The largest pension fund in Europe, having sold its stake in Tesla for over 571 million euros, disagrees with the overly large compensation package for the company’s CEO, Elon Musk.
The pension fund Stichting Pensioenfonds ABP is based in the Netherlands and has millions of participants — mainly former civil servants and education workers.
As Bloomberg notes, on Sunday a representative of the fund stated that they had “issues” with payments to Musk and announced the sale of Tesla shares. It is noted that the decision also took into account costs, profitability levels, and requirements for responsible investments, as well as “poor working conditions” at the company, according to the newspaper Het Financieele Dagblad.
Recall that in November, rumors spread about “hellish” manufacturing at the Tesla factory in Austin, where due to a malfunctioning oven door employees were reportedly forced to work in fog and at temperatures of +38°C.
The story with Elon Musk’s compensation package has been ongoing since 2018, when Tesla decided to issue shares as compensation instead of regular salary. At the time, the package envisaged payments up to $55.8 billion for Elon if the company achieved high performance indicators, and could become the largest in the history of public companies.
However, despite the support of the majority of shareholders, American courts repeatedly canceled the reward, and the billionaire himself called their decisions “absolute corruption”.
As Forbes notes, if approved, the compensation would increase Elon Musk’s share in Tesla to 20% from the current 13%. Earlier, the billionaire complained that he owned too few shares of the company and was uncomfortable developing the automaker as a leader in AI and robotics without having at least 25% of the votes in the company.
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