Tesla’s board found a way to get rich without getting “paid.” The company suspended director compensation in 2021 after shareholders sued, but earlier option grants kept swelling with the stock. A Reuters analysis with Equilar finds Tesla directors still averaged about $1.7 million a year from 2018 to 2024 — and logged more than $3 billion in stock-award gains from 2004 to 2024 — a haul that far out-muscles peer boards across Big Tech.
Tesla relied heavily on stock options for director compensation, issuing awards years before the company’s valuation exploded. As the company’s share price climbed, those options multiplied in value — withou…
Tesla’s board found a way to get rich without getting “paid.” The company suspended director compensation in 2021 after shareholders sued, but earlier option grants kept swelling with the stock. A Reuters analysis with Equilar finds Tesla directors still averaged about $1.7 million a year from 2018 to 2024 — and logged more than $3 billion in stock-award gains from 2004 to 2024 — a haul that far out-muscles peer boards across Big Tech.
Tesla relied heavily on stock options for director compensation, issuing awards years before the company’s valuation exploded. As the company’s share price climbed, those options multiplied in value — without requiring new votes, new packages, or new disclosures. By the time Tesla froze director pay in 2021, much of that wealth was already baked in. And the money was pooled around a small group of longtime directors.
Board chair Robyn Denholm has made $650 million since joining the board in 2014. Earlier this year, SEC filings showed that Denholm had already cashed in about $532 million worth of Tesla shares, powering a portfolio that includes her family investment firm and two Australian professional basketball teams. And her tenure has overlapped with Tesla’s messier chapters: The stock has had ugly stretches. Denholm has faced myriad questions about her — and the board’s — independence. The company’s culture has been under pressure. CEO Elon Musk’s politics and outside ventures have repeatedly spilled back into Tesla’s brand and sales story. And she keeps telling everyone that bigger and better is coming.
But she wasn’t the only one getting paid for her position on the board and proximity to Musk’s supposed grand vision. Reuters reported that Kimbal Musk, Elon’s brother, has earned nearly $1 billion from Tesla options since 2004, that Ira Ehrenpreis has collected $869 million since 2007, and that Kathleen Wilson-Thompson has made $234 million in seven years. Equilar found that the $3 billion total was paid to five of Tesla’s eight current nonexecutive directors, with JB Straubel, Jack Hartung, and Joe Gebbia joining after the board was forced to freeze pay.
And that came about because a derivative suit filed in 2020 challenged director pay awarded from 2017 to 2020. A settlement followed in 2023. And on Jan. 8, 2025, a Delaware judge approved a settlement worth up to $919 million resolving claims that Tesla directors overpaid themselves — so-called “excess” director pay. The deal required directors to return roughly $277 million in cash and $459 million in stock options — and to forgo $184 million in options for 2021 through 2023. The settlement also imposed governance changes, including a requirement that future director compensation receive shareholder approval.
Between 2018 and 2020, the average Tesla director reportedly received about $12 million in cash-and-stock compensation — about eight times Alphabet’s directors over the same period. Governance consultant Douglas Chia asked Reuters, “What makes Tesla directors so special?”
Tesla’s own filings keep insisting directors are, in fact, special — or at least extra busy. Tesla told Reuters that director compensation is tied to stock performance and “shareholder value creation,” and pointed to directors attending 58 full-board or committee meetings in 2024. At one of those meetings this year, the board asked shareholders to approve something much bigger upstairs. In November, investors backed a CEO performance award for Musk that could reach $1 trillion if certain milestones are met. Denholm put her name on the campaign, hitting the airwaves and urging shareholders to keep Musk in the chair as the company pitched itself as an AI and robotics bet.
The headline numbers make their own argument about what “performance” has meant at Tesla’s board level: not salary, not cash, not restraint — just options, time, and a stock that rewards anyone close enough to the cap table. Tesla’s directors may have stopped getting “paid” in the obvious, annual-compensation way, but equity never sleeps.