Dive Brief:

• Tesla CFO Vaibhav Taneja’s total compensation for 2024 hit over $139 million, largely comprised of an equity award consisting of approximately $113 million in stock options and approximately $26 million in stock awards for full-year 2024.
• The award comes after the Austin, Texas-based EV maker’s compensation committee “adjusted base salaries and/or granted equity awards” for several executives in October 2024. That included Taneja — whose compensation had not changed since he took the CFO seat in August 2023, according to the filing with the Securities and Exchange Commission.
• Tesla also adjusted the finance chief’s annual base salary, raising it to $400,000. Approximately 80% of Taneja’s equity award was granted as stock options, while 20% of the award was granted as restricted stock units, Tesla said.

Dive Insight:

Though Taneja was the only named executive officer to receive an equity award in 2024, “we generally grant one-time new hire equity awards to our employees, including executives, upon their commencement of employment with us, or upon their promotion to a new position,” the EV maker said. “Additionally, as part of our ongoing executive compensation review and alignment process, we have periodically granted additional equity awards to our executives.”  

The company cited the case of its SVP, APAC or Asia-Pacific, Tom Zhu, who received 100% of his equity award as stock options upon taking his current role in 2023.

“As a result, a significant portion of our named executive officers’ total compensation is entirely at risk, depending on long-term stock price performance,” the company said.

The 2024 annual report was filed as the EV maker continues to face economic headwinds in 2025. In addition, several executives, including CFO Taneja, have offloaded millions in stock over the past few months.

In early April, prior to Tesla’s Q1 2025 earnings report, Taneja sold shares with an aggregate market value of $957,720, following a March share sale of $1.7 million and a February sale of $2.8 million worth of shares, CFO Dive previously reported. Other executives, including Kimbal Musk, the brother of CEO Elon Musk, and Board Chair Robyn Denholm, have also sold shares in the company.

The stock sales have occurred as Tesla has logged declining sales of its EVs, with the company also attempting to weather tariff and other macroeconomic changes, and a consumer backlash surrounding its CEO’s political activities within President Donald Trump’s administration. These headwinds have seen the company’s stock price fall, eliminating much of a gain following Trump’s election. Year to date, the company’s stock price has slumped by approximately 25%, according to CNN.

During Tesla’s earnings call on , Taneja highlighted the potential impact of tariffs on the auto industry and auto parts by the Trump administration noting they are likely to affect the EV maker’s profitability. For the quarter, Tesla’s net income slid to $409 million, a 71% drop year-over-year.

On the April 23 call, Musk sought to reassure Tesla investors, noting his plan to allocate less time to the Department of Government Efficiency, an agency targeting what Musk has termed “waste” and fraud in the government, and asserting the EV maker was “not on the ragged edge of death, not even close.”

Musk’s DOGE efforts have contributed to a consumer backlash against Tesla, including protests in the EV maker’s headquarters city of Austin, as well as several acts of vandalism and arson targeting Tesla showrooms, CFO Dive reported previously.

The backlash also may well have spooked investors: The Wall Street Journal reported Wednesday that Tesla directors had approached several executive search firms to begin locating a successor for Musk as CEO, citing people familiar with the matter. Board members informed Musk he needed to spend more of his time focusing on Tesla, the WSJ report states, noting the board narrowed its outreach efforts to a “major search firm.”

The report “is absolutely false (and this was communicated to the media before the report was published),” the EV maker said Thursday in a post on Musk-owned social media platform X, attributed to Denholm. “The CEO of Tesla is Elon Musk and the Board is highly confident in his ability to continue executing on the exciting growth plan ahead.”

The WSJ report states the company did not provide a statement prior to publication. Tesla did not immediately respond to requests for comment.

Musk’s compensation as Tesla’s CEO for the company’s full-year 2024 was left unfilled in its annual report. The CEO has been embroiled in a court battle regarding a potential $56 billion pay package, filing an appeal in a Delaware court in March, Reuters reported.