Month: November 2025

• Elon Musk secured a pay package worth up to $1 trillion if he achieves certain milestones.
• Employees who earn more typical salaries can employ some of the approaches he used.
• Workers can leverage their worth and negotiate higher pay by aligning incentives with performance.

When it comes to earning a living, you might want to be more like Elon.

There are some strategy lessons to be learned from the world’s richest man, who just won a pay package worth up to $1 trillion at Tesla — even for those of us whose paychecks come with fewer zeros.

Of course, most people can’t go work at their rocket company if their promotion or job offer doesn’t come through. However, a scaled-down version of some of the methods Musk and the Tesla board used could work for mere mortals.

It comes down to knowing your worth, framing a pay agreement as a win-win, and, if you can, treating a compensation discussion as a negotiation, not just a plea for more money, career advisors told Business Insider.

Know your worth

To start, workers need to understand their leverage. In a lackluster job market, you might not feel like you have much to bargain with. Yet if you have an offer from another employer or some other option that would let you walk away, you have latitude, said Alan Stein, CEO of Kadima Careers, which offers coaching for getting six-figure jobs.

“If you understand what your plan B is, then that gives you a lot of power,” he said.

A viable backup plan — sometimes called a BATNA, or a best alternative to a negotiated agreement — can mean you’re asking for something from a position of strength, Stein said.

Your leverage could just be that you’re invaluable to your employer. If that’s you, then your boss might recognize that things would fall apart if you leave. It’s what employers often refer to as “key person risk,” said John Gates, founder of Salary Coach, which helps executives negotiate their pay.

“As you get to the point where there’s only one of you in a company, that’s when the elbow room appears,” he said.

That’s similar to how many, including Tesla’s board, appear to view Musk, who has a stable of companies to which he could decamp if he were to leave Tesla. “He’s a unique rainmaker within Tesla,” Gates said.

On Thursday, Tesla shareholders voted to award Musk $1 trillion in compensation if he meets a series of goals.

The opposite holds true as well: If you’re one of many workers doing something similar, Gates said, your bargaining chip is likely going to be smaller.

Watch how you flex

Even if you are your company’s golden goose or you have a shiny new offer from a competitor, it’s not necessarily advisable to walk into your boss’s office and flaunt it, he said. Most people aren’t Musk, after all.

Gates said there is a danger, however, in showing an offer to your employer because it signals that you’re poised to leave.

“The average executive would be running a tremendous risk with that approach,” he said. “It brings your loyalty into question.”

Gates said that a better way would be to say something like, “I’ve had several calls from headhunters or other companies interested in my background. The numbers that they’re throwing at me are kind of surprising, but I really like working here.” Then, he said, you can make clear that the offers are becoming a distraction and that you’d like to discuss your compensation.

Get paid if you perform

Musk’s new compensation plan is directly tied to numerous milestones, including his ability to boost Tesla’s valuation from about $1.5 trillion to $8.5 trillion by 2035 and deliver 20 million vehicles and one million Optimus robots.

Similarly, if you’re negotiating a job offer or a pay bump, you can ask to tie some of that to a specific goal. It’s a way to align incentives, Gates said, so that “everybody’s making more money together.”

Being able to say, “I contributed to this,” or “I made this happen,” makes it easier to say, “This is why I’m worth what I’m asking for,” said Patrice Lindo, CEO of Career Nomad, a platform that helps professionals navigate career changes.

Your compensation goes beyond your paycheck, and so can the discussions you have with your employer. Like Musk, who has been seeking to get paid through awards in Tesla shares, you can ask for things like company stock, a signing bonus, added vacation time, or even a deferred start date, Lindo said.

By regularly documenting your successes, it’s easier to talk about them when it comes time to discuss your pay, she said. Lindo encourages workers to keep notes on their accomplishments — what she calls a “value tracker” — so that they can keep score. Then, when it’s time to sit down with your boss to go over your performance and pay, you have the evidence you need, Lindo said.

After all, she said, “Every raise that you get is a referendum on how well you branded your impact.”

Do you have a story to share about your career? Contact this reporter at tparadis@businessinsider.com.

• Mike Graham says a 402,000-square-foot data center is being built less than a mile from his home.
• The area is known for its high concentration of data centers, causing local concern.
• Graham says the change is inevitable, but fears environmental impact and noise.

This as-told-to essay is based on a conversation with Mike Graham, a 57-year-old resident of Chantilly, Virginia. It’s been edited for length and clarity.

When my wife and I were looking for where to move in 2002, we kept coming back to Chantilly. We wanted some shade, old growth, and a little bit of woods for our kids to enjoy. It was the perfect place.

Over 20 years later, a walk in the woods near my home is my peace. To find a family of river otters in a stream, or to go see the birds in the trees — it just tickles me to death.

Now, developers have just cleared that land to build a 402,000-square-foot data center less than a mile from my home. I don’t want to lose what I have. A walk in the woods gives me peace, and they’re taking a big piece of that away from me. We never considered moving until now.

Are all my Google Photos kept in a cloud somewhere? Yeah. Unfortunately, the cloud is not a cloud at all. It’s made up of big, hideous buildings. The development, while inevitable, is disappointing.

I was shocked when I heard a data center might be built near me

I’m right on the border of Loudoun County, which is known for its concentration of data centers. So, when I first heard about the plan to build a data center less than a mile from my home, I was alarmed, shocked, and angry.

I love to go out and take pictures in the woods — that’s how I spend my spare time.

In the woods surrounding the data center plot, I’ve captured a North American river otter, woodpeckers, owls, and even a great blue heron colony. I worry about what turning a natural area into a hardscape will do to the ecosystem.

I fought against it at a public hearing

In 2023, I spoke alongside over a dozen other people at a meeting of the Fairfax County Planning Commission, the body that recommends approval or disapproval of development to the Board of Supervisors. I wrote a speech and listed every flora and fauna in that ecosystem that could be affected.

The meeting went on past midnight, and as soon as everybody was done speaking, the planning commission voted in favor of the build. I felt so disappointed and dejected.

We have a voluntary HOA, which doesn’t have the funds for legal counsel to help us fight the data center.

My wife and I won’t move until we retire

The biggest concern I have about being so close to a data center is the potential buzzing noise many of them can produce. I don’t have any plans for how we’ll deal with it, because I really don’t think there’s much we can do.

My wife and I had never considered moving, but now we’re planning to move once we both retire within the next decade. I’m thinking somewhere a little more peaceful, like the mountains or a beach.

In the meantime, I just want the data center to be a nice neighbor.

Do you have a story to share about living near a data center? If so, please reach out to the reporter at tmartinelli@businessinsider.com.