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Musk's $1T pay package is full of watered-down versions of his own broken promises

Tesla has proposed a massive new $1 trillion compensation package for its CEO Elon Musk, and many of the benchmarks he needs to hit are simply watered-down versions of promises he’s spent years making about the company.

That’s not the picture Tesla’s board of directors paints in the company’s annual proxy statement, where they revealed the proposed pay package. Instead, the board focuses on how it plans to create “the most valuable company in history.”

To be sure, if Tesla accomplishes all that it aims for with this deal, it will look like a much different company at the end of the 10-year period it covers. That doesn’t change the fact that the milestones the company is asking Musk to aim for are less ambitious than his own previously stated goals.

While the unprecedented pay package still needs to be approved by shareholders at a meeting in November, it’s easy to see the company’s fervent fan base voting “yes.” Previous votes on Musk’s compensation have been overwhelmingly approved by Tesla’s shareholders.

With that in mind, let’s take a look at what Musk needs to accomplish in order to receive the full payout.Image Credits:Justin Sullivan / Getty Images

20 million cars … total

Musk spent years claiming Tesla would be able to make 20 million electric vehicles per year by 2030. This was back when he and his company were still promising to grow at a rate of 50% each year.

But Tesla walked away from those promises as sales growth stalled, and then reversed in 2024. The company then pulled the 20-million-per-year goal from its impact report last year and stopped building a planned factory in Mexico that would have increased production.

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Now, the first “product goal” that Tesla’s board of directors laid out for Musk to achieve on his path to becoming a trillionaire is to deliver 20 million vehicles total. Tesla has already sold 8 million cars to date, and even with sales slumping, is moving just shy of 2 million per year.

With the new pay package being laid out over a 10-year period, that means the target has gone from 20 million EVs per year by 2030 to just 20 million total by 2035.Image Credits:David Paul Morris/Bloomberg / Getty Images

1 million robotaxis

One of Musk’s most infamous and outrageous promises about Tesla came in 2019, when he claimed that the company would have 1 million robotaxis on the road in 2020. It’s now 2025, and Tesla has only just begun to trial a robotaxi service in Austin, Texas, that has, at most, around 20 or 30 cars with safety drivers on board.

To access his full proposed pay package, Tesla is asking Musk to help the company realize an altered version of that promise, as another product goal listed is to have “1 million Robotaxis in Commercial Operation.”

It’s a goal with caveats. The fine print shows that Tesla is only requiring there to be a “daily average aggregate” of 1 million robotaxis “commercially operated by or on behalf of [Tesla] over a consecutive three-month period, as part of a transportation service.”

Tesla goes on to define “Robotaxi” as any Tesla vehicle, including but not limited to the purpose-built “Cybercab” it’s developing, that is using the company’s Full Self-Driving software to offer rides to people.

This includes customer-owned vehicles, which is another thing Musk has long promised but never delivered. He’s spent years claiming that Tesla could flip a digital switch and turn existing vehicles into fully autonomous ones and that owners could add and subtract those vehicles to a larger robotaxi fleet at will.

But Musk has since said many of the Teslas currently on the road don’t have the necessary hardware for the former to happen, and the company has yet to demonstrate the latter. Regardless, Musk now has an even looser timeline to try and make both things happen.Image Credits:Tesla

1 million “bots”?

Musk sees Tesla’s future being all about the humanoid robot that it’s developing, called Optimus. Just this week he claimed it could make up as much as 80% of the company’s future revenue.

As he became increasingly focused on Optimus, Musk made some pretty wild promises about what that future would look like. One of his core claims was that Tesla will be making 1 million Optimus bots per year by as early as 2029.

And yet, Tesla’s board is only asking Musk to deliver 1 million “bots” total as part of this proposed compensation plan. Tesla also defines “bots” as “any robot or other physical product with mobility using artificial intelligence manufactured by or on behalf of the Company” — though the company’s vehicles do not count.

The directors seem to agree that Optimus has “the potential to be Tesla’s bestselling product,” and they say it reperesents “the clearest example of how Tesla has the ability to make autonomy benefit all of humanity.”

But the board also notes that “commercialization plans” for Optimus are “still in development,” and Musk now has until 2035 to reach the 1 million mark.Image Credits:Tesla India / X

Everything else

The fourth and final product goal Musk has to achieve is to notch 10 million active subscriptions to Tesla’s Full Self-Driving (FSD) software. It’s arguably the most ambitious product goal. The company does not say how many current owners have paid for FSD, though executives have recently said the adoption rate is in the “teens.” At best, that means anywhere from a few hundred thousand to the low millions of Tesla vehicles have the software installed.

Everything else Tesla’s board is asking of Musk is tied to money. Ultimately, Musk needs to help Tesla reach an $8.5 trillion valuation in order to unlock the full value of the compensation package and become a trillionaire himself.

Musk already had grand designs to accomplish something similar. He has often claimed that Tesla could one day become more valuable than Apple and Saudi Aramco combined. At their current valuations, those two companies are collectively worth around $5.5 trillion. But earlier this year, the CEO claimed Tesla could be worth more than the next five most-valuable companies combined — which at the time meant he was aiming closer to the $15 trillion mark.

Along with the goal of blowing up Tesla’s valuation, Musk is being asked to increase the company’s earnings to, essentially, $400 billion per year — an enormous figure compared to last year’s earnings of around $17 billion.

Lastly, Tesla’s board has asked for two notable assurances from Musk in order to unlock the full value of the compensation package. One is that he must work with the company to develop a plan for how he will be succeeded as CEO of Tesla (and the plan essentially locks him to the company for at least 7.5 years).

The other, buried in a footnote, is that Tesla received “assurances that Musk’s involvement with the political sphere would wind down in a timely manner.”

Taken as a whole, it’s a complex agreement with lots of truly pie-in-the-sky ideas about where Tesla could go under Musk’s leadership over the next decade. The same was said about the previous compensation deal that Tesla struck with Musk back in 2018, and yet the company hit all of those seemingly outrageous goals. (Musk’s award was ultimately dusted by Delaware’s Chancery Court.)

Still, it’s hard not to notice just how much these new goals appear to come from the company trying to drag its CEO’s promises back down to earth.

2025-09-12
AI-Powered Radar Can Now Spy On Your Phone Calls From 10 Feet Away

Oh great, more surveillance!

A team of Penn State computer scientists has cooked up a chilling new way to eavesdrop: detecting the microscopic vibrations your smartphone gives off during a call and translating them into words using artificial intelligence.

The method relies on millimeter-wave radar, the same high-frequency tech powering self-driving car sensors, motion detectors, and 5G networks. Aim it at a phone and it can capture the subtle tremors from the earpiece when someone is speaking. These vibrations are invisible to the naked eye but, with the right tools, can become a transcript of your conversation.

The radar data is run through a modified version of Whisper, an AI speech-recognition model originally designed for clean audio. Instead of retraining the whole system, the team used a low-rank adaptation trick to tweak just 1% of the model’s parameters – enough to boost performance without starting from scratch.

The result? Roughly 60% accuracy on continuous speech from up to 10 feet away, covering a vocabulary of about 10,000 words. It’s not perfect, but it’s plenty to grab key phrases, names, or numbers that could be pieced together to expose private information.

“When we talk on a cellphone, we tend to ignore the vibrations that come through the earpiece and cause the whole phone to vibrate,” said Suryoday Basak, the project’s lead researcher and a doctoral candidate in computer science, adding “If we capture these same vibrations using remote radars and bring in machine learning… we can determine whole conversations.”

This is an evolution of a 2022 project where the same team could only identify 10 pre-set words with 83% accuracy. Now, they’ve moved into the far more complex world of live speech.

As Interesting Engineering notes further;

Radar tech breakthrough

The experimental setup involved positioning the radar sensor about three meters (10 feet) away from the phone to capture the minute vibrations.

The data was then fed into the customized AI model, which produced transcriptions with around 60 percent accuracy over a vocabulary of up to 10,000 words.

While this is far from perfect, the researchers noted that even partial keyword matches could have serious security implications.

“The result was transcriptions of conversations, with an expectation of some errors, which was a marked improvement from our 2022 version, which outputs only a few words,” said co-author Mahanth Gowda, associate professor of computer science and engineering.

“But even picking up partial matches for speech, such as keywords, are useful in a security context.”

The team compared their approach to lip reading, which typically captures only 30% to 40% of spoken words but can still help people infer conversations when combined with context.

Similarly, the radar-AI system’s output, though imperfect, can reveal sensitive information when supplemented with prior knowledge or manual correction.

Privacy risks amplified

Basak emphasized the potential privacy risks posed by this emerging technology.

“Similar to how lip readers can use limited information to interpret conversations, the output of our model combined with contextual information can allow us to infer parts of a phone conversation from a few meters away,” he said.

“The goal of our work was to explore whether these tools could potentially be used by bad actors to eavesdrop on phone conversations from a distance. Our findings suggest that this is technically feasible under certain conditions, and we hope this raises public awareness so people can be more mindful during sensitive calls.”

The U.S. National Science Foundation supported the research, and the team stressed that their experiments are intended to highlight possible vulnerabilities before malicious actors exploit them.

They envision future efforts to develop protective measures to secure personal conversations from this kind of remote surveillance.

As wireless technology and AI evolve rapidly, this study serves as a crucial warning: even the faintest vibrations from your everyday devices can potentially betray your most private words.

The study has been published in, published in the Proceedings of WiSec 2025: 18th ACM Conference on Security and Privacy in Wireless and Mobile Networks.

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2025-09-01