For Halloween, Tesla stockholders received a treat. The electric vehicle maker’s stock reached a five-year high of $456.56 a share. Stockholders approved an unprecedented 10-year pay package in November that could be worth $1 trillion for Tesla founder and CEO Elon Musk.

Musk was already the world’s richest man with a personal fortune estimated at almost $500 billion. He has a significant stake in Tesla and private ownership stakes in SpaceX, X, and The Boring Company, among others. This deal has the potential to turn him into the world’s first legitimate trillionaire, even after all taxes are accounted for.

The Tesla stock rebound marked quite the comeback for the automaker and for Musk after his stint leading the Department of Government Efficiency during the early months of President Donald Trump‘s second term. The Musk-led effort pushed for cuts to government spending and headcount, which had made him deeply unpopular with many liberal Americans for the better part of the year. This unpopularity had affected consumer behavior.

Some liberal Tesla owners sold their vehicles in protest. Others slapped on bumper stickers denouncing Musk. And some truly unhinged individuals started setting fire to cars at Tesla dealerships in protest. These attacks led to Attorney General Pam Bondi throwing the phrase “domestic terrorism” around to discourage copycats.

Musk then left the government and publicly and acrimoniously broke with Trump in the summer over the president’s self-styled One Big Beautiful Bill, charging that the tax cut legislation was deeply fiscally irresponsible and would worsen already sky-high federal budget deficits and grow the national debt. They traded escalating insults and threats — with Musk insisting that Trump must be in the Epstein files and the president threatening to stop government contracts with SpaceX and saying that he would look into having Musk, a naturalized citizen, deported. For Musk, the spat risked a backlash with a whole different set of consumers.

All of this, plus rising competition from Chinese electric vehicle makers, pummeled Tesla’s stock. The stock-tracking graph for the year would come to resemble a fun roller coaster ride. Tesla stood at $428.22 per share on Jan. 15, then fell to a low of $221.86 on April 8, and bounced through a few smaller hills and dips. It then climbed back up and then some to its present historic high range.

Speculators who bought in the dip and sold on Halloween stood to gain a whopping $234.70 per share. Yet, the compensation vote showed that many Tesla shareholders are excited to see where this ride goes next.

Tesla by the numbers

Tesla investors are betting that Musk can deliver robust growth. Much of his compensation is tied to hitting aggressive production and sales targets. Currently, that would be the only way the company could find a way to pay him the full value of the deal. Tesla currently has a market cap, or total estimated value, of more than $1 trillion, but not a great deal more than $1 trillion.

Tesla is valued at $1.4 trillion according to the Companies Market Cap website. That would make it the 10th-largest publicly traded company in the world, ahead of firms such as Berkshire Hathaway ($1 trillion) and Walmart ($824.7 billion). But behind fellow tech-focused companies such as Amazon ($2.6 trillion) and Apple ($4 trillion). AI chipmaker industry leader NVIDIA tops the list at $4.7 trillion.

No boss of a peer firm had compensation of the magnitude that Tesla shareholders voted for Musk, at roughly $100 billion a year on the high end. Rather, compensation packages for top CEOs are in the tens of millions of dollars annually, not billions.

Tesla’s current market position is dominant, though far from a monopoly. In America, approximately four of every 10 electric vehicles sold in fiscal 2025 were Teslas, and it was an especially good year for electric vehicles, as many Americans bought cars before a large tax credit expired. In the rest of the world, Teslas are strong sellers. Yet, Chinese electric vehicle firm BYD is challenging Tesla in China and any other market that doesn’t impose high tariffs against its vehicles.

Tesla enjoyed record revenues for the third quarter of 2025, at $28.1 billion, according to its October quarterly filing. That represented more than 10% year-over-year growth. (Quarter 3 revenues for the previous year came in at $25.1 billion.) Analysts pointed out, however, that profits on revenues were down slightly, as various price pressures, from labor to tariffs, have made things trickier for many American firms.

Enter the robots

The carmaker was in a good position. Musk then talked shareholders into a deal that has the potential to hand him the equivalent of the company’s current total revenues — never mind profits! — every year for the next decade. How did he pull that off?

He did it with robots. Musk has created a line of vaguely humanoid-looking robots called the Optimus, after the Transformers’ hero Optimus Prime. He’s been manufacturing, tweaking, and previewing these mechanical marvels for some time. The first Optimus models are set to go on sale next year.

To say that Musk is bullish on Optimus is an understatement; perhaps Redbullish would get closer to the mark. Musk has called these robots an “infinite money glitch” for Tesla shareholders, predicted that they will end poverty, and said that he expects that eventually 80% of Tesla’s revenues will not come from selling cars. Rather, the company’s bottom line will be carried by this new army of robotic grunts.

TESLA OFFERS ELON MUSK UP TO $1 TRILLION PAY PACKAGE

Automation is a process that has been ongoing since roughly the beginning of the Industrial Revolution. It is not constant but rather tends to happen in bursts. Businesses and governments around the world are currently betting big on AI, with over $1 trillion invested globally this year.

Musk is betting big by creating a whole new kind of movable hardware to pair with that software. His intelligible goals are, first, to create a new mass market and, second, to have Tesla hold a dominant position in that market. He’s won before against long odds. Stockholders have just put a great deal of money on the table to see if he can do it again.

Jeremy Lott is the author of several books, most recently The Three Feral Pigs and the Vegan Wolf.