Musk is putting a lot of time into his newly founded artificial intelligence company xAI, and at the same time, he is asking Tesla shareholders to approve a hefty compensation package designed to ensure his focus.

On Thursday, in U.S. time zone, Tesla will announce the preliminary results of a key shareholder vote, with the core topic being Musk's new compensation plan.

If this plan is approved, it will increase his shareholding from approximately 15% to 25% within the next ten years, on condition that the company achieves grand goals including selling one million Optimus humanoid robots and reaching a market value

However, media outlets have cited sources with knowledge of the situation to reveal that some major Tesla investors have privately pressed company executives and board members in recent weeks about Musk's commitment to Tesla and whether the company h

According to former executives and people who have worked with Musk, for most of this summer, Musk has been 'hiding' at his latest startup xAI, participating in meetings day and night. He even began to hold meetings with Tesla employees at xAI's offi

Trillion-dollar salary and the CEO as a 'part-timer'

Tesla's board proposed this huge compensation plan in September's proxy statement.

In an interview last week, the Board Chairman Robyn Denholm said that the board is not concerned about how Musk allocates his time. She stated:

Other CEOs might enjoy playing golf, but he enjoys creating companies that are not necessarily Tesla.

Denholm expressed that the tough targets in the compensation plan will force Musk to invest his "time, effort, and energy" into Tesla. During the meeting with major investors, she and other directors also admitted that they cannot force Musk to work

On the "All-In" podcast, Musk himself expressed his hope that shareholders would approve the plan to ensure his significant control over Tesla as it transitions into a robotics company. He said:

If there's a possibility that I could be kicked out, I wouldn't go to build a robot army.

However, the proxy advisory firms believed that this plan would give Musk too much equity, thus recommending opposition.

Tesla, xAI and the Entanglement of Interests

The boundaries between companies owned by Musk are becoming increasingly blurred.

Earlier this year, he integrated xAI with X (former Twitter). After SpaceX invested about $2 billion in xAI, the idea of getting Tesla to participate in the investment resurfaced. Over 140 shareholders submitted proposals to ask the Tesla board to ap

Although Musk declared the synergies between the two companies in terms of autonomous driving and Optimus robots, some large investors expressed doubts about this potential investment.

Tesla's board of directors ultimately did not make any recommendations on the proposal. When interviewed by the media, the chairman of the board Denholm tried to downplay the technical connection between Tesla and xAI, saying that the overlap between

Now, with the critical vote approaching, Tesla investors are facing a core question: whether approving this huge compensation plan can really bring back a CEO whose focus has already shifted, or if it is merely paying for another piece of the puzzle

Musk himself responded to the salary controversy on X with a post, asking:

If the CEO weren't me, which CEO from another car company do you want to run Tesla?

Fully committed to xAI

After leaving the Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) in late May this year, Musk fully committed to the work of xAI.

According to media reports citing sources with knowledge of the matter, he sometimes sleeps at the xAI office in Palo Alto several days a week, which is located just across the street from Tesla's engineering headquarters.

His work style has also changed from signing in for a weekly all-staff meeting to holding one-on-one meetings with employees for several hours.

In the frenetic weeks leading up to the release of the latest xAI model, Grok 4, in July, many employees adjusted their schedules to accommodate Musk's unusual work hours.

He personally supervised the design of a sexy female chat robot called Ani, planned a very large data center for xAI in Memphis, and spent long hours in the office playing his favorite video game "Diablo" to relax.

Meanwhile, Tesla's core business stumbled. Its car sales fell by 13.5% in the quarter ended June 30, marking the second consecutive quarter of decline. Musk disclosed to investors during the earnings call that

We may experience several tough quarters.

The controversial journey of xAI expansion

In order to make xAI's Grok quickly catch up with OpenAI's ChatGPT, Musk has taken some controversial measures.

It is reported that xAI requires its employees, mainly AI trainers, to sign an agreement granting the company a perpetual, global, tax-free license to use their biometric data such as faces and voices to train virtual images. A subsequent notice more

These data are used to develop a 3D virtual image named Ani. The robot is designed with golden hair braids and an exposed anime-style character, and its interaction with users is similar to a dating simulation game, which attracts a large number of p

However, some employees who provided biodata reportedly felt uncomfortable with Ani's sexual implications and stereotypical images. Additionally, the Grok system once outputted anti-Semitic and violent content on platform X after adjustments to incre

Furthermore, according to company records seen by the media, xAI also instructed employees to use personal accounts to ask questions on competitor platforms such as ChatGPT, and then use the obtained answers to improve Grok.

Another project required employees to create personal accounts on Replit and Bolt, AI website-building companies, and scrape data. A spokesperson for Replit said this behavior violates their service terms.