Tesla Proposes a Trillion-Dollar Bet That It's More Than Just Cars

For a while now, Tesla CEO Elon Musk has seemed awfully distracted. His past few years in non-Tesla activities include: buying and renaming Twitter; going all in on President Donald Trump's election campaign and then an obscure Wisconsin Supreme Court race; a lot of babymaking, plus attendant drama; and months spent standing up the so-called Department of Government Efficiency. Meanwhile, Tesla sales have slid as the electric-car maker faces fierce competition from Chinese manufacturers and rejection from buyers turned off by his politics. Now a new and unprecedentedly gigantic 1 trillion pay package proposal from the Tesla board will attempt to recenter Musk's focus on the automaker. Maybe "automaker" is the wrong term: For years now, Musk has argued that Tesla should be valued as an autonomous vehicle and robotics firm.