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Comment by lavezza | Hacker News Reader

Somehow I think Elon giving himself a multi-billion dollar salary to cover a jump in Tesla stock would upset a lot of people.

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I'd be in favor of this I think. It might force Elon, Tesla, or the shareholders to address the elephant in the room: Teslas market cap vs their revenue.

Teslas market cap is 1030m on 31.5m of revenue. GM is 79m on revenue of 122.5m. That's 50x the market cap per revenue.

How would they “address” that? It’s outside of their control

How exactly would you propose Tesla address it? Put out a press release that says "you people are paying too much for our stock, stop it"?

Already tried:

https://twitter.com/elonmusk/status/1256239815256797184

If a company is doing tons of R&D, and everything suggests that that R&D will give huge dividends in the future, then it seems perfectly normal for such a company to have a high market-cap/revenue ratio.

If having too big of a market cap relative to revenue is wrong, then you're basically saying that companies should not invest too much in their future, just use their money to sell as much as possible right now.

You know who else has extremely high ratios of mktcap/revenue? Pharmaceutical companies trying to cure diseases that have no available cure. Is it wrong to try to cure those diseases?

If it's so perfectly reasonable, they should be able to take out cheap loans to pay this new Elon salary.

I think Tesla does a good job of making folks think they are doing a lot of R&D, but that's about it. Based on some quick internet research, Tesla is a quarter of the R&D of either Ford or GM...

Unless you think it's higher quality or in a different area... but the whole world is going toward electric cars and autonomous driving. Tesla AutoPilot comes in a distant second to GM according to Consumer Reports: https://www.cnbc.com/2020/10/28/gms-super-cruise-tops-teslas...

Tesla build quality also ranks low, even according to Elon: https://www.cnn.com/2021/02/03/business/elon-musk-tesla-qual...

There's a reasonable chance of Tesla creating patents that generate a license fee from every car produced, basically in the globe.

It's kind of the reason Toyota has a monopoly on hybrids: they have a patent on the best kind of hybrid system. Ford held a similar enough patent that Toyota entered into a license agreement with them.

Getting a 20 year monopoly on key EV/battery tech will be worth an unimaginable sum.

I don't agree with Telsa's valuation, but I can appreciate why investors support them at their current price.

Revenue is an instantaneous metric of a company where as Market Value is a reflection of sentiment integrated over time and relatively compared to competing options for capital (such as other stocks, bonds, even present vs future purchases if inflation is material).

They will always be quite disjoint when viewed with an single/small number of revenue data points.

I think what most people want is for billionaires to pay their true rate of income instead of artificially low percentages because they have access to financial instruments that most don't.

Would SpaceX even exist if this law had been in place? Serious question. Let's think this through.

Also what if it had been in place during the dotcom boom and bust?

jesus christ, yes. Elon didn't become a billionaire including assets until 2012, well after nasa awarded them the cargo contract and two years after Falcon 9 started launching. Before that, he was barely a millionaire after PayPal and his investments in Tesla and SpaceX. This tax wouldn't have affected him at all until both SpaceX and Tesla were relatively healthy with both Falcon 9 and Model S.

There's a reason CEO's at this level take $1 in salary.

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