Will Musk Get His $1 Trillion Payday? All Eyes on Tesla's Shareholder Meeting

Recently, Tesla’s share price has recovered the declines since April. The market broadly believes this shareholders’ meeting could set Tesla’s strategic direction for the next decade and determine the ceiling of its market capitalization.

In terms of performance over the past five years, November has been Tesla’s second-strongest month, with an average monthly return of 11.47% and a 75% probability of the stock rising.

What are the key points to watch at this shareholders’ meeting? How is the market viewing it?

Tesla has proposed a compensation package for Musk potentially worth about $1 trillion, the largest executive pay package in U.S. corporate history.

The plan’s targets include: delivering 20 million vehicles; putting 1 million autonomous robotaxis into commercial operation; achieving 10 million active FSD subscriptions; delivering 1 million robots; and increasing the company’s market capitalization from about $1 trillion to at least $8.5 trillion. The plan spans 10 years.

Debate around Musk’s compensation package centers on its sheer size: if Musk meets all performance targets, he would receive up to $1 trillion in compensation. This massive payout would only vest if he creates eight times the company’s current market value. Musk has repeatedly emphasized that what he truly cares about is voting control and overall strategic influence—especially as Tesla moves into the robotics arena.

Musk has stressed the importance of the vote on social media: “This shareholder vote will decide Tesla’s future and may also affect the future of the world.” He has also stated clearly that if the compensation package is rejected, he might leave Tesla or step down as CEO.

As the vote approaches, the positions of Tesla’s major shareholders are becoming clearer.

Morgan Stanley has warned that if Musk’s compensation plan is not approved, Tesla’s stock could face an immediate sell-off of more than 10%, which the market would view as a vote of no confidence in his leadership. A rejection could also introduce uncertainty about the company’s strategic outlook and increase the risk of losing key talent.

Over the next decade, Musk must achieve 12 market-cap milestones (up to $8.5 trillion) and 12 operational milestones (such as delivering 20 million vehicles and reaching $400 billion in EBITDA). Each tranche achieved would unlock roughly 35 million shares. Tesla’s Optimus is expected to be a key driver for achieving these unlocks.

Tesla expects to showcase the Optimus V3 prototype in February–March of Q1 2026 and initiate mass production, aiming to establish an annual production capacity of 1 million humanoid robots by the end of 2026, ramp to the 10 million-unit level in the medium term, and plan long-term capacity of 50–100 million units—targeting what it calls “the greatest product ever.”

Key challenges for humanoid robots span control, software engineering, hardware, model training, manufacturing, and supply chain. For example, hand dexterity is extremely complex to design—degrees of freedom, muscle strength, and finger length—and the engineering difficulty of actuators in the forearm and hand exceeds that of the rest of the robot combined. Breakthroughs in dexterous hands will determine the pace of mass production. On the supply chain, Tesla would need to vertically integrate production of core components. For large-scale training, it must transfer real-world AI from cars to robots while training models across general mobility, task-specific behaviors, and voice interaction. Currently, Optimus can already navigate autonomously around the engineering headquarters and respond to visitors’ navigation requests.

At this shareholders’ meeting, the market is looking for updates on Optimus Gen 3. Current expectations include:

1. Stronger locomotion: more stable and faster walking, potentially including light jogging, stair climbing, or handling more complex terrain.

2. Improved fine manipulation: higher hand degrees of freedom to perform more complex assembly or manipulation tasks.

3. Greater autonomy: reliance on more powerful end-to-end AI models capable of understanding more complex natural-language commands and executing multi-step tasks.

4. A design closer to mass production: further optimizations in materials, structure, and actuation to prepare for cost control and scaling.

The significance of Gen 3 extends beyond the hardware itself. Tesla is more likely to present an ecosystem-level solution with the robot as the carrier. This could include open-source hardware designs, a unified operating system, and a large-scale AI training platform, ultimately anchored in deep integration with core technologies such as the Dojo supercomputer and the FSD system, with the aim of defining future industry standards for robots.