Tesla’s 2024 shareholder meeting: all the news about Elon Musk’s $50 billion payday

Tesla CEO Elon Musk got his big compensation package approved yesterday, but how many really voted in favor? Well, it seems 1.78 billion shares voted in favor of Musk’s payday, while 529 million voted against — a 72 percent margin, excluding shares held by Musk and his brother Kimbal, as The New York Times reports. Musk took a victory lap on the mic at the shareholder meeting in Austin, Texas.

The shareholder meeting ends with several people pitching Musk on their personal business ideas. He adds another note about FSD’s rate of improvement. And that’s the end.

Musk kind of sidesteps a question about whether there’s a succession plan in place in the event that he gets hit by a car — or just decides to leave. “I think Tesla has a good future without me,” he said. “I think I’m a helpful accelerant to that future.”

“People will have super helpful humanoid helper robots,” Musk says in response to a question about robot personalities. “And, yeah, you’ll be able to customize the personality, customize the voice and really kind of, the robot will kind of get to know you as well and know your preferences.”

Musk is asked when the Cybertruck will go international. He responds saying it was designed with American specs in mind, and a new and redesigned version would be needed for the European and Chinese markets. There won’t be an international model this year, he confirms.

Trump has been a huge critic of electric vehicles on the stump. But Musk says he talks to Trump a lot and maybe its just a put-on. “I think a lot of his friends now have Teslas,” Musk says. “And they all love it. And he’s a huge fan of the Cybertruck. So I think those may be contributing factors.”

He goes off on a tangent about “homicidal maniacs” after one shareholder asks him how he’s doing with everything. We have fully left the substantive portion of the meeting and are now just coasting on vibes.

This sounds like a question about financial risks of autonomy, but it could also be seen as one about human collateral. Musk leaps to his usual difference: “There’s a small chance of something bad happening. But when you look at the sort of safety per mile, it’s very clear that the safety better than human driving.”

In response to a question about bundling software, Musk says the company will continue offering free trials of Full Self-Driving to new customers as long as there are new versions of the software to release.

Musk is known for his tendency to over-hype his companies products, but this is definitely above the normal level. “I don’t want to trivialize what’s necessary to get there. I mean, it’s an immense amount of work that is required to get there, like super difficult, but we are moving very fast down that road,” he says before shifting to Q&A.

Musk says that it has several humanoid Optimus robots performing tasks at its factory in Fremont. They’re taking cells off the end of the assembly line and putting them into shipping containers. By the end of next year, Musk predicts Tesla will have a thousands robots working in its factories.

Musk quipped in response to the recent layoff of the Supercharger team, which left many charging station projects stalled. Musk says there will be more Superchargers this year than the rest of the industry combined and promises to give other manufacturers adapters to use Tesla stations (which are still in limited supply).

He first pitched this idea of Tesla’s fleet running inference compute for AI during the last earnings call. “So there’s 100 hours of 100 gigawatts of inference compute, which I think we should use. Why not?” he says.

HW4 will be “five times” more powerful than HW3. And then HW5, which will go into the company’s Optimus robots, will come out 18 months after HW4.

There were only two covered mystery vehicles during last year’s Master Plan Part Three event. Now we have three. One’s definitely the robotaxi. The other could be the forthcoming revamped Roadster. What about the third? The long-awaited more affordable Model 2?

We’re getting the greatest hits: Cybertruck, Model Y best-selling car globally, and Tesla Semi. Musk said last week he approved volume production plans for the Semi, which has been stuck in low-volume mode since 2022. So that’s news.

That’s Musk’s recommendation for clearing up the question of the Cybertruck’s cool factor. (I would ask my own kids, but they’re too busy blasting Skibidi Toilet non-stop.)

In light of defeated proposals to get Tesla to be more transparent about its carbon emissions, Musk puts up this slide that shows the company is producing less pollution.

Now he’s touting Tesla’s Optimus humanoid robot, which the company claims is already performing tasks at Tesla’s factory. “I think the ratio of robots-to-humans will probably be at least two to one,” he said, predicting there will be eventually 10-30 billion humanoid robots.

Musk recalls an anecdote about his brother giving him the wrong time to catch the school bus, to ensure he catches the bus, as a way to illustrate his trouble with deadlines. He has consistently promised self-driving cars, but has yet to deliver. But this time is different, he claims. “I deliver in the end. That’s important.”

“It will be like an Airbnb thing. You can add or subtract your car to the fleet whenever you want. So you can say, like, I’m going away for a week at just one tap on your Tesla app, your car gets added to the fleet and it just makes money for you while you’re gone.”

I get the feeling we’re going to get a lot of statements like this. He starts out talking about energy storage, sustainability, and then shifts to autonomy. He repeats his claim that most people don’t understand what Tesla is working on. And he adds a dig at people who live in New York who don’t drive cars. As a transit rider, I’ll try to keep my opinions to myself.

He jumps in the air with both arms raised. He is clearly in a good mood. “I just want to start off by saying, hot damn, I love you guys.”