in sales has meant they are only going to ship around 1.6 million vehicles by the end of the year. This means Tesla is only operating at about 68% production capacity, assuming they have abandoned production capacity expansion. This makes the manufacturing of each vehicle much more expensive, and means Tesla has lost a huge stack of cash abandoning its expansion plans. Realistically, operational profits are in the low single digits, and Tesla’s profits are in the gutter.

I haven’t even mentioned Hyperloop, the litany of class action lawsuits against Musk, the failure of the Dojo supercomputer, how the Optimus robot is so terrible even its lead engineer called it a dead end, or how Musk enabled the tariffs that are currently squeezing Tesla to death.

Musk should have been ousted as CEO a long time ago. He has failed repeatedly, made irrational decisions, ignored internal experts to great damage, and ruined the brand.

So, is threatening to step down as CEO a threat at all?

It wouldn’t be if Tesla’s value were remotely realistic.

Even major Tesla bulls recognise this element. Gary Black, a hedge fund manager who heavily backs Tesla, publicly stated that if Musk stepped down, Tesla’s stock could fall by 20% to 25%. His leadership track record does not back this valuation at all, but this has nothing to do with performance — it’s about the cult of Musk. There is an army of brainwashed investors who are in too deep to think rationally about Musk and so are happy to slurp up his obviously false propaganda. That is what makes Musk so valuable to Tesla. It isn’t what he brings as a leader but the hype and cult of investors.

As a result, I think Black is way off the mark. If you value Tesla as a carmaker and not an Elon Musk AI outfit, its value plummets by around 90%!

That is the threat here. Musk is holding shareholders’ investment in him hostage and saying, “Give me the money, the crown and the throne, or I will destroy your investment.”

They aren’t hiding it either. Robyn Denholm, Tesla’s board chair, recently stated, “Without Elon, Tesla could lose significant value, as our company may no longer be valued for what we aim to become: a transformative force reimagining the fundamental building blocks of mobility, energy, and labor, with products such as FSD and Optimus.” In other words, without Elon, the demonstrably false brainwashing propaganda won’t work, and Tesla will lose all its value.

Musk, Denholm, and the rest of the board literally have Tesla shareholders by the balls.

And they know it will work. Why wouldn’t they? They have managed it before, getting shareholders to vote in favour of Musk’s $55 billion pay packet in spite of a court finding it illegal (read more here).

As a side note, that $55 billion pay package was thrown out by a court because it found that Musk’s manipulation and lobbying of shareholders, as well as his control of the board during negotiations, were so inappropriate as to void the contract. Since then, Musk has moved Tesla to Texas, where there aren’t sufficient laws against this kind of horrifically dodgy business practice. But we can all see that Musk is doing the exact same thing again here, can’t we?

Okay, so why would Musk go to these lengths?

Well, for one, petty revenge and greed.

This “$1 trillion pay package” isn’t actually a $1 trillion pay package. That figure relies on Musk increasing Tesla’s value to levels totally unprecedented, which simply won’t happen. Furthermore, all the “targets” Musk is expected to reach are worded in a way to make it easy for him to achieve them, or achieve them by manipulation, rather than actual growth. In reality, this is a contract to give Musk just over $100 billion (read more here). That $1 trillion figure is merely a PR stunt, because of course it is — it’s Musk we are talking about here.

In other words, it gives him back his $55 billion pay packet, which was agreed upon a decade ago, and then gives him the same again for the next decade’s worth of work.

Musk is already the wealthiest man alive. He doesn’t need this amount of extra income, especially when he doesn’t engage in any meaningful philanthropy.

But there is more to the story than just blatant greed. No, this demand for $1 trillion worth of Tesla shares demonstrates something far more terrifyingly pathetic about Musk — just how fascist and authoritarian he really is.

Musk has justified wanting this enormous amount of shares and voting control by saying, “My fundamental concern with regard to how much voting control I have at Tesla is, if I go ahead and build this enormous robot army, can I just be ousted at some point in the future?” “If we build this robot army, do I have at least a strong influence over this robot army? Not control, but a strong influence… I don’t feel comfortable building that robot army unless I have a strong influence.”

Did you catch that? Musk expects to retain a level of control of Optimus robots once they are sold. That should raise every red flag you can possibly think of. Musk wants to sell a million of these bots by 2035, not just to businesses but also to households. Why does he want to “strongly influence” them and not allow the owners to retain full control? Is it because he wants to use them as leverage to force people and businesses to align themselves with his heinous political ideology? I hope I don’t have to spell out just how scary things could become if Musk did sell this many robots and had even the slightest bit of control over them.

And there is another even larger red flag here.

As much as I trash Tesla investors, the company is incredibly democratic, with 44% of shares owned by the public and 15.42% owned by insiders, including Musk’s 15.32% stake. Institutional investors make up less than 26% of shares (including ETFs), meaning Musk and the public make up the majority vote. Compare this to a company like GM, where only 7% of shares are publicly owned.

In other words, if Musk gets ousted and a new CEO comes in, Tesla will become far more democratic, as Musk will lose control of the board, meaning the board will need to listen to its shareholders more, of which the vast majority are publicly owned.

Essentially, Musk is terrified of democracy.

For one, if Tesla operated more democratically, Musk would likely have been ousted years ago, and he almost certainly knows that, which is why he is so concerned.

But this also highlights why he sided with Trump. Musk is terrified of democracy. He can only accept a world where he has total authoritarian control and is able to squash the will of the people. But the fact that he wants to wield that control against the people — as we have seen with Starlink and will likely see with Optimus — takes this authoritarian streak and gives it a fascist flavour.

I do not use the “F” word lightly or hyperbolically here. This is the structural thinking of a fascist leader played out in a corporate world. It is a serious warning sign about Musk’s mentality and the direction he intends to take things.

But you can also see how pathetic Musk is being here, right? He would rather resort to open blackmail and ransom and demand an amount of wealth that makes him look like a demoted, greedy narcissist than face even the tiniest amount of public accountability?

The truth is, all fascists are like this. Pathetic little people. The scene from “A Bug’s Life” where it says, “You let one ant stand up to us, then they all might stand up!” is oddly wrong. It isn’t a giant, powerful, vicious creature demanding this oppression. It’s the weedy, pathetic people who lash out to avoid taking responsibility or going to therapy. Musk proves that beautifully.

To conclude, Musk is holding a trillion-dollar company to ransom because he is afraid of democracy. He is afraid of you and how you could hold him accountable, so he is desperately clawing for control and attempting to use that control against you so you never do something as violating as enforcing his responsibility. Fortunately, I’m British, so I’m allowed to say this. What an insufficient cunt.

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Sources: FT, The Verge, SEC, Wired, Will Lockett, Will Lockett, Will Lockett, Guru Focus, Tip Ranks, Market Beat, Will Lockett, Inside EVs, Bazinga