Elon Musk is tied to Tesla, for better or worse.

It is official: Tesla put a hoop on it. The corporate’s shareholders awarded CEO Elon Musk a $46 billion inventory grant, one thing Musk had demanded with the intention to not go away Tesla on the altar.

Now, $46 billion is a really great amount to provide anybody, not to mention the man who has tanked the inventory a lot that the award itself misplaced $10 billion since January (which was when a choose blocked the weird payout from a board that included Musk relations).

Fortunately, Tesla has offered a straightforward strategy to visualize it. The corporate simply handed Elon Musk one million bucks for each one of many 46,561 new and unsold Teslas that appeared within the firm’s stock within the first quarter of 2024 — a file pile-up for the corporate, which now has so many parking heaps stuffed with unsold Teslas that you could see them from house.

The inventory award can also be the equal of $12 million for each Cybertruck bought from that automobile’s launch by means of April, and precisely the identical quantity for each Cybertruck that needed to be recalled when a pad on its accelerator pedal began flying off. And it is $153 million for each Cybertruck proprietor at the moment making an attempt to unload his steel elephant on-line (roughly 5 % of all Cybertrucks in existence are on the second-hand market proper now).

Was there any acknowledgment of setbacks on the Cybertruck, which Musk has repeatedly mentioned will dig a grave for Tesla if there aren’t sufficient bought, on the Tesla shareholder assembly? There was not. The closest Musk got here to acknowledging the nationwide joke that Cybertruck has grow to be, was this bizarre defensive comment: “if you wish to know whether or not Cybertrucks are cool or not, ask a child. Youngsters don’t have any filter, proper?”

That was genuinely Musk’s argument: as a result of youngsters may gawp over the automotive that appears prefer it was designed by a 12-year-old, so ought to the grown adults who, y’know, really purchase vehicles. Good use of $46 billion, Tesla shareholders!

Additionally, nice job on reinforcing the notion that Tesla is unfriendly to the Democratic voters who comprise nearly all of Tesla’s buyer base. Giving $46 billion to the man who’s restoring and selling literal Nazis on Twitter whereas silencing dissent feels like about nearly as good an concept to that buyer base as reinstalling Musk’s brother and Rupert Murdoch’s son on the board. (Which Tesla additionally simply did.)

However no phrase of dissent may very well be heard contained in the Tesla bubble of the shareholder assembly, which resembled nothing a lot as a cult. Musk mumbled his means by means of unplanned remarks, his silences increasingly regarding to a impartial listener, solely to obtain whoops for any sentence he accomplished. Within the Q&A, the primary questioner merely praised Musk for all the pieces he’d performed “for the First Modification.” Presumably he did not imply the repeated censorship and the banning of journalists.

Like all good cult chief, Musk was taking part in to his viewers. Fairly than return to the imprecise guarantees of a $25,000 Tesla EV that enthused analysts on the final earnings name, Musk merely went by means of the listing of each present Tesla product, then defined how its income might skyrocket, then repeated that it would not be simple to get there. The robotic Optimus, we have been reliably assured, may very well be a $1 trillion enterprise.

There was no explaining how Musk obtained his numbers. However there was one quantity he was unimpeachably correct about.

“It is 4:20pm. I simply seen that,” Musk giggled, then stretched out an uncomfortable silence. “So, uh. Yeah. Yeah.”

Congratulations, Tesla shareholders. I hope you and this very mature, very intelligent grownup will likely be very completely happy collectively.