SpaceX CEO Elon Musk may one day be in line for three outsized pay awards, valued at around $1.7tn. Unlike conventional pay packages tied to sober remuneration metrics, these awards would depend on market value and ambitious goals, such as establishing a permanent colony on Mars, placing data centres in orbit, launching fleets of robotaxis and selling more than one million humanoid robots.
Musk has also returned to the centre of US politics, pouring $442mn into backing the Republicans in the midterm elections and allegedly making life-and-death decisions about Starlink satellite services in Ukraine. This week, the world's richest man turned back to the corporate agenda, setting out plans for a potential union of SpaceX, which went public this summer, with his electric-car maker Tesla.
The deal would be the world's largest ever merger and would combine most of Musk's business interests into what amounts to a single publicly traded Musk Inc. Backers see it as the birth of a new 21st-century conglomerate built around artificial intelligence, with a leading position in space exploration and robotics. Investor Gene Munster of Deepwater Asset Management says it sets up high emotions for investors, adding that there has never been a company like it of any scale.
Critics see the merger differently. They view it as another example of Musk promising tech breakthroughs that often remain out of reach, and as part of opportunistic dealmaking in a stock market consumed by a bubble. Based on combined value of around $3.5tn, the deal would make SpaceX one of the five most valuable companies on the planet, even though its business is far smaller than other AI-focused tech groups. The union still requires backing from independent board committees, a majority of Tesla shareholders and approval from regulators around the world.
Source: Financial Times Companies · Summarized by HeadlinesBriefing