Elon Musk hasn't taken a salary from Tesla since 2019, and last time he did, it was minimum wage

Elon Musk is working at Tesla without a regular wage, having taking no salary since 2019.

The last salary the Twitter CEO took was that of $23,760, according to CNN, when Musk was forced to receive the minimum wage required by California law.

Telsa could be announcing a new compensation package for Musk, however. An investor's day in early March 2023 along with an annual shareholders' meeting would give insiders a heads-up on the plan after Musk's deal expired in 2022.

The South African's 412,000,000 shares in Telsa and his options are worth $142 billion, with Tesla stock rising nearly 70% in the first quarter of 2023.

This equates to an addition of around $61 billion to Musk's net worth, for which Bloomberg ranks him as the second-richest person in the world. The rankings put Musk above Jeff Bezos, Bill Gates, and Warren Buffett and below the world's richest man, Bernard Arnault, who owns LVMH Moët Hennessy Louis Vuitton.

Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg is ranked at #19; he has taken a $1-per-year salary in recent history.

Former President Donald Trump reportedly gave all of his annual $400,000 salary back to the federal government each year of his term, making him the first president since John F. Kennedy to do so.

Musk's payment packages have received both positive and rather negative responses previously; a 2018 lawsuit contested his nearly $51 million compensation, with the plaintiff stating that Musk exploited Tesla and the board of directors to secure the compensation to “fund his personal ambition to colonize Mars.”

Nearly five years after the fact, the judge has yet to make a ruling on the case.

However, in 2022, investors expressed worry about Musk leaving the company and whether he would have a successor, to which he replied, “I intend to stay with Tesla as long as I can be useful," adding that he is "not leaving, just to be clear.”

In a November 2022 federal court case, board member James Murdoch testified that Musk had indeed decided on a successor.

“Investors have expressed concern over Musk’s ability to multitask and whether the billionaire is taking on too much to legitimately run as many companies as he does,” Murdoch said.

CNN notes that Amazon’s Jeff Bezos and Facebook’s Mark Zuckerberg have never received stock options or grants since either company's initial public offerings.

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