Ridiculous and biased article. Elon gets ZERO compensation if Tesla doesn't do stellar performance. Any tesla shareholder knows how Tesla is structured (Elon-focused) so just don't buy the stocks if you don't like Elon.
It also fails to completely mention Tesla stock's currently at an all time high.
The US has some broken incentives where if a small company fails then it hurts the shareholders but if a large company fails, it's "too big to fail" and ends up getting bailed out by the government. That's why it's worrying how Tesla is growing unsustainably. If the risk pays off then shareholders reap the benefits but if it crashes and burns then everyone takes a hit.
The automakers that got bailed out had large unionized workforces and franchised dealer networks, both of which are very politically active and neither of which Tesla has.
This makes me think that executives in the manufacturing sector should be paid in kind AKA in product, if that is the hot stuff that they claim they'd have zero problems selling the product on the secondary market and collect dollars
Elon Musk currently owns 12% of Tesla. Claiming he gets “ZERO compensation” outside of stellar performance is nonsense. If Tesla actually reached a 8T dollar valuation his net worth would increase to 1T dollars without any additional grants or investor dilution.
He currently directly shares 12% of the growth of Tesla, far more than most executive teams which are viewed to be adequately aligned with far less ownership. Claiming there is no incentive to perform is nonsensical and incoherent.
The GP was arguing that unless Elon Musk is given a additional 12% of the company, increasing his total ownership to 25%, he has zero incentive to raise the value of Tesla to a 8 trillion dollar valuation as he is not being “compensated” for his work.
I am pointing out that if he raised the value of Tesla to 8 trillion dollars he would earn ~800 billion dollars even without any further grants. Earning more money than anybody else has on the planet is about the absolute furthest thing from being “uncompensated” you could be. Giving him a additional 12% of the company on top of that would mean he is earning 1.8 trillion dollars from his actions instead of just 800 billion dollars.
So if I get 12% of the profit from music sales that is not “compensation”? Share ownership is, at its foundation, a profit (and asset) sharing agreement.
You are getting confused by the fact that this class of profit sharing agreement can be easily sold for its expected net present value of all future cash flows and that they frequently retain earnings in tax advantaged forms instead of directly distributing their generated income in highly taxed forms.
1. Elon could quit and do zero work and he would still own the 12%. So what is his compensation for the extra work?
2. If you owned $10M worth of shares of TSLA from your personal investments, and applied to work at TSLA, would it be reasonable to deny you any compensation since you are already incentivized and share in the success?
This is not to comment on what the right pay package is; perhaps the proposed one is far far too rich, but that's a separate question to whether his existing assets are compensation or not.
1. 12% of the increased profits. If we used your logic then we would conclude that 100% owners of businesses are not being compensated for their work. They are literally being compensated all of the profit and asset growth.
2. Yes, it is fairly common to “compensate” executives primarily in the form of their own stock appreciation [1]. Mark Zuckerberg receives 1$ in salary, options, stock awards, with only a tiny 20 M$ as reimbursements to avoid running afoul of tax law [2]. Larry Ellison [3] got only 8 M$. Michael Dell only got 3 M$ [4]. Andrew Jassy only 1 M$ [5]. Should I keep going?
- Jassy: "When Jassy became CEO in 2021, he received a special stock award with a total value of $212 million. This award vests over 10 years..."
- Ellison: "Founder, chairman and CTO Larry Ellison was awarded $138.6 million in the year ended 31 May 2022...However the bulk of the headline-grabbing figures, some $129.3 million of the total awards for both the CTO and CEO, will not be realized for a further three years. The performance-based stock options (PSOs) were granted in May 2018 and were supposed to vest in May 2022 "at the earliest" but were expected to take five years."
Zuckerberg may have agreed to forego additional equity comp, but he is a rare exception. Most executives receive new equity grants, subject to vesting, as compensation, even if they already own a lot of stock, as the stock they already own is not compensation for work.
Larry Ellison received 138.6 M$? Wow, that might fill up his piggy bank right next to his, let's see... ~400 billion dollars and ~300 billion dollars of stock appreciation based compensation since 2021. That is almost, gonna need to bring out the calculator for numbers this small... 0.04% of his compensation.
Can you explain how this is not, as I said: "primarily in the form of their own stock appreciation"? Also crickets on how your interpretation means that sole proprietorships and fully owned businesses are not being compensated for their work. The only reason it looks like such compensation is uncommon is because executive teams in long-standing companies that have long since lost their founders, common of publicly traded companies, infrequently have enough prior stake to justify such forms of compensation which is absolutely not the case for Elon Musk who currently owns 1/8 of Tesla's growth and profits.
Yeah, it explains why I can't buy one of these. Now, what I am puzzled by is why none of the various PCIe (standard form factor) cards that offer m.2 nvme slots on them will work with any of my older computers; they have PCIe lanes to spare but I suppose the system firmware itself just doesn't know what to do with them.
If you want to (for example) put 4 NVME drives (4 lanes each) in a 16x slot, then you need two things:
1. The 16x slot actually needs to have 16 lanes (on consumer motherboards there is only one slot like this, and on many the second 16x slot shares the lanes, so it will need to be empty)
2. You need to configure the PCIe controller to treat that slot as 4 separate slots (this is called PCIe bifurcation.
For recent Ryzen CPUs, the first 16x slot usually goes directly to the CPU, and the CPU supports bifurcation, so (assuming your BIOS allows enabling bifurcation; most recent ones do) all you need to do is figure out which PCIe lanes go to which slots (the motherboard manual will have this).
If you aren't going to use the integrated graphics, you'll need a 16x slot for your GPU. This will at best have 4 lanes, and on most motherboards (all 800 series chipset motherboards from all major manufacturers) will be multiplexed over the chipset, so now your GPU is sharing bandwidth with e.g. USB and Ethernet, which seems less than ideal (I've not benchmarked, maybe someone else has?).
In the event that you want to do a 4x NVME in a 16x slot I found that the "MSI X670E ACE" has a 4x slot that does not go throught the chipset, and so does the "ASRock B650M Pro x3D RS WiFi" either of those should work with a 9000 series Ryzen CPU.
ThreadRipper CPUs have like a gajillion PCIe lanes, so there shouldn't be any issues there.
I have also been told that there are some (expensive) PCIe cards that present as a single PCIe device to the host. I haven't tried them.
Thanks, very helpful! My use case is a bit different: NVMe drives are now cheap and fast as hell, I want to put them in older existing machines in the ~10-15 year old sort of category that have PCIe but not much else. Buying a new mobo kinda defeats the purpose... but as I type this, I can't remember what the purpose really is anyway, lol!
Adapting a PCIe slot to a single M.2 slot should always work, so long as the SSD is actually using the PCIe lanes and not the SATA port that M.2 can also support.
Depending on how old the motherboard, or UEFI, is - it may not be able to directly boot from NVMe. Years ago I modified the UEFI on my Haswell-era board to add a DXE to support NVMe boot. You shouldn’t need to do that to see the NVMe device within your OS though.
As the other reply mentioned, if you want to run multiple SSDs on a cheap adapter your platform needs to support bifurcation, but if it doesn’t support bifurcation hope is not all lost. PCIe switches have become somewhat cheaper - you can find cards based on the PEX8747 for relatively little under names like PE3162-4IL. The caveat here is that you’re limited to PCIe 3.0, switches for 4.0+ are still very expensive.
> suppose the system firmware itself just doesn't know what to do with them.
Anything since socket 1155 can work and even Westemere/Nehalem should work too, except you don't really want a system that old.
I have a 4Tb M.2 drive in x1 slot in my GA-Z77X, works fine.
Not a boot drive and I didn't bother to look if the BIOS supports booting from NVMe, though a quick search says the support for that was started with Z97 chipset/socket 1150.
> use a little sata SSD as /boot
For Linux you can even use some USB thumbdrive, especially a small profile like Kingston DataTraveler Micro G2.
I have an older workstation with no NVMe sockets. You can find 4 socket NVMe PCIe cards that let you bifurcate a 16x PCIe socket into four 4x NVMe sockets. Great way to make a local flash ZFS pool.
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