Musk’s Payout Cries Out: Limit The Rewards of Wealth!
Tesla is actually FAILING harder than the rest of the EV marketing is SUCCEEDING
Elon Musk was awarded a $46-billion pay package by Tesla shareholders.
The pay-out is a disgrace to our society: no one person should have been allowed to obtain that kind of wealth. Taxation should have drawn a ‘wealth line’ at a much lower level – say, one billion dollars. Anyone can get by with that. The ‘freedom’ of billionaires to earn whatever they want will not be limited anywhere near as badly as the freedom of the lower 99% of society to enhance the social platforms that have kept everyone back. Total freedom soars.
At the same time as Musk’s pay-out, Tesla laid off 14,000 employees. $46-billion could have kept all those people employed for 9,001 years, but this is about Musk’s freedom, isn’t it?
His pay package is 250 times larger than the median peer CEO's pay plan. It opens the ambitions of all other CEOs to this ludicrous jump in pay. They all belong to the “Business Roundtable” that is lobbying to enshrine Trump’s business tax cuts that have cost the US $1.3 trillion – and are the main reason why the federal deficit is so high…not spending on social programs; profits for CEOs.
In proportion, his net work of $210-billion is larger than the net worth of the GDP of 57 countries, or 30% of the world’s nations. These include Bharain and Kuwait – countries founded on oil wealth that the new EVs are putting in a perilous position. It must make Musk smile.
Certainly, the huge concentration of wealth by some investors gives them all the right to smile.
It’s equivalent to every single household in America being forced to send the world’s richest man a check for $350 at a time when most can barely pay their bills.
This is no longer “capitalism”. This is “silicon serfdom”. When the trade unions ceased to be an effective counterweight, capitalism ran amok and allowed a small portion of people to amass larger fortunes. It is no longer adequately regulated by the government, as will become plain when a new Supreme Court is concluded; the wealthy few are arguing for the elimination of the Labor Relations Board. Why have unions at all?
We have put no reins on the super-wealthy, and now they have the resources to overwhelm the state.
Even before Musk’s current wealth balloon, CEOs were getting paid at 1500 times the rate of their employees. This skyrocketing gain comes because of their power to set pay. and because so much of their pay (more than 80%) is stock-related. They are not getting higher pay because they are becoming more productive or more skilled than other workers. They are getting higher pay because they are manipulating stock prices in their own interests.
This is not adding value to the United States.
Nor is a situation where one capitalist has been allowed to accumulate enough wealth to own a rocket company, a global satellite communications business, an EV transportation system and a social media company.
One journal noted that “Musk’s payout is larger than what is estimated it would cost to eliminate homelessness ($20 billion) and hunger ($25 billion) in the US. It is equivalent to what is made, before taxes, by 1.2 million workers who earn the median income in the US ($37,500) in an entire year.”
If Musk’s net worth was distributed evenly among all 328 million citizens in the US, each person would receive roughly $600 – the same amount the US government handed out as a stimulus check during the pandemic.
The median chief executive pay at S&P 500 companies has risen by 12 per cent, compared with a 4.1 per cent year-on-year increase in US wage growth.
While tens of billions are being handed over to Musk, workers need to have multiple jobs to pay their bills while government is cutting funding for social programs and infrastructure. Seven million people endure homeless every year.
Let us keep in mind that he did not "innovate" anything; he added no new value. Tesla was already in existence, the cars already had been invented. He simply bought the company, just as he simply bought the other companies. He promoted them and took advantage of government incentives.
While some people think that these large-company CEOs pay high taxes, in proportion Netflix, Tesla, Ford, and T-Mobile all paid their executives more than what the companies paid in federal income taxes from 2018-2022.
Regarding his pay packet, Musk just got most of it for pimping the sale of Telsa stock. Stock price is what Musk is being compensated for, not company performance.
Company performance, in fact, is dreadful. Tesla is doing so poorly it is cratering the entire EV sales picture.
EV sales overall are not slumping, nor are people starting to avoid EVs. Tesla is failing so badly that it is taking the rest of the EV market down with it. It is failing harder than the rest of the market is succeeding.
Which brings us to the interesting question: when the Tesla Board tied Musk’s pay package to shares, did they not have a dynamic element in their calculations? Say, share price considered on an ongoing basis.
Right now Musk is being paid according to a snap-shot of the current stock price.
Tomorrow it might fall. Many are expecting that to happen, considering that you can see the parking lots full of unsold Teslas from space.
A longer range pay scale might have us asking: if Musk gains $46-billion when the share price is high, should he not have to pay that back to the company when the share price drops?
Move from a snap-shot to a video. The future moves on…and down.
Musk has more money than the Ukraine.
His money could keep that besieged nation free in its fight against one of the most deadly dictatorships in the world. A fight, we remember, where Musk originally supported Putin. Dictators Club Rules, I suppose.
The US just went through conniption fits, for example, over a budget item of $100-billion in aid to Ukraine. Musk just got 50% of that amount in a pay package. He is obtaining revenue on a scale equivalent to the budgets of nations - nations with tens of millions of people.
Surely this brings us to the question: are we insane to countenance an economic system that would let one person accumulate that much money?
What are billionaires good for, anyway?
“Good” is a concept that has a hard time fitting onto the frame of some people.
Musk has been accused of massive insider trading, where he allegedly sold $7.5 billion worth of Tesla shares in late 2022 while knowing that the EV maker wouldn't be able t meet expectations by the end of the year.
Shareholder Michael Perry filed a lawsuit complaining: "By disposing of $7,530,113,926 worth of Tesla stock in November and December 2022 while he was in possession of adverse, material non-public information, E. Musk exploited his position at Tesla, and he breached his fiduciary duties to Tesla."
He is already under scrutiny for unloading $22.9 billion in stock in 2022 alone to help him fund his purchase of X/Twitter, which under his leadership has been involved in a steady slide.
Musk is very much a rich-man’s-club conservative in his values. He has pushed X/Twitter to the right, so much so that he is a threat to Fox News. He has become buddy-buddy with Trump, who is on speed dial on Musk’s phone. The rumours say the two men have discussed a possible advisory role for Musk if Trump is elected president again; the title of “Economy and Border Patrol Advisor” has been kicked around. Musk denies that he is interested.
Musk has an anti-trans bigotry that is puzzling considering that one of his daughters is transgender — though she, notably, wants nothing to do with him.
He urges gays to have children “for the continuance of civilization”. Perhaps he had a reproductive role in mind akin to his own actions against female employees: alleged harassment, wildly inappropriate relationships, and sexist exploitation.
This has surfaced recently in a report from the Wall St. Journal, which focuses on Musk’s “boundary-blurring relationships with women at SpaceX.”
The WSJ describes one particularly uncomfortable case when, Musk—who had twins with employee Shivon Zillis back in 2021, which he didn’t discuss with his then-partner Grimes—allegedly repeatedly asked one female employee to have children with him in 2013. Per the Journal, this woman “alleged that Musk had asked her on multiple occasions to have his babies, according to people familiar with the allegations.” She declined but remained at SpaceX, and her working relationship with Musk obviously “deteriorated.” People familiar with the woman’s experience told the outlet that Musk went on to “[deny] the woman a raise” and “[complain] about her performance,” prompting her to exit the company soon thereafter.
This was not one-off behavior, but a pattern to get employees to have children with him. One commentator noted: “A few years later, apparently not done trying to sleep with or impregnate every female employee within arm’s reach, Musk allegedly embarked on a sexual relationship with a much younger former intern while trying to recruit her. In 2017, the young woman was fresh out of college and over 20 years Musk’s junior.
Musk is just one – albeit a high-profile one – of the representatives of a top 0.1% of wealthy people. The consequences of having a class of very, very wealthy people in a democracy have been laid out before this; just to encapsulate, they include the hollowing out of social solidarity; the shaping of every important institution – including universities, museums, hospitals, parks, football teams, the media, and recreation; the undermining of democracy through purchased votes; and the souring of our youth on the society we love.
I will leave the last comment in the hands of the future – the readers of Teen Vogue - who were treated to an editorial that summed it up well:
“In a fair society, there would be no billionaires. Bernie Sanders says they shouldn’t exist and Elizabeth Warren sells mugs of their tears…When a single billionaire can accumulate more money in 10 seconds than their employees make in one year, while workers struggle to meet the basic cost of rent and medicine, then yes, every billionaire really is a policy failure…The ultra-rich can be seen as beneficiaries of an unjust economic system where billionaires don’t make money, they take money.
“It’s been argued that Universal Basic Income, Guaranteed Minimum Income, and Universal Basic Services could aid prosperity in a world grappling with growing populations, societal aging, and climate breakdown. Piecemeal proposals are not enough to remedy a crisis of poverty in the midst of plenty. And a fair world would not further the acceleration of either.”
There you have it, from the coming generation.
Musk would not like it, so I suggest that it passes a good test.
Any way we do it, we should have a society where people have an equal chance to do well…but not devastatingly well. Cap wealth at a billion; take the rest. They will not suffer. And our economy would bloom!
It would be much less incredible than having a system where one person can acquire wealth equal to or more than the income of a third of the world’s countries…
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Just finishing reading “Evil Geniuses”
https://www.amazon.com/Evil-Geniuses-Unmaking-America-History/dp/B086H5LVQL/ref=mp_s_a_1_1?crid=2O17A6A1WSAS2&dib=eyJ2IjoiMSJ9.wfnWP9jVxsFRXhWaicb0jiGCQWJaHfgprvo-jn6QJGCcr7iRfK7vOi8le_vVn5JmlmMo91NrnJCQSJUMBK7UhOTlvRf2-Bdo2li4NA3zjVnYWlag4r7Wk4vZ5yjUKtpQzAF_akhTLwNc7r1FxD4df3jD84Z20UejJVBqlFp8cg3aPlFRrWrJz1tGOQYEs8D_q-1gtrCJjM6u428EstkLMg.kDMh4tZ3F4sFls2CDGfhngvsPy79UL3fdg_joWednZc&dib_tag=se&keywords=evil+geniuses&qid=1718801310&sprefix=evil+gen%2Caps%2C210&sr=8-1
“When did America give up on fairness? The author of Fantasyland tells the epic history of how America decided that big business gets whatever it wants, only the rich get richer, and nothing should ever change - and charts a way back to the future.”
Musk is just the most flagrant example. Our capitalist system has lost its way.