When the pay package was approved, virtually no one outside Tesla thought the company could hit the insane performance targets upon which the options were contingent. At the time Tesla was struggling to ramp up initial production of the Model 3! I remember looking at those insane performance targets back in 2018 and thinking, oh boy, the Tesla board must be on crack or something like that. The targets looked impossible to achieve, to me, back then.

And yet, under Musk's leadership, Tesla somehow surpassed all those insane targets: https://x.com/Tesla/status/1800612353932722458

What Tesla has done under Musk's leadership borders on miraculous.

So I'd say YES, he deserved those options in 2018.