Ari hosts Rory O'Driscoll, Jason Lemkin, and Jeff to break down Elon Musk's trillion-dollar pay package. Rory reads the 322-page proxy as a board bet on Musk's future performance. Lemkin warns that venture capital has abandoned due diligence, with deals closing on Saturdays and founders facing few consequences for fraud.
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The real truth is the buyer has cunningly eviscerated the brains and the heart of the company and left the carcass, and we're going to pretend it's real, but it's dead as the dodo, and everyone knows it, but no one's going to go on the record saying it. And then secondly, I mean, Harry said something insightful. Must have been an accident. Um, Scale was for sale for $28 billion. Brett's got to be worth $56 billion. I quoted Gloria Swanson before: I didn't leave Hollywood, Hollywood left me. This is venture capital today.
Oh, we're gonna make your human beings 10% more efficient because of the AI copilot thing, when reality is they're gonna want a product that is like, No, no, no, I don't need 75% of these people anymore. Give me that product.
Venture rounds are all getting done on Saturdays. Forget about no diligence being done 2 years ago. Now diligence isn't even being attempted. I think the best control today would be if more founders that committed fraud went to jail.
Ready to go? It is my favorite show of the week. I'm so happy to be back with the one and only Rory O'Driscoll, Jason M. Lemkin, and our special guest today, Jeff. It is awesome to have you with us. So Jeff, first off, thank you for agreeing to do this with us today.
Great to be here. Thanks for the invitation, Ari.
Now we're going to start with, uh, the most pressing or a big element of news, which was Musk and the first trillion-dollar pay package. Breaks all prior benchmarks in terms of a trillion-dollar pay package. I'd love to hear how we thought about this and whether this is a new normal that we should be expecting to see for your Sam Altman's of the world, or this is a one-off exception. Rory, I know you love it when I go to you first.
Yeah, I like this question. It made me think a lot and I did a little work. And I think there's a lot to unpack here. Let's start with the first thing. I always say this. Compensation is how boards reveal their real priorities. Nothing else matters as much. So you can tell everything about what the board wants in terms of how they— if it's how they structure the CEO package. So there's 2 or 3 things here. One is, and I read the proxy ballot, it's 322 pages. I didn't read all of it, but I got to around 100, 150 pages. What's clear here is this: the board wants the Elon bet. That's just super clear. We feel they owe him the past and they're going to give him the future. The second thing is they really did believe that if they didn't give him the extra 12% on top of making good the stuff that was disallowed in 2018, he might walk. I mean, that's in the thing every time. Rightly or wrongly, you can argue that. But that's clearly what they believe in the proxy. And then the third, I think the most interesting thing is they're really paying him to double down again. I mean, if you look at it, yeah, the trillion-dollar headline is— it's obviously a big headline.
