I am not alone in struggling to get my head around the idea of Elon Musk as the world’s first dollar trillionaire. “What does that mean and what’s that about?” wondered Pope Leo in a recent interview.
Last month, Tesla approved an extraordinary incentive plan, worth $1tn in shares to Musk if the mercurial chief executive meets stretching goals. If this is a landmark in executive pay, it seems fabulously remote.
To put it in terms Musk might appreciate, imagine that the distance from the centre of our Earth to its surface represents $1mn of executive pay. That threshold was probably crossed for the first time almost a century ago by Eugene Grace, president of Bethlehem Steel. His 1929 bonus of $1.6mn — a “phenomenal fact”, according to Time magazine — was uncovered, with exquisite timing, just as the Great Depression hit. By the 1980s the very highest paid were breaking the $10mn threshold: in 1988, for example, Disney executive Michael Eisner’s total package was worth $40mn.