Tesla's compensation package for Elon Musk could be worth as much as $824 billion rather than $1 trillion because the company's outstanding share count has increased since investors approved the plan in November, The Wall Street Journal reported. The structure includes a change-of-control clause under which half of the operational milestones tied to targets such as Full Self-Driving (FSD, Tesla's driver-assistance software) subscriptions, vehicle deliveries, Robotaxis, Optimus Robot and other goals would be treated as met if Tesla merges with or is acquired by another company. In that case, the final award would hinge on valuation thresholds, with the payout calculated using either the deal price or Tesla's market value immediately before the transaction, whichever is higher. The report said a roughly $8.5 trillion acquisition of Tesla would allow Musk to receive the full 424 million shares covered by the package. Ross Gerber, the Gerber Kawasaki co-founder, responded on X by calling the scenario "Fantastical abundance!" Musk separately dismissed a report that Tesla could sell its China business for a SpaceX merger as "Absurdly Fake News." The discussion comes as investor Gary Black of The Future Fund LLC said investors were "losing faith" in Tesla's ability to achieve unsupervised autonomy and questioned whether management believed the FSD system was safe enough to scale, while Musk promoted Starlink-enabled cars as the "only way" to provide high-speed bandwidth to billions of vehicles worldwide. Tesla shares rose 0.33% to $333.90 in pre-market trading on Wednesday.