Tesla Paid CEO Musk Minimum Wage of $37,584

By Douglas A. McIntyre Updated Jan 13, 10:42AM EST · Published Apr 16, 6:49AM EDT

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Tesla Paid CEO Musk Minimum Wage of $37,584 — © Thinkstock

Tesla Motors Inc. (NASDAQ: TSLA) paid CEO and founder Elon Musk $37,584 last year, which is the California minimum wage. It is not unusual for founders who own large pieces of their public companies to take small compensation. Apple Inc. (NASDAQ: AAPL) CEO Steve Jobs and Facebook Inc. (NASDAQ: FB) founder Mark Zuckerberg had periods during which they were paid $1 a year. Each could afford the low pay, because of the massive value of the of the companies they ran or run coupled with their stock holdings.

Musk’s compensation on a cash basis is even lower:

The base salary for Elon Musk, our Chief Executive Officer, continues to reflect the current minimum wage requirements under California law, and Mr. Musk still does not accept this salary.

Musk owns 26.5% of Tesla, according to its proxy. The value of that holding is worth approximately $8 billion.
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Tesla pays a very small amount to its six directors, at least based on cash compensation that was spread from $20,000 to $45,000, depending on membership in board committees. However, each has stock options and stock grants with total values of over $4.5 million.

Even at such a low annual compensation, there are risks to Musk’s role in Tesla, as the company’s management points out in its 10-K:

We are highly dependent on the services of Elon Musk, our Chief Executive Officer, Product Architect, Chairman of our Board of Directors and largest stockholder. Although Mr. Musk spends significant time with Tesla and is highly active in our management, he does not devote his full time and attention to Tesla. Mr. Musk also currently serves as Chief Executive Officer and Chief Technical Officer of Space Exploration Technologies, a developer and manufacturer of space launch vehicles, and Chairman of SolarCity, a solar provider.

Based on that warning, $37,584 may become very expensive.

About the Author Douglas A. McIntyre →

Douglas A. McIntyre is the co-founder, chief executive officer and editor in chief of 24/7 Wall St. and 24/7 Tempo. He has held these jobs since 2006.

McIntyre has written thousands of articles for 24/7 Wall St. He is an expert on corporate finance, the automotive industry, media companies and international finance. He has edited articles on national demographics, sports, personal income and travel.

His work has been quoted or mentioned in The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, Los Angeles Times, The Washington Post, NBC News, Time, The New Yorker, HuffPost USA Today, Business Insider, Yahoo, AOL, MarketWatch, The Atlantic, Bloomberg, New York Post, Chicago Tribune, Forbes, The Guardian and many other major publications. McIntyre has been a guest on CNBC, the BBC and television and radio stations across the country.

A magna cum laude graduate of Harvard College, McIntyre also was president of The Harvard Advocate. Founded in 1866, the Advocate is the oldest college publication in the United States.

TheStreet.com, Comps.com and Edgar Online are some of the public companies for which McIntyre served on the board of directors. He was a Vicinity Corporation board member when the company was sold to Microsoft in 2002. He served on the audit committees of some of these companies.

McIntyre has been the CEO of FutureSource, a provider of trading terminals and news to commodities and futures traders. He was president of Switchboard, the online phone directory company. He served as chairman and CEO of On2 Technologies, the video compression company that provided video compression software for Adobe’s Flash. Google bought On2 in 2009.