Tesla drops Musk’s $29B ‘interim’ award after Delaware court restored larger pay package

Tesla has revoked the “interim” pay package worth $29 billion that it gave its CEO Elon Musk last year, after the Delaware Supreme Court recently restored his larger $56 billion compensation award from 2018.

The company had given Musk the interim package in August 2025 to hedge against the possibility of Delaware’s highest court rejecting his appeal. Tesla had explained to investors that the interim package would be voided should Musk prevail. “[T]here cannot be any ‘double dip’,” the company wrote last year.

Sure enough, Tesla confirmed in its quarterly filing with the Securities and Exchange Commission on Thursday morning that it spiked the interim award on April 21. Tesla said that the board voted without Musk or his brother (and fellow director) Kimbal Musk.

“These actions are consistent with the ‘no double dip’ principle, which precludes Mr. Musk from getting a windfall in the event that he may exercise the 2018 CEO Performance Award,” Tesla wrote in the filing.

Tesla granted the $56 billion package to Musk in 2018, and it was challenged in court by a shareholder who accused the CEO of essentially negotiating against himself in designing it, and not properly informing shareholders of this. That case took years to play out in Delaware’s Chancery Court before a judge ultimately decided in 2024 that the plaintiff was right, and struck down the pay package.

Tesla waged a public affairs campaign while it appealed the judge’s decision to the state’s supreme court. That included “re-voting” on the package to ostensibly prove that shareholders weren’t duped. Musk, meanwhile, threatened to leave Tesla altogether to develop artificial intelligence elsewhere. This spurred Tesla’s board to draw up the $29 billion award as a hedge, and also work on a much larger and far more ambitious compensation package worth up to $1 trillion.

The revocation of this interim award has no impact on Musk’s $1 trillion package. To access that full amount, Musk has to lead Tesla through a number of operational milestones (like deliver 20 million vehicles and a million robots, and put one million robotaxis on the road), and increase its valuation to more than $8 trillion over the course of 10 years.

Interestingly, Tesla explained in the quarterly filing that it is starting to make its own estimates about what milestones Musk might and might not achieve. The company doesn’t specify which one it thinks Musk will accomplish, but wrote that it has “unrecognized stock-based compensation expense of $9.97 billion for the operational milestone that was considered probable of achievement over the term of the award.”

The company went on to say that it has unrecognized stock-based compensation expense of between $105.82 billion to $120.37 billion for the “operational milestones that were considered not probable of achievement,” though it did not specify which milestones it meant.

While Musk has 10 years to accomplish all of the goals tied to the trillion-dollar package, many of these operational milestones are watered down versions of promises he’s previously made. Yet, it seems Tesla itself isn’t sure he’ll be able to execute at least a few.

Tesla also explained in the filing that its board of directors has decided to put up some barriers on how and when Musk can sell shares from the now-restored 2018 package “to mitigate any negative impact of significant share sales on the Company.”

Those restrictions appear to track some of the more general ones laid out in the $1 trillion pay package. They dictate Musk has to remain CEO or a product development executive at the company through at least 2028 for the shares to vest, and require him to hold the shares for five years.