Good morning. If it seems like more CEOs are asking for—and getting—so-called “moonshot” pay packages, well, they are, as I reported in a recent feature for Fortune. A moonshot ties CEO compensation almost entirely to aggressive, seemingly impossible targets over five to 10 years. The upshot is often billions in compensation and slices of company ownership. But in the meantime, the CEO gets almost nothing.
Tesla CEO Elon Musk has hit two moonshots, but the second award, once valued at $56 billion, was twice rescinded after a legal challenge. Taser stun gun and body camera company Axon Enterprise awarded its CEO Rick Smith a carbon copy of Musk’s deal in 2018 at a smaller magnitude. Smith blew the lights out and last year earned compensation valued at $165 million after growing the company’s market cap from $2.5 billion to $13.5 billion. Smith even brought his entire workforce along with him by sharing some of his pay with employees, negotiating a deal where $88 million in stock went to the lowest-paid workers at Axon. His moonshot is also open to Axon workers, allowing them to put some of their pay at risk in a way similar to Smith’s comp. He’s now on a second seven-year moonshot plan, but even Smith’s wife was against the notion at first, because she thought it was just too risky.
