Tesla CEO Elon Musk won shareholder approval on Thursday (November 6, 2025) for the largest corporate pay package in history as investors endorsed his vision of morphing the EV maker into an AI and robotics juggernaut. The proposal was approved with over 75% support, and Mr. Musk bounded to the stage of the company’s annual meeting at its factory in Austin, Texas, accompanied by dancing robots.

Mr. Musk, already the world’s richest person, could get as much as $1 trillion in stock over the next decade, although required payments would take the value down to $878 billion. The vote is crucial for Tesla’s future and its valuation, which hangs on Mr. Musk’s vision of making vehicles that drive themselves, creating a robotaxi network across the U.S. and selling humanoid robots, even though his far-right political rhetoric has hurt the Tesla brand this year.

“What we are about to embark upon is not merely a new chapter of the future of Tesla, but a whole new book,” Mr. Musk told a cheering group of shareholders. Shareholders also reelected three directors on Tesla’s board and voted in favor of holding annual elections for all board members and a replacement pay plan for Mr. Musk’s services because a legal challenge has held up a previous package.

“Other shareholder meetings are like snoozefests, but ours are bangers,” Mr. Musk said. “I mean, look at this. This is sick.”

Shareholders voted in favor of Tesla investing in Mr. Musk’s artificial intelligence startup, xAI, though there were many abstentions.

Although conflict-of-interest concerns have arisen over Tesla’s possible investment in xAI, the move is seen as widely benefiting both companies as the EV maker’s self-driving ambitions hinge on critical AI prowess and xAI would gain from a major customer like Tesla.

A win for Mr. Musk was widely expected as the billionaire was allowed to exercise the full voting rights of his roughly 15% stake after the automaker moved to Texas from Delaware. Some major investors had opposed the plan, including Norway’s sovereign wealth fund and proxy firms Glass Lewis and Institutional Shareholder Services, saying the pay could decrease shareholder value.

Tesla’s board had said Mr. Musk could quit if the pay package was not approved.

The vote allays investor concern that Mr. Musk’s focus has been diluted with his work in politics as well as in running his other companies, including rocket maker SpaceX and xAI. The board and many investors who lent their endorsement have said the record-setting pay package benefits shareholders in the long run as Mr. Musk must ensure Tesla achieves a series of milestones to get paid.

“Will the growth offset these concerns of dilution – or – is this just giving Elon his wish of enough influence to shape the future of AI? That remains to be seen,” said Brian Mulberry, a senior client portfolio manager at Zacks Investment Management.

Goals for Mr. Musk over the next decade include the company’s delivering 20 million vehicles, having 1 million robotaxis in operation, selling 1 million robots and earning as much as $400 billion in core profit. But in order for him to get paid, Tesla’s stock value has to rise in tandem, first to $2 trillion from the current $1.5 trillion, and all the way to $8.5 trillion. Achieving each step – an operational goal and a valuation milestone – awards Mr. Musk 1% of stock. So the plan could still hand Mr. Musk tens of billions of dollars even if he falls short of most of its ambitious targets.

If Mr. Musk hits all of them, he would be eligible for 12% in stock, or about $1 trillion.

The true value of those shares would be $878 billion because the board wants to pay Mr. Musk only for increasing the company’s value. The package is structured to give Mr. Musk up to $1 trillion in shares – minus the value of the stock on the day the board passed the proposal in early September. Mr. Musk could either pay that amount in cash or accept fewer shares to account for their original value.

The value of the package is always a moving target because it would fluctuate based on changes in the stock price.

Mr. Musk has said he is interested in the higher voting stake he would get in Tesla as part of the pay package, more than the money, as he gears up to sell a “robot army.”

Amazon.com recovered for most users in the United States on Wednesday, according to outage tracking website Downdetector.com.

At the peak, more than 6,000 incidents were flagged for Amazon, Downdetector showed. That number has since dropped below 1,000, indicating a broad restoration of access.

Downdetector, which aggregates user-submitted reports, also noted that Amazon Web Services, the company’s cloud computing arm, experienced issues for a limited number of users.

“AWS services are operating normally,” a spokesperson for AWS told Reuters.

In October, AWS faced an internet outage that caused global turmoil among thousands of sites.

Apple plans to use a 1.2 trillion parameter artificial intelligence model developed by Google to help power an overhaul of the Siri voice assistant, Bloomberg News reported on Wednesday.

After an extensive evaluation, the companies are finalising a deal that would have Apple pay about $1 billion a year for access to Google’s technology, the report said.

The iPhone maker will use Google’s Gemini model as a stopgap until its own systems are ready, Bloomberg said. The model’s 1.2 trillion parameters, a measure of AI model complexity, would dwarf Apple’s current systems.

Apple and Alphabet did not immediately respond to Reuters requests for comment.

Google Maps is heading in a new direction with artificial intelligence sitting in the passenger’s seat.

Fueled by Google’s Gemini AI technology, the world’s most popular navigation app will become a more conversational companion as part of a redesign announced Wednesday.

The hands-free experience is meant to turn Google Maps into something more like an insightful passenger able to direct a driver to a destination while also providing nearby recommendations on places to eat, shop or sightsee, when asked for the advice.

“No fumbling required — now you can just ask,” Google promised in a blog post about the app makeover.

The AI features are also supposed to enable Google Maps to be more precise by calling out landmarks to denote the place to make a turn instead of relying on distance notifications.

AI chatbots, like Gemini and OpenAI’s ChatGPT, have sometimes lapsed into periods of making things up — known as “hallucinations” in tech speak — but Google is promising that built-in safeguards will prevent Maps from accidentally sending drivers down the wrong road.

All the information that Gemini is drawing upon will be culled from the roughly 250 million places stored in Google Maps’ database of reviews accumulated during the past 20 years.

Google Maps’ new AI capabilities will be rolling out to both Apple’s iPhone and Android mobile devices.

That will give Google’s Gemini a massive audience to impress — or disappoint — with its AI prowess, given the navigation app is used by more than 2 billion people around the world. Besides making it even more indispensable, Google is hoping the AI features will turn into a showcase that help gives Gemini a competitive edge against ChatGPT.

Prodded by OpenAI’s release of ChatGPT in late 2022, Google has been steadily rolling out more of its own technology designed to ensure its products continue to evolve with the upheaval being unleashed by AI.

The changes have included an overhaul of Google’s ubiquitous search engine that has de-emphasised a listing of relevant web links in its results and increasingly highlighted AI overviews and conversational responses provided through an AI mode.

OpenAI Chief Financial Officer Sarah Friar said an initial public offering is “not on the cards” for the near term, speaking at The Wall Street Journal’s Tech Live conference on Wednesday.

Friar said the AI startup is prioritizing growth and research over profitability and that its recent structural changes do not signal an imminent listing.

OpenAI did not immediately respond to a Reuters request for comment.

Last week, Reuters reported that OpenAI was laying the groundwork for an initial public offering that could value the company at up to $1 trillion.

Google is in early discussions to deepen its investment in Anthropic, the Business Insider reported on Wednesday, citing people familiar with the matter.

The new round of funding could value Anthropic at more than $350 billion, the report said.

Reuters could not immediately verify the report.