Image: Tesla
Tesla quietly filed an amendment to its 2025 annual report this week. While it is mostly routine SEC paperwork, it pulls back the curtain on some genuinely wild numbers and a boardroom that looks a little different than it did a year ago.
The Board
Elon Musk remains CEO and holds the title of Technoking, which Tesla has kept on official documents. Joining him on the board are his brother Kimbal Musk, former Tesla CTO JB Straubel, and Jack Hartung, who joined from Chipotle in June 2025. Every director was eligible for cash payments last year and every single one declined, opting for stock options instead.
The Pay Package
The number that jumps off the page is Elon Musk’s listed 2025 compensation: $158.4 billion. Tesla is careful to flag that this is an accounting figure, not money that landed in his bank account. The bulk of it comes from a new performance award structured around 12 tranches. These only pay out if Tesla hits targets most companies wouldn’t dare put in writing, including a market cap of $8.5 trillion and 20 million vehicle deliveries.
The filing also closes the book on the saga surrounding his original 2018 pay package. After years of legal back and forth, the Delaware Supreme Court reinstated that award in late 2025. With the original deal back in place, the interim award created to keep him motivated during the legal fight was forfeited as of April 2026.
Everyone Else
CFO Vaibhav Taneja and Senior VP Tom Zhu are the only other named executives, with compensation packages that are more conventional but still heavily weighted toward stock options.
Tesla ended 2025 with just over 135,000 employees worldwide. The median worker earned $62,786. The ratio between that figure and Musk’s on-paper compensation is the kind of number that breaks calculators, though Tesla notes that since he takes no salary and did not sell shares for profit, the ratio based on actual realized pay effectively drops to zero.
The 2026 annual meeting date has not been set yet.
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