A Tale Of Two Employees: Elon Musk v. Fast Food Workers
The contrast is striking between the public reaction to Elon Musk's thwarted $55.8 billion Tesla pay plan and the $4 an hour bump in California's minimum wage for fast food workers.
Effective April 1, the minimum wage for California fast food restaurant employers will go from $16 per hour to $20 per hour.
The headline from Fox Business warned: “Fast-food prices set to rise at McDonald’s Chipotle and others as California minimum wage hike looms.” LOOMS!
There seems to be a sense of panic around the nation that a cheap hamburger is becoming unattainable. Never mind that one in 17 homeless people in CA works in fast food, and 25% of frontline fast food workers spend at least half of their earnings on rent.
A fashionably dressed young woman posted a video on Musk’s social media platform X (formerly Twitter) asking whether Chick-fil-A is “becoming too pricey for this market?” Her drive-through breakfast cost $14.
Needless to say, it’s a completely different story with respect to Delaware’s push back on the 2018 pay plan approved by Tesla, Inc.’s Board of Directors for Elon Musk, the richest man in the world.
Musk’s earned $106,545 per minute from Tesla until fate intervened last week in the persona of Delaware Chancellor Kathaleen McCormick.
Chancellor McCormick ruled the board breached its fiduciary duty when they awarded Musk the largest compensation package ever granted to a public company executive. “Put simply, neither the Compensation Committee nor the Board acted in the best interests of the Company when negotiating Musk’s compensation plan. In fact, there is barely any evidence of negotiations at all,” she wrote.
Chancellor McCormick voided Musk’s pay package, causing almost universal outrage.
Musk earned more per minute at Tesla than the average American worker earns annually.
The Bureau of Labor and Statistics estimates the average salary in the U.S. is $74,738 per year. Musk’s Tesla pay plan yielded him more per minute than the average American worker earns annually. Plus, he doesn’t work 40 hours a week at Tesla given time devoted to his other profit making ventures at X, Open AI, SpaceX, Neurolink, Boring Co., etc.
In reality, Musk earned more in seconds than the average American worker earns in a year!
From time immemorial, chief executives have packed their boards with friendly faces who routinely approved their proposed pay plans, no matter how outrageous. It’s a scam. You’d think consumers would be outraged by this but, in Musk’s case, the opposite is true.
Musk immediately posted a poll on X asking whether Tesla should move its corporate headquarters from Delaware to Texas. Almost 90% of a million respondents voted yes.
Musk is metaphorically picking the pockets of shareholders. You might think they would care but …
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