Tesla is rapidly becoming theBerkshire Hathaway of the tech sector. So does that make CEO Elon Musk the Warren Buffett of his generation?
Thursday was a big day for electric-vehicle maker. The company hosted its annual meeting in Austin, Texas, where Musk learned shareholders voted to award him some 425 million incentive-laden stock options worth roughly $1 trillion, if all performance incentives are met over the coming 10 years.
Musk expressed his gratitude to attendees of the upbeat affair, which has become a kind of pilgrimage for Tesla fans. The company’s annual meetings are starting to feel a little like the Berkshire Hathaway annual gatherings.
They might feel even more like a Berkshire meeting, which has been described as Woodstock for capitalists, in the future. “This is a nice venue, we love coming to the factory…but there are thousands of retail investors who are crying because they cannot [attend]…Please organize a bigger venue,” said Alexandra Merz, a Tesla shareholder and former credit officer at Moody’s, who founded L&F Investor Services.
“We’re bigger than Berkshire and we will do better than Berkshire,” she added.
Musk agreed with Merz. If he follows through, Tesla’s annual meeting might become a Woodstock for technologists. Musk could showcase SpaceX, xAI, Neuralink, The Boring Company, as well as Tesla, which makes cars, robots, batteries, and stationary power equipment, and computer chips, among other things.
Besides widely followed annual meetings, there is another similarity between Buffett and Musk. Neither takes much in the way of traditional annual compensation.
Buffett earns approximately $400,000 a year as Berkshire’s CEO. His wealth, estimated at approximately $150 billion, stems from his holdings of Berkshire stock. Musk doesn’t make a traditional salary at Tesla, and his wealth, measured at almost $500 billion, comes from his holdings of the EV maker and other stocks.
The average annual compensation for a CEO of an S&P 500 company is currently about $20 million, according to Bloomberg. While Buffett and Musk’s salaries don’t compare with those numbers, both men are doing just fine. And Musk’s 2018 pay award was valued at about $56 billion, or $8 billion a year, if investors amortize it over seven years. Those stock options are worth closer to $130 billion today.
There are differences between Buffett and Musk, too. Berkshire doesn’t award giant stock-based pay packages to Buffett.
Tesla stock wasn’t doing all that much early Friday. Shares were up 1.2% at $440.45, while S&P 500 and Dow Jones Industrial Average futures were down 0.3%.
A small move after the massive pay package might surprise investors, but there is a simple explanation. The package was always likely to pass. Tesla’s board and shareholders have repeatedly demonstrated their preference for this type of compensation for their preferred CEO.
With the pay award drama settled, the “focus shifts to AI,” wrote Wedbush analyst Dan Ives in a Thursday report. The vote cemented “Musk as a wartime CEO as the AI Revolution takes hold, giving us greater confidence in the Tesla story moving forward.”
Ives sees Tesla developing AI applications, such as self-driving cars, that will unlock a new era of earnings growth. He’s the company’s biggest bull on Wall Street, rating shares Buy, and with a Street-high $600 price target for the stock. The average analyst price target for Tesla shares is about $400, according to FactSet.