Musk Claims No Role in Setting His $55 Billion Pay Deal at Tesla

However, court filings in the case show the entrepreneur was asked in a text by his friend Ira Ehrenpreis, a Tesla board member, on April 8, 2017, about how to structure his future compensation. Musk replied that he should end up “owning 10 percent of the company” in a performance plan built around a progression of targets that would each grant him 1% of Tesla’s outstanding shares, filings show. As Musk later mused to one of his co-founders in an email, he was “planning on something really crazy, but also high risk.”