Charged: Tesla shareholders about to decide on Musk’s $1T pay package

Institutional investors and professional traders rely on The Fly to keep up-to-the-second on breaking news in the electric vehicle and clean energy space, as well as which stocks in these sectors that the best analysts on Wall Street are saying to buy and sell. 

From the hotly-debated high-flier Tesla (TSLA), Wall Street’s newest darling Rivian (RIVN), traditional-stalwarts turned EV-upstarts GM (GM) and Ford (F) to the numerous SPAC-deal makers that have come public in this red-hot space, The Fly has you covered with “Charged,” a weekly recap of the top stories and expert calls in the sector.

Click here to check out Tesla’s recent Media Buzz Sentiment as measured by TipRanks. 

FLYING CAR: Tesla CEO Elon Musk said the electric vehicle maker might unveil a flying car before the end of 2025, The Information’s Theo Wayt reports, citing comments Musk made on Joe Rogan’s podcast this week. Musk told Rogan that the company was close to demonstrating a prototype, but declined to provide any details, the author notes. “Well you know my friend Peter Thiel once reflected that the future was supposed to have flying cars but we don’t have flying cars,” Musk said in response to a request for more information. “I think if Peter wants a flying car we should be able to buy one.” Publicly traded companies in the air taxi space include Joby Aviation (JOBY) and Archer Aviation (ACHR). 

MUSK COMPENSATION: Tesla shareholders will soon decide whether CEO Elon Musk should be awarded $1T worth of stock if he achieves a series of goals, Jack Ewing of The New York Times reports. Musk will acquire voting control of 29% of Tesla shares if he meets all targets in a 10-year performance plan. While the goals sound difficult, the plan would allow Tesla’s board to grant Musk a portion of the shares if he fell short.

California Public Employees’ Retirement System, Calpers, the largest pension plan in the U.S., plans to vote against Elon Musk’s $1T Tesla compensation agreement, Loukia Gyftopoulou of Bloomberg reports. “The CEO pay package proposed by Tesla is larger than pay packages for CEOs in comparable companies by many orders of magnitude,” a spokesperson for the pension plan said. “It would also further concentrate power in a single shareholder.”

BofA analyst Federico Merendi notes that Tesla shareholders will vote on November 6 on CEO Elon Musk’s newly proposed pay package at the company’s annual meeting and points out that Robyn Denholm, the chair of Tesla’s board, stated in a media interview earlier this week that “If we don’t get this across there is a high probability Elon will back away from the company or become less engaged.” This vote “poses significant risk to the stock” and if it doesn’t pass and CEO Elon Musk focuses his efforts on his other ventures or steps down the firm expects the stock to react negatively, adds the analyst, who has a Neutral rating on Tesla shares.

ROBOTAXI: Tesla’s current permit in California only allows testing with a human driver behind the wheel and the company has not yet applied for the separate permit required to remove the driver in the state, The Information’s Theo Wayt reports.

CYBERCAB: Tesla is planning to make fundamental design changes to sell its Cybercab in higher volumes, Kara Carlson and Craig Trudell of Bloomberg report. In short, the company is open to making the Cybercab more like a normal vehicle. “If we have to have a steering wheel, it can have a steering wheel and pedals,” Robyn Denholm, chair of Tesla’s board of directors, told Bloomberg News.

COMPLAINTS: The National Highway Traffic Safety Administration, NHTSA, which recently initiated a probe into whether certain Tesla door handles are defective, has received more complaints from consumers unable to get in or out of their vehicles due to battery failures, Dana Hull of Bloomberg reports.

RECALL: Tesla is recalling 6,197 Cybertrucks in the U.S. because a detached light bar could fall and pose a road hazard to other vehicles, the NHTSA says. Tesla will either install an additional mechanical attachment or replace the light bar for free, NHTSA says.

AUTONOMOUS DRIVING: Lucid Group (LCID) announced an initiative that accelerates the path to full autonomy with Nvidia (NVDA) technology. The company said, “This collaboration with NVIDIA positions Lucid to deliver one of the world’s first privately owned passenger vehicles with Level 4 autonomous driving capabilities powered by the NVIDIA DRIVE AV platform, while also unlocking next-generation manufacturing efficiencies through NVIDIA’s Industrial AI platform. In addition, Lucid aims to deploy a unified AI factory to build smart factories and transform their enterprise leveraging NVIDIA Omniverse and NVIDIA AI Enterprise software libraries… Lucid’s partnership with NVIDIA marks a pivotal step in the evolution of intelligent manufacturing and electric mobility.”

DRIVERLESS RIDES: Uber (UBER) plans to launch driverless rides in the San Francisco Bay Area next year using Lucid Gravity SUVs equipped with Nuro’s self-driving technology, putting it in direct competition with Waymo’s (GOOGL) robotaxi service, Bloomberg’s Natalie Lung reports. Testing is already underway, and the move marks a major step in Uber’s push to expand its autonomous vehicle offerings.

MOVING TO THE SIDELINES: Jefferies downgraded Canadian Solar (CSIQ) to Hold from Buy with a price target of $19.64, up from $13.70. The firm cites the recent share rally and enforcement risk of the module price floor from the Chinese government for the downgrade. It may take time for the module price to pass through the poly price hike, Jefferies tells investors in a research note.