New frontiers of obscene wealth
Telsa’s trillion-dollar pay package for Elon Musk is the latest flaunting of obscene wealth. Its supposed rationale – to incentivize Musk to achieve the corporation’s goals of producing a million humanoid robots and quintupling the company’s stock valuation in the next decade – piles farce on tragedy:
Dan Ariely, a behavioral economist at Duke University, suggested a thought experiment: “Imagine a day in the life of Elon Musk, where he gets $1 trillion versus $1 billion. He wakes up and he does what differently? He drinks more coffee, he sleeps less, he sleeps more, he exercises less, he talks to people, he thinks harder. What exactly would he do?”
Tesla’s board of directors, which includes Mr. Musk’s brother and several friends, argue that the pay package is crucial to the future of the company and will keep him focused on hard-to-achieve goals.
Mr. Musk deserves the compensation, said Robyn Denholm, the board’s chair, because he is doing things “that no one else has done before, doing things that further humankind.”
Perhaps. But the question is, would humanity’s great innovators — Gutenberg, Newton, Einstein, Pasteur, Edison, Bell, Steve Jobs or even Nikola Tesla — have done more if only the pay had been better?
Memo to the mathematically inclined: Giving one trillion dollars to the poorest billion people in the world would be enough to double their annual incomes.
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