WSJ What’s News - Elon Musk Returns to Business. How Much Should Tesla Pay Him?

Episode Date: June 2, 2025

P.M. Edition for June 2. Taser’s boss topped the highest-paid CEOs list this year, while Elon Musk came in last at $0. But as Musk rejoins the business world after his stint in Washington, WSJ’s Theo Francis discusses how Tesla’s board could figure out how much to pay the world's richest man. Plus, the suspect in the Colorado flamethrower attack has been charged with a federal hate crime. And the Trump Organization, the family’s flagship real-estate firm, has expanded globally since the 2024 election. WSJ reporter Brenna Smith describes those projects and what they involve. Alex Ossola hosts. Sign up for the WSJ's free What's News newsletter.  Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

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The suspect in the Colorado flamethrower attack is charged with a federal hate crime. Plus, how Elon Musk's pay at Tesla stacks up against that of other CEOs. This concept of these moonshot packages really took off after Tesla gave Musk that one because other CEOs said, oh, that's kind of cool. That like gives you the sort of startup approach at a more established company. So this kind of had a snowball effect where you saw a lot more of these moonshot packages after Elon Musk got his. And how the Trump Organization has expanded globally since the 2024 election. It's Monday, June 2nd. I'm Alex Osala for The Wall Street Journal.

This is the PM edition of What's News, the top headlines and business stories that move the world today. The man accused of using a flamethrower in an attack on a group in Boulder, Colorado, supporting hostages being held by Hamas, has been charged with a federal hate crime. The Department of Homeland Security said the suspect, Mohammed Sabri Salman, was in the U.S. on an expired visa and had filed for asylum in September 2022. Solomon said he had planned the attack for a year and was waiting until after his daughter graduated to strike. The police said that all eight victims of the attack are alive and remain in the hospital. President Trump expressed

condolences for the victims on Truth Social, saying the incident, quote, is yet another example of why we must keep our borders secure and deport illegal anti-American radicals from our homeland. U.S. manufacturing activity sank a little deeper into contraction in May, reflecting persistent worries over the impact of the Trump administration's whipsawing trade policy. The Institute for Supply Management said today that its Purchasing Manager's Index of Manufacturing Activity fell to 48.5 in May from 48.7 in April, matching economist predictions. That brought the index to its lowest level since November as activity fell further below

the 50 mark that divides growth and contraction. U.S. stocks rebounded from early losses to end higher, despite a new trade flare-up between the U.S. and China that we mentioned in this morning's show. The Nasdaq led the gains, rising about 0.7 percent. The S&P 500 rose about 0.4 percent. And the Dow was up roughly 0.1 percent. Even after the latest bout of tariff turmoil, stocks have mostly recovered their April losses. So you might be wondering, do I have too much money in one investment?

Is it a bad idea to have 85% of my portfolio in Nvidia? Should I own some other stocks besides Apple? Jason Zweig writes the Intelligent Investor column for the Wall Street Journal and says that, for something like 99.95% of people, the answer is yes, you do have too much money in that one hot stock. He told our Your Money Briefing podcast that, chances are, no matter your estimation of your own skills in picking stocks, you're no Warren Buffett. One of the points that I made in this column is that there are two types of people who should concentrate their stock picks. And the first type is people like Warren Buffett or Charlie Munger who have just extraordinary

skills at picking stocks. The second type is what you might call a control person, a CEO or another extremely senior executive at a publicly traded company where your decisions have influence over the outcome of the company's future. In either of those cases, it makes a lot of sense to concentrate your portfolio, but wow, is that a small number of people. For more from Jason, check out tomorrow's episode

of Your Money Briefing. Coming up, how should Tesla pay the world's richest man? That's after the break. Who do you think is the highest paid CEO in the S&P 500? Maybe someone in finance or a Silicon Valley juggernaut. In fact, it's Rick Smith, the head of Axon Enterprise, the manufacturing company that makes tasers. He raked in about $165 million in 2024. Meanwhile, Tesla chief Elon Musk was the lowest paid CEO of an S&P 500 company last year. He made $0 as his last pay package became the subject of

a legal battle. For more, I'm joined by Teo Francis, who covers executive compensation for the journal. Okay, Teo, how did executives do this year broadly? It's an interesting year. Overall, pay is up for CEOs of S&P 500 companies. The difference this year is that a lot of these super high value pay packages, nine figures and a hundred million dollars and more. This year, you only saw one of those,

but there were enough other CEOs who were getting $50 million and up, but not quite $100 million to bring the overall median up. Most of these giant pay packages, they're mostly stock. Increasingly, these days, they have different conditions on them. So Elon Musk's multi-billion dollar pay package from six years ago has a bunch of different conditions on it. What those triggers tend to do is they increase the number of shares or options that the executive ultimately gets.

You mentioned Elon Musk. So he's back in the business world, fresh off his detour through US politics. So now Tesla's board is faced with this question. How do you pay the world's richest man? Now the company didn't respond to requests for comment, but what are some of the options they might be considering, especially after his 2018 pay package was thrown out by a court twice? This concept of these moonshot packages really took off after Tesla gave Musk that one. One of the big questions that always comes up with

big pay packages is why. And companies say, look, you need to attract the best talent, you need to keep the best talent, and you need to give them an incentive to make the company do well. So some big name CEOs like Warren Buffett own so much of the company that if the company does well, they do well. Elon Musk arguably has that as well, but he's made it very clear that he wants more stock. He wants a bigger stake in the company. So the company needs to take that into account. They also need to take into account the fact that he hasn't been around a lot.

One of the things that Elon Musk is probably going to be asked to do is to focus on Tesla. That's what Tesla shareholders want. That's what the Tesla's board probably should ask him to do. The board's job is to pay the CEO to run the company. They could go out and hire another CEO if he doesn't want to do it for what they're willing to pay. That was WSJ special writer, Teo Francis. Thank you, Teo. Great. Thank you. And as Musk ends his time in government and returns his attention to running his companies, including Tesla, it's not just the board that will be looking for results. WSJ reporter Becky Peterson told our tech news briefing podcast that investors and employees

alike will be keeping an eye on Musk's progress. Tesla's investors have already priced in all of the success. So I'm also wondering how patient they'll be, but they've already been waiting a really long time. The difference between now and in the past when he said, robo taxis are around the corner or Mars is around the corner. At both Tesla and SpaceX, he really has bet the company. Tesla doesn't have a new car in its lineup for customers to get excited about over the next few years. There's only the cyber cab, which doesn't have a steering wheel or pedals.

So that's a very big commitment to this vision that he has. And at SpaceX, we know that they are moving people off of Dragon, which is the spaceship that currently takes astronauts to the space station. They're trying to reduce the number of people who are working on these existing successful programs, which means there's more bodies on the dream programs, but it also means that if the dreams don't work out, there's no backup plan. To hear more from Becky and WSJ columnist Tim Higgins about Musk's record in Washington and the challenges he faces as he returns to the business world, listen to today's episode of Tech News Briefing.

Though President Trump has pledged to bring business back to the U.S., his own company has been doing more business overseas than ever before. Since the election in November, the Trump Organization, the family's flagship real estate firm, and its partners have publicly announced 12 international projects, far outpacing the two overseas deals announced during his first administration. Reporter Brenna Smith joins me now with more. Brenna, what are some of the kinds of projects the Trump Organization is planning to build and where will they be located?

You know, it really runs the gamut. So we're talking about everything from hotels to golf courses, even a mixed-use office space. And these recent announced deals are all over the world, but primarily in the Middle East and in India. Most of Trump's real estate deals are mainly licensing agreements. So the Trump Organization would collect fees and money

for its brand and management services, but this is not the Trump Organization going and directly using its own funds to invest in these development projects. A representative from the Trump organization said that these 12 developments were under contract before the November election. In January, the Trump organization released an ethics agreement barring the company from doing business directly with foreign governments.

And yet several of these deals involve foreign governments. So is there a conflict here? It depends on who you talk to. We spoke with Senator Christopher Murphy, the Democrat from Connecticut, who basically said that, from his point of view, this violates the ethics agreement that the Trump Organization released. When we spoke with the Trump Organization,

they said that they are not dealing directly with foreign governments, but they have partners like, for example, in one case, there was already land purchased from a foreign government sovereign fund. So it was like there was a middleman between Trump org signing onto the project and a foreign government getting involved and they weren't directly dealing with the foreign government. That was WSJ reporter Brenna Smith. Thank you, Brenna. Thank you. And Gautam Adani, Asia's second richest man,

is trying to get the Trump administration to drop foreign bribery charges against him. Instead, he's facing a new front in his fight with prosecutors, a probe into whether his companies are buying Iranian petrochemical products. U.S. prosecutors are investigating whether Adani's companies imported Iranian liquefied petroleum gas, or LPG, into India through the company's Mundra port. A Wall Street Journal investigation into tankers that regularly traveled between Mundra and the Persian Gulf found their behavior often exhibited traits seen by ships seeking to evade sanctions.

In a statement, a company spokesman said Adani categorically denied any deliberate engagement in sanctions evasion or trade involving Iranian-origin LPG, and said they were not aware of any U.S. investigations on the subject. Before we go, heads up, we ran a bonus episode of the podcast earlier today. In the latest episode of What's News in Earnings, we're looking at how U.S. retailers like Macy's, Target, and Best Buy are negotiating President Trump's tariffs and what their earnings reports tell us about the resilience of American consumers. You'll find it in your feed just before this episode.

And that's What's news for this Monday afternoon. Today's show is produced by Anthony Bansi with supervising producer Michael Kosmides. I'm Alex Osola for The Wall Street Journal. We'll be back with a new show tomorrow morning. Thanks for listening.