Tesla has granted Tom Zhu, its Senior Vice President of Automotive and one of the most critical executives at the company, a massive new stock option package covering over $226 million worth of shares.
According to a new SEC filing released yesterday, Zhu received 520,021 stock options with a strike price of $435.80. The grant date was January 8, 2026.
While stock options technically have zero intrinsic value at the moment they are granted (since the strike price is the market price at the time), the face value of the shares underlying the options is approximately $226.6 million.
To realize that value, Zhu will need to stick around. The filing reveals a long-term vesting schedule:
“1/48th of the shares subject to the option will become vested and exercisable on April 5, 2027, and 1/48th of the shares subject to the option shall become vested and exercisable each month thereafter.”
This means the package is effectively a five-year retention plan, with the options fully vesting by March 2031.
To realize value on this package, Tesla’s stock price will have to increase by that date.
Who is Tom Zhu?
Zhu has long been considered the guy who gets things done at Tesla, where he has worked for more than a decade at this point. He famously led the construction and ramp-up of Gigafactory Shanghai, which quickly became Tesla’s most productive factory.
He has been partly responsible for Tesla’s success in China.
In early 2023, Electrek exclusively reported on Zhu’s meteoric rise, where he was brought over to the US to oversee North American sales and the struggling ramp of Gigafactory Texas. For a while, he was effectively Elon Musk’s No. 2, managing global automotive operations while Musk was distracted with Twitter (now X).
There were reports in 2024 that Zhu might return to China as Musk “isolated himself” at the top, but his day-to-day role at Tesla is not exactly clear today.
One thing is clear: he is one of only two “critical execs” at Tesla not named Elon Musk.
Public companies have to report stock transactions to the SEC for executive officers (C-suites) or critical executives, as well as for the board members.
The number of executive officers at Tesla outside the CEO is down to two: Zhu and CFO Vaibhav Taneja. This is unprecedented for a major company such as Tesla, but the number has been going down at other “Mag 7” companies as well as they figured they don’t have to report if they simply don’t call them “executive officers”.
Nonetheless, Google has 3, Apple and NVIDIA each have 4, and Microsoft has 5.
A drop in the bucket compared to Elon
While a $200 million-plus package is massive for almost any automotive executive, it pales in comparison to what Tesla shareholders recently signed off on for CEO Elon Musk.
In late 2025, shareholders approved a new compensation structure for Musk that includes the “2025 CEO Performance Award” and the ratification of previous packages, potentially worth hundreds of billions, and up to $1 trillion if extremely aggressive targets are met.
Comparatively, Zhu’s package is modest, but it serves a different purpose: stability. With Musk splitting time between Tesla, SpaceX, xAI, and Neuralink, retaining a hands-on operator like Zhu is critical for the day-to-day execution of Tesla’s 2026 goals, including the robotaxi rollout and the continued ramp of the Cybertruck.
Electrek’s Take
I would argue that, stock price aside, Zhu is way more important at Tesla than Musk. And yet, he gets a deal worth a fraction of what Elon got and at a strike price near Tesla’s all-time high.
There’s simply no way to justify Elon’s latest package deal one way or the other, but let’s say that Tesla would have decided to allocate $250 billion worth to existing employees and $250 billion worth to attract top talent; there would still be $500 billion worth for Elon.
But that wouldn’t be enough to motivate him? Please.
This company and its board are a joke at this point. A stock-pumping machine that exists to enrich Elon, but it does produce a few nice electric cars, just fewer and fewer every year.
FTC: We use income earning auto affiliate links. More.
