Yet there are three big problems with the award as it stands. First, Musk has always multi-tasked furiously, and yet since the package was first agreed he has started to spread himself even more thinly.
The takeover of Twitter has consumed vast amounts of his time and energy. His SpaceX rocket business has become bigger, but it is also taking up more of his time. He has just raised $6bn for his artificial intelligence start-up xAI, and presumably that will take up a few hours a month as well.
Meanwhile, we learned last week that he might take a role as an official adviser to the Trump White House, should the former president win re-election in November (and, heck, who knows, if the boss is detained in court perhaps he will run the country).
The list of jobs gets longer and longer all the time. For $56bn you might be hoping to get an executive’s full-time attention, and yet that is clearly not true of Musk anymore. If he spends less and less time on Tesla, he can’t expect to be paid quite so extravagantly.
Next, it diverts too much money away from shareholders. In fairness, Musk does not draw a salary, but the shares he will be awarded under the proposed plan will dramatically increase his stake in the business. That comes at the expense of the existing shareholders who, obviously enough, will end up owning far less. That hardly seems fair.
Perhaps most significantly, the company is clearly losing its edge. The sales of EVs are falling off a cliff as buyers worry about charging, about the cost of repairs and insurance, and as governments, fretting over vanishing fuel tax revenues, start to impose more and more taxes on them.