By Harinder Mahil

On November 6, 2025, Tesla shareholders approved a pay package of one trillion dollars for Elon Musk. This will make Elon Musk, who is already the richest man in the world, even richer. I note that this pay package is in US dollars which is more than 1.4 trillion Canadian dollars.

I have been wondering what he would do with so much money. I cannot even figure out how many zeroes should be added to one to make it one trillion.

If Musk spent $40 every second, it would take him more than 790 years to run out of money. Put it another way, a trillion dollars could buy every car sold in the US this year, or all eight Ivy League universities five times over.

Let us suppose Elon Musk works 50 weeks and takes only two weeks of holidays in a year. Even if he works 40 hours a week that would be 2,000 work hours a year. This means he would earn $500 million per hour. This is unbelievable, obscene and disgusting.

According to Google, Elon Musk has 14 children with four different women. Assuming he has no other funds other than one trillion he will receive from Tesla; he will be able to provide about 71.5 billion to each of his children.

I used the words obscene and disgusting to describe Elon Musk’s pay package. This is because out of a population of 340 million in the US, approximately 67 million people collect Social Security benefits. This is about one in every five US residents.

According to the US government figures, about 42 million people in the US receive benefits under the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP) commonly referred to as food stamps.

The government figures show that a growing number of SNAP households are employed. They are working but still can’t get by. These are households in which one of the two wage-earners lost his or her job or became disabled. Or they are among the increasing numbers of US residents who are in low-wage jobs or are not getting enough hours.

Let us compare Elon’s pay package to expenditures incurred by the BC and Canadian governments. For the 2025-26 fiscal year, the total government expenses of the province of British Columbia and Canada are projected to be $94.9 and $450 billion.

This means that Elon Musk’s pay package is bigger than three years of the total budget of the government of Canada.

We can also compare Elon Musk’s pay package to those in British Columbia who supposedly have good jobs. An average BC government employee makes between $80,000 to 90,000 a year. Recently, they were on strike for eight long weeks and received a wage increase of 12 percent over 4 years. Assuming a government employee was earning $90,000 a year, he or she will receive an annual increase of $2,700. Some commentators regarded this as inflationary.  I am sure each government employee who was on strike lost way more than $2,700 in wages and benefits during the 8-week strike and do not feel that receiving an increase of three percent a year is inflationary.

We live in an age of unparalleled wealth disparity, where the 30 most valuable companies in the US have seen their stock values increase by over 200 percent in just nine years, according to the Dow Jones index. At the same time, there has been a much smaller 40 percent increase in the average worker’s pay – an increase wiped out by a similar increase in inflation over the same period.

I fail to understand why Elon Musk has been offered such a pay package. Maybe it is designed to signal that he is unique in the world to whom normal rules of society do not apply. Whatever the reason, it is obscene and disgusting.

Harinder Mahil is a human rights activist and is secretary of Dr. Hari Sharma Foundation.