Investor Ross Gerber has weighed in on a clause inside Elon Musk’s Tesla Inc. (NASDAQ: TSLA) compensation package that could grant him a windfall worth hundreds of billions of dollars.
The clause relates to a potential merger or acquisition involving Tesla and an enterprise such as Space Exploration Technologies Corp., commonly known as SpaceX.
According to a report by The Wall Street Journal, the pay package approved by investors in November could result in Musk securing a payday now topping out at $824 billion.
The figure has shifted downward from earlier trillion-dollar estimates due to the number of outstanding Tesla shares rising since the package was originally approved.
Tesla did not immediately respond to a request for comment on the matter.
While the pay package is tied to performance-related milestones, including Full Self-Driving subscriptions, vehicle deliveries, Robotaxis, and Optimus Robot, a merger changes the calculation significantly.
In the event of a takeover or merger, half of the operational targets would effectively be treated as satisfied, leaving the market-value targets to determine the ultimate award.
The conditions also stipulate that the award would be based on the merger or acquisition’s deal price or Tesla’s market value just before the deal, whichever remains higher.
The Wall Street Journal reported that a potential $8.5 trillion acquisition of Tesla could help deliver the pay package’s full 424 million shares to Musk.
Gerber Kawasaki co-founder Ross Gerber took to X to respond to the report, quoting a post from The Wall Street Journal and writing simply: “Fantastical abundance!”
The commentary arrives as investor Gary Black of The Future Fund LLC said that investors were “losing faith” that Tesla would be able to solve unsupervised autonomy.
Black also questioned whether Tesla’s management believed that the Full Self-Driving system was safe enough to scale across its fleet.
Separately, Musk has been touting Starlink-enabled cars, arguing that the satellite-based internet service was the only way to ensure high-speed bandwidth to billions of vehicles across the Earth.
The confluence of an enormous potential pay package, lingering FSD questions, and Musk’s broader ambitions across multiple ventures continues to keep Tesla at the center of investor debate heading into the second half of 2026.
