The richest man on the planet, Elon Musk, may soon receive a pay package of almost a trillion dollars – from his own company! What a wonderful Christmas gift.
This package – which is conditional on whether the company’s market value reaches $8.4 trillion – was agreed and celebrated with fanfare at the recent Tesla shareholder meeting, with over 75 percent of shareholders voting to lavish their leader in untold riches.
It is crucial to keep Musk at whatever cost, argued Musk’s frenzied sycophants. His mere existence, his single genius… that is something the company would not be able to afford to lose!
Elon Musk puts on a dance performance alongside robots after $TSLA shareholders voted to approve his $1,000,000,000,000 pay package:
“What we’re about to embark upon is not what we’re about to embark upon is not merely a new chapter of the future of Tesla, but a whole new book.” pic.twitter.com/UIB2uzJWzd
— Yahoo Finance (@YahooFinance) November 6, 2025
But it is neither Musk, nor the Tesla board, nor shareholders who produce the billions which line their pockets.
For that, they can thank Tesla’s 110,000 employees, as well as the hundreds of thousands of other workers toiling away in sweatshop conditions, and the child-slaves mining coltan for Tesla batteries in wartorn central Africa.
None of them will be gifted a trillion dollars this Christmas, that’s for sure. In fact, the average US worker would have to work for 16.2 million years to make that much!
Meanwhile, conditions at Tesla factories are hellish, with ambulances having to collect passed-out workers from factory floors, and many workers becoming permanently disabled through unsafe working conditions.
Workers have described the culture as one of “long hours under intense pressure, sometimes through pain and injury, in order to fulfill the CEO’s ambitious production goals.”
Every drop of value is being squeezed out of Tesla employees to fund Musk’s gargantuan payout – shared of course with the cheering shareholders.
Meanwhile Tesla customers pay extortionate prices for electric vehicles which have an annoying tendency to randomly catch fire, explode, or kill nearby pedestrians.
Extreme contradictions
Tesla workers are pioneering some of the most advanced technologies of our century, from self-driving cars, to the Optimus robot which intends to carry out “unsafe, repetitive or boring tasks.”
This technology potentially has the ability to transform society: to free women from domestic servitude, prevent deaths from car crashes and workplace accidents, and to replace the drudgery of unskilled manual labour with automation, freeing up our time for meaningful leisure and work.
But under capitalism, this technology will in fact destroy millions of jobs, livelihoods, and communities – whilst a tiny minority become eye-wateringly rich.
This is already reflected in what social relations look like today in the USA. The poorest half of the population owns only 2.5 percent of the wealth, while the top 10 percent owns over two thirds of wealth – what an American dream!
Karl Marx foresaw all this over 150 years ago, when he wrote that the “accumulation of wealth at one pole is, therefore, at the same time accumulation of misery, the torment of labour, slavery, ignorance, brutalization and moral degradation at the opposite pole”.
The excesses of capitalism aren’t the product of greedy CEOs abusing the system. The logic of capitalism itself breeds megalomaniac parasites like Elon Musk.
This system is entirely irrational. None of Musk’s money is going to be used to improve people’s lives, through investment in education, public transport, or healthcare. A trillion dollars could end all world hunger three times over, according to Oxfam.
295 million people around the world are now experiencing acute hunger – twice as many as in 2020. This is the sixth consecutive year it’s increased.
The 2025 Global Report on Food Crises (GRFC), led by the Food Security Information Network (FSIN) was released today.
“This… pic.twitter.com/UZNhsuKSHG
— Oxfam Ireland (@OxfamIreland) May 16, 2025
Instead the majority of this trillion will be thrown into an orgy of gambling and speculation, enlarging Musk’s already enormous ego.
Or perhaps it will be squandered on hare-brained schemes to send rich people into space (we aren’t necessarily opposed to that last one, provided it’s a one-way ticket…)
Seize their wealth!
Is Musk’s wealth and power untouchable? Absolutely not. The working class produces all the wealth in society – it has the power to seize this wealth too.
Musk can threaten to leave Tesla if he doesn’t receive his outrageous trillion-dollar payout, but that would mean very little for the company’s day-to-day work.
On the other hand, where would Musk be if his workers didn’t show up to work? What would happen to his trillion-dollar package if the workers got to decide what to do with it? It wouldn’t end up in his hands – that’s for certain!
A democratically planned economy would lay the basis for real, socially-useful technological advancement, and a world free from self-serving parasites at the top.
