In 2018, the Tesla board fashioned a 10-year pay plan for founder and CEO Elon Musk that so far stands as the most successful long-term compensation blueprint in history. The structure is highly innovative in rewarding Musk for raising Tesla's market value, and it has delivered brilliantly. In the just over three years the program's been in place, Musk has multiplied the EV pioneer's value 12-fold to $647 billion at the market close on March 9. Musk hit many of the laddered targets that trigger the awards years earlier than the board could possibly have anticipated, leapfrogging one market-cap goal after another. His reward is what this writer anticipates to be the largest stock options award, secured in a brief period, in the annals of capital markets: $31.7 billion since May 2020, including over $10 billion alone in the first quarter of 2021. READ MORE