Tesla Shareholders to Vote on Pay Package that Could Make Elon Musk World’s First Trillionaire

Elon Musk Could Become First Trillionaire Under New Tesla Pay Package

Tesla’s board on Friday proposed a pay package that could make its chief executive, Elon Musk, the world’s first trillionaire as long as he meets a series of very ambitious corporate goals.

Mr. Musk, already the world’s richest person, would have to increase Tesla’s stock market value eightfold over the next decade to collect the full value of the package, according to a securities filing.

All the compensation would be in the form of Tesla shares. The package, which must be approved by the company’s shareholders, is expected to be put to a vote at an annual meeting on Nov. 6.

Statement on the Spring 2025 Regulatory Agenda

Today, the Office of Information and Regulatory Affairs released the Spring 2025 Unified Agenda of Regulatory and Deregulatory Actions.

This regulatory agenda reflects that it is a new day at the Securities and Exchange Commission. The items on the agenda represent the Commission’s renewed focus on supporting innovation, capital formation, market efficiency, and investor protection.

The agenda covers potential rule proposals related to the offer and sale of crypto assets to help clarify the regulatory framework for crypto assets and provide greater certainty to the market. A key priority of my Chairmanship is clear rules of the road for the issuance, custody, and trading of crypto assets while continuing to discourage bad actors from violating the law.

It also covers a number of envisioned deregulatory rule proposals to reduce compliance burdens and facilitate capital formation, including by simplifying pathways for raising capital and investor access to private businesses. It discusses amending existing rules to improve and modernize them as well as address disclosure burdens.

SEC’s Climate-Disclosure Rules Bit Dust, but California Blazing Trail With Similar Mandates

Large companies that do business in California must prepare to comply next year with first-of-their-kind laws requiring them to disclose greenhouse gas emissions and climate-related financial risks after a judge ruled that they can take effect, although future legal challenges could eventually reduce their scope, attorneys say.

“Right now, it looks like it is full force forward,” said Alison Torbitt, co-leader of Nixon Peabody’s environmental practice. […]

Under President Joe Biden, the Securities and Exchange Commission headed down a similar path, adopting rules requiring public companies to disclose climate-related risks, their climate strategies, board oversight and greenhouse gas emissions.

Court challenges prevented those rules from going into effect, however, and after President Donald Trump returned to the White House in January the SEC ended its defense of the rules and withdrew from the appeals.

California’s laws may be only the beginning. Several other states—including Colorado, Illinois and New York—are considering similar measures.

Not everything is securities fraud

There’s one other funny point in the opinion. Walmart disclosed that it was being investigated for opioid stuff, yes, but the plaintiffs argued that this disclosure was misleading, because it didn’t also disclose that it was guilty. The court didn’t buy this argument:

“Plaintiffs argue further that Walmart’s filings were misleading because they omitted Walmart was, in fact, violating the CSA and engaging in the conduct for which it was being investigated. But the Second Circuit, in an opinion we find persuasive, concluded — where a company disclosed to investors it was under investigation for facilitating tax evasion—the company did not also need to disclose that it was ‘engaged in an ongoing tax evasion scheme.’” […]

That is, if a company is doing crimes, and it discloses to investors “we are being investigated for doing crimes,” that is good enough. In some ways it would be better disclosure for the company to add “and also we are guilty of those crimes,” but it is not strictly required.

Crypto is Everything Everywhere All at Once

If this all sounds confusing, you are not alone. In just seven months, a series of coordinated policy actions by the SEC and CFTC—backed by the White House—has steadily eroded the traditional boundary between securities and derivatives regulation. If current trends hold, crypto assets in all their forms will soon be tradable on SEC- and CFTC-registered platforms. At that point, firms will no longer need to restructure their business models or worry about holding the “right” license to roll out new products. One license from either agency may be enough to do virtually anything.

This naturally raises the question: why maintain separate regulators for derivatives and securities at all? As I argued in a Wall Street Journal op-ed last December, now is the time to merge the two agencies. Paul Atkins has long advocated this view and recently confirmed his stance, remarking that a merger “makes a lot of sense.” But rather than work with Congress to advance a genuine merger, Chair Atkins—joined by Acting Chairman Pham—appears intent on engineering a de facto consolidation of the SEC and CFTC for the narrow purpose of facilitating crypto trading. This approach deprives the public and market participants of an open debate not only on the merits of combining the agencies, but also on whether the agencies’ regulatory reforms should apply beyond crypto. Established securities firms have already voiced concerns. Both SIFMA and Citadel submitted letters urging the SEC to reject broad exemptions or no-action relief that would allow tokenization platforms to bypass existing safeguards, insisting instead on a full public rulemaking process.