The bank behind the world’s largest sovereign wealth fund has just dealt a blow to Elon Musk’s $1 trillion payday.
Norges Bank Investment Management, which manages Norway’s $2 trillion sovereign wealth fund, said on Tuesday it had voted against the Tesla CEO’s proposed pay package ahead of the company’s annual shareholder meeting on Thursday.
The bank said that while it appreciated the “significant value” created under the billionaire’s leadership, it had concerns about the size of the package, dilution, and the lack of mitigation of Musk’s “key person risk” for Tesla.
The fund, which is Tesla’s sixth-largest institutional investor, also voted against Musk’s previous pay package in 2024. In January, leaked messages revealed an icy text exchange between the Tesla boss and Norges’ CEO Nicolai Tangen, with the billionaire telling Tangen that “friends are as friends do.”
Norway’s sovereign wealth fund is the largest institutional investor to publicly say how it has voted on the $1 trillion pay package. The fund has a 1.2% share in the EV giant.
Tesla’s CEO compensation plan has come under fire from some investors, including the California Public Employees Retirement System (CalPERS) and the New York State Retirement Fund.
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Proxy firms Glass Lewis and ISS have also urged shareholders to vote against it, prompting Musk to label them “corporate terrorists” in a recent earnings call.
Several other big investors, including Florida’s State Board of Administration and ARK Invest’s Cathy Wood, have expressed support. Vanguard and BlackRock, Tesla’s two largest institutional shareholders, have not yet said how they are voting.
The 2025 CEO compensation plan would award Musk around $1 trillion worth of Tesla shares, assuming he hits a series of ambitious goals over the next decade.
These include raising Tesla’s market cap to $8.5 trillion, selling 1 million Optimus robots, boosting annual earnings way above those reported by tech giants Meta and Google, and planning his own succession.
