Rivian CEO RJ Scaringe could personally earn up to $4.6 billion over the next decade if the electric automaker hits specific profit and share price targets laid out in a new compensation package recently approved by his company’s board of directors.
The potential payout, which is earning comparisons to Elon Musk’s Tesla pay plan, likely never would have been possible had the 42-year-old Rivian founder — and his father — not made a “financially highly irrational” decision. In 2009, they took out a pair of second mortgages to secure the money needed to get the company off the ground.
Scaringe has said that he formed Rivian, initially named Mainstream Motors, the day after he earned his PhD in mechanical engineering from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in June 2009. He dreamed of starting an automotive business since childhood, when he helped a neighbor restore classic cars, and researched lower-emission combustion ignition engines as part of his PhD program at MIT’s Sloan Automative Lab.
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His first business project: building a hybrid sports car. But he lacked enough funding to launch a capital-intensive business: A car company can require “billions of dollars ... thousands of engineers [and] a manufacturing plant that would take years to build,” Scaringe said in an October 2024 interview at his undergraduate alma mater, Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute.
