Bribery is generally unethical and often illegal, but also quite effective. When my four-year-old is acting up and ignoring my increasingly desperate pleas for her to get dressed, leave the playground or do something else very important, I have, on occasion, resorted to desperate promises of ice-cream. Obviously, I know it’s counterproductive to respond to suboptimal behaviour with sugar-based bribes. But sometimes you are exhausted and just need a short-term win. The ice-cream always delivers.
It seems trying to motivate a four-year-old is not much different from trying to keep a petulant 54-year-old tech mogul in line. On Friday, Tesla’s board of directors rolled out a pay package proposal for CEO Elon Musk that could, if he plays his cars right, turn the billionaire into the world’s first trillionaire. In a section of Tesla’s latest stock market update that began: “Yes, you read that correctly”, the board outlines everything Musk has to do to get his hands on that performance-based trillion. Which, to be fair, is a lot. Tesla needs to reach a market cap of $8.5tn, eight times its current value, in 10 years to get Musk the payout. Many analysts believe Tesla is already overvalued, so this is no small task.
