As I understand it, Musk has worked for years without getting paid. The "paycheck" you refer to is actually the OPTION to buy stock at an agreed upon price. So he has to pay to get paid. That set of stock options required him to lead the company to massive profit, otherwise he doesn't get the stock options. He did that. Having fulfilled the conditions of the agreement, vest his options.

If Musk leaves then the Tesla company will become "corporate", meaning they will only make decisions that appear to improve the next quarterly report. The thing that keeps Tesla ahead of everyone else involves massively risky decisions that require long-term goals, such as building out a charging network, moving away from the traditional linear conveyor construction for car factories, "inventing" giga-casting to eliminate parts, steps, and vendors, improving battery technology, use Ethernet rather than individual CANBUS wires, move to a 48 volt architecture to reduce copper use, etc.

Rest assured that a "corporate Tesla" will die. I suspect that's the whole point of this exercise. All of the major car companies need Tesla to go away because they can't compete. Only Tesla and BYD make a profit on each EV sold. You have to sell over 50,000 EVs to break even and the majors can't seem to do that. So the next best thing is to kill off Tesla.

Musk realized that you don't need a 500 person team working on chargers. Why have a whole "charger research team" if you can already make the best, lowest-cost to build, lowest-cost to install, chargers? You only need a small factory and an install team. Oh, and as for laying off 500 people, do you think a Union would let Tesla recover the nearly 1-billion dollars a year it costs to employ 500 people doing nothing valuable?

Musk doesn't need Tesla but Tesla needs Musk.