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While I think Musk seems to have duplicated Jobs' Reality Distortion Field*, the second CEO-ing of Jobs didn't strike me as quite as severely attaching Apple to Jobs as all of Musk's businesses are now with Musk. For example, quite a lot of the industrial design of that era is (and was) strongly associated with Jony Ive, not Steve Jobs.
I think at best, out of all of Musk's business empire, the closest you get to a Jony Ive-esq "it's not Jobs" is that Gwynne Shotwell is well regarded and seen as being highly competent in her own right; the second closest is that Linda Yaccarino gets named a decent amount in the news, but even then she's very much in Musk's shadow. The public perception of Neuralink and The Boring Company is just "Musk announced his company, [Neuralink|TBC] did ${thing}".
* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Reality_distortion_field — and apparently I'm nearly a decade late in making this connection
Which is because he is in the media a lot.
I can understand the impact on your brand as things are, but it would be interesting to see how well other manufacturers would stand up to scrutiny.
> musk wasn't tesla's face and main profiteer of any purchase.
The face bit of it makes sense.
As for "main profiteer", he is the single largest shareholder, but its about 13% shareholding - 87% of the profits belong to other people.
And since the compensation is equity, comparing it to profit, which is cash, makes no sense. One can discuss if the market price of the equity is too far removed from current profit, but surely even Elon doesn’t have any influence over what millions of investors around the world choose to pay for Tesla shares.
Should majority owners of a business not be able to vote on compensation?
I do find it surprising that such ridiculously generous pay was approved by shareholders and think it rather prove what GK Galbraith said: "The salary of the chief executive of a large corporation is not a market award for achievement. It is frequently in the nature of a warm personal gesture by the individual to himself".
On the other hand there are limits, and at this point I wonder whether shareholders will decide he is a liability and not pay him so well in future. If I was a shareholder I would want to sack him.