Short conversational segment from a YouTube video featuring Jason M. Lemkin, Rory O'Driscoll, Harry and guest Jeff discussing Elon Musk's newly reported trillion-dollar pay package. The hosts frame the topic within broader venture-capital themes—valuation excess, weakened diligence, and AI-driven workforce efficiency claims—mixing humor and criticism while introducing the question of whether such pay packages signal a new normal.
Chapters
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.
Scale was for sale for 28 billion. Brett's got to be worth 56 billion quoted.
Gloria Swanson. Before I didn't leave Hollywood, Hollywood left me. This is venture capital today.
Oh, we're going to make your human beings 10% more efficient because of the AI copilot thing. When reality is they're going to want a product that is. 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 two 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 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, Harry.
Now we're going to start with the most pressing or a big element of news, which was Musk and the first trillion dollar pay package. It 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.
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 structure the CEO package. So there's two or three things here. One is, and I read the proxy value, 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. Right? Be a wrong. 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 obviously a big headline.
