Norway’s giant government investment fund voted against Elon Musk’s $1 trillion pay package, which is expected to pass shareholder muster on Thursday anyway. Norges Bank Investment Management is Tesla’s fifth-largest institutional shareholder, said it was “concerned” both about the size of the award and Tesla’s reliance on the billionaire.
It isn’t personal for the Norwegians, who consistently oppose big paydays. But it is personal for Musk. “When I ask you for a favor, which I very rarely do, and you decline, then you should not ask me for one,” the Tesla CEO told NBIM’s chief executive and lively corporate podcaster Nicholas Tangen last year, turning down a dinner invitation after the investment fund voted against Musk’s last large pay package in 2018. “Friends are as friends do.” (Musk later accused Tangen of leaking those texts, which were released to the press under an open-records law.) Big pension funds in California and New York have also opposed the package.