Tesla's directors made $3 billion via stock awards

Board independence at risk, say analysts

- RACHAEL LEVY

Tesla's board of directors has earned more than $3 billion through stock awards that far exceeded the value of those given to peers at the biggest US technology firms at the time they were paid, according to an analysis performed for Reuters by compensation and governance specialist Equilar.

The analysis found CEO Elon Musk's brother Kimbal has earned nearly $1 billion since 2004, based on the appreciated value of stock options held or liquidated. Director Ira Ehrenpreis has collected $869 million since 2007. Board chair Robyn Denholm has made $650 million since 2014. Directors reaped such windfalls even though they haven't awarded themselves new stock grants since 2020.

The board agreed to suspend director compensation starting in 2021 to settle a shareholder lawsuit alleging excessive board-member pay. Between 2018 and 2020, however, the average Tesla director received a total of about $12 million in cash-and-stock compensation. That was about eight times as much as the average director at Alphabet, the next highest-paid among the “Magnificent Seven” companies over the same period.

The value of those original awards skyrocketed along with Tesla’s share price in subsequent years. That’s also true of the other six firms in the Magnificent Seven — Nvidia, Alphabet, Meta, Apple, Microsoft and Amazon — which got that name because their soaring stocks have been a big driver of the long-running bull market.

But Tesla is the only company among that cohort where the size of directors’ original stock awards played such an outsized role in the vast wealth they've earned from these part-time jobs, the Equilar analysis shows. Tesla directors’ average compensation between 2018 and 2024 — including the four years of suspended pay — was still two-and-a-half times that of Meta directors, the next highest-paid over the seven-year period.