Musk's Massive Pay Package, Trump Fires BLS Head, Stocks Rebound After Friday Sell-Off 8/4/25

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Carl Quintanilla (0:47)

Market Moving Insight and Analysis join Jim Cramer, David Faber and me, Carl Quintanilla on the opening bell hour of CNBC Squawk on the Street.

SPEAKER_4 (0:56)

Good Monday morning.

David Faber (0:57)

Welcome to another week. Squawk on the Street, David Faber.

Jim Cramer (1:02)

You're so enthusiastic.

David Faber (1:03)

Come on hot, man. Yeah. No, you're coming out hot. He's coming out hot. He's Jim Cramer. We're live from Postline at the New York Stock Exchange. Carl has them running off. Let's give you a look at futures as we get ready to start the trading week. Thirty minutes from now, we're looking for an up-open after a decidedly negative day on Friday. Let's get to our roadmap this morning. It begins with Tesla, which approves a massive interim compensation award for its CEO, Elon Musk. We'll give you details on that staggering number, talking about what it means for Musk and of course the EV maker and its many investors. Plus, we'll discuss the fallout from the president's decision to fire the chief of the Bureau of Labor Statistics after he did not like the weak jobs numbers. And the growing dominance of the Mag 7 versus the rest of the S&P 500 What are the stats signaling about this market?

All right, let's start this morning with that massive pay package that Tesla is awarding Elon Musk. And Jim, really what this is is only one third of the 2018 compensation package that he was awarded that was approved by shareholders once and then approved by shareholders again last June. Now, I've been covering this pretty closely, as our viewers probably recall. We're waiting still for the Delaware Supreme Court. They haven't even held the hearings yet on it to find out whether they will overturn the ruling of Chancellor McCormick, which even after the second approval by Tesla shareholders, at some almost 70% of those shareholders, she said it was not valid. And they got tired of waiting is what I've been hearing at this point. And they felt like with Musk certainly making noise, and we're going to share some of our interview that I did back in May with him on this very subject, that he would like a larger voting stake, that he hasn't been paid in a long period of time. They felt like they needed to do something. They are being, you know, I'm certainly hearing respectful of the court process, but they can't wait forever was the feeling. Because again, there's no guarantee that it's going to be heard at the Delaware Supreme Court anytime soon. If in fact it is, and they overturned Chancellor McCormick's ruling, and the 2018 pay package goes into effect, then this award goes away. So that's kind of where we stand right now. The numbers are staggering, but they've always been staggering. That 2018 comp package was insane, but it was based, remember at the time, on stock prices that were so far in excess of anything that anybody thought was possible, and then they were achieved. So that's kind of where it ends up. That's what the pay package from 2018 looks like. I've talked about this a lot. That's based on the closing price of Tesla right now. So that would be worth about $85 billion to him. What he got is roughly a third of that. Same exercise price, $23.34. What's that worth? About $26.8 billion at the current price. So yes, the numbers are staggering that equal the profits of the company over the last five years combined. This is what shareholders voted for.

Jim Cramer (4:10)

Look, I was doing some work for my book about whether you should have found Tesla.

And I have to admit you couldn't find it. You couldn't find it because it didn't seem like it was going to make it. I think people have to look back and remember the dire straits of what people thought. There were such a big short position.