- In today’s CEO Daily: Amanda Gerut on CEO “moonshot” pay.
- The big story: More worries that the AI bull run is too narrow.
- The markets: U.S. Futures are up but global equities are otherwise mixed.
- Plus: All the news and watercooler chat from Coins2Day.
Good morning. If it seems like more CEOs are asking for—and getting—so-called “moonshot” pay packages, well, they are, as I reported in a recent feature for Coins2Day. A moonshot ties CEO compensation almost entirely to aggressive, seemingly impossible targets over five to 10 years. The upshot is often billions in compensation and slices of company ownership. But in the meantime, the CEO gets almost nothing.
Tesla CEO Elon Musk has hit two moonshots, but the second award, once valued at $56 billion, was twice rescinded after a legal challenge. Taser stun gun and body camera company Axon Enterprise awarded its CEO Rick Smith a carbon copy of Musk’s deal in 2018 at a smaller magnitude. Smith blew the lights out and last year earned compensation valued at $165 million after growing the company’s market cap from $2.5 billion to $13.5 billion. Smith even brought his entire workforce along with him by sharing some of his pay with employees, negotiating a deal where $88 million in stock went to the lowest-paid workers at Axon. His moonshot is also open to Axon workers, allowing them to put some of their pay at risk in a way similar to Smith’s comp. He’s now on a second seven-year moonshot plan, but even Smith’s wife was against the notion at first, because she thought it was just too risky.
Now, the trend is poised to spread beyond founder-CEOs like Smith to what Todd Sirras of executive compensation consulting firm Semler Brossy calls “founder-anointed successors.” For instance, Opendoor Technologies CEO Kaz Nejatian got a potential $2.8 billion moonshot and a slice of the company after he was hired last month. But Sirras’ concern is that big bets on a single CEO pose major risks to shareholders. Human beings are emotional and they get distracted easily thinking about what they can buy with all this stock, he said, like a new private jet.
He compared the potential rise of moonshot pay deals to the Jurassic Park film series. “Danger increases exponentially the closer these awards get to the general executive population,” Sirras said. While moonshots for founder-annointed successors and non-successors with a major capital investment he deems “inside the T-Rex fence”—“awards in non-founder companies means the dinosaurs have escaped and are heading to the mainland.” Read the full article here.—Amanda Gerut
Contact CEO Daily via Diane Brady at [email protected]
Top news
AI bull run is too narrow, Morgan Stanley exec says
Morgan Stanley Wealth Management’s chief investment officer Lisa Shalett warned that the U.S. Equity market’s remarkable run is built on a precariously narrow foundation: a surge in spending on, and optimistic assumptions about, infrastructure for artificial intelligence. This spending has fueled a boom in the shares of most of the so-called Magnificent 7 and a few dozen related businesses, which have now come to account for roughly 75% of the S&P 500’s returns since the rally began.
AI companies may be underinsured, legally
OpenAI and Anthropic may not be carrying enough insurance to pay all the legal claims against them from publishers whose work they have used to train their AI models, the FT reports. The companies may be required to use investor funds to pay off lawsuits. Kevin Kalinich, head of cyber risk at Aon, said “we don’t yet have enough capacity for [AI] providers”.
SoftBank will buy ABB robotics for $5.4 billion
“SoftBank’s next frontier is Physical AI. Together with ABB Robotics, we will unite world-class technology and talent under our shared vision to fuse Artificial Super Intelligence and robotics—driving a groundbreaking evolution that will propel humanity forward,” Masayoshi Son, founder of SoftBank, said.
Soybean farm crisis may need $24 billion bailout
China, in response to President Trump’s trade war, has refused to buy U.S. Soybeans this year, and it’s driving American farms into bankruptcy. Bailout packages for soy farms may cost taxpayers $24 billion, the WSJ reports, as the market for animal feed evaporates.
Trump says federal workers may not get shutdown back pay
“I would say it depends on who we’re talking about,” the president said yesterday, arguing that some workers “really don’t deserve to be taken care of, and we’ll take care of them in a different way.”
Red Lobster CEO’s recipe for a comeback
36-year-old Red Lobster CEO Damola Adamolekun is tasked with bringing the fast casual chain back to success following a tumultuous bankruptcy. He sees seafood boils and his own private equity savvy as ways ahead.
Wall Street economist’s tariff predictions
Wall Street economist Nathan Sheets told Coins2Day that the Trump Administration’s tariffs are unlike any we’ve seen “for many decades,” and could play out in two different ways. Retailers may subtly pass them off by raising prices during phases like the holiday season, though tariffs could also make some manufacturing unprofitable and bring about automation quicker.
Elsewhere: Attorney General Pam Bondi refused to answer questions about her treatment of files held by the Justice Department that relate to President Trump and Jeffrey Epstein … The E.U.Is considering new tariffs on steel imports by cutting the quota of steel that can be imported tariff-free and raising tariffs on the rest to 50% … Elon Musk’s Tesla launched two new, cheaper vehicles, priced at $40,000 for the Model Y and $37,000 for the Model 3.
The markets
S&P 500 futures were up 0.18% this morning. The index closed down 0.38% in its last session. STOXX Europe 600 was up 0.42% in early trading. The U.K.’s FTSE 100 was up 0.38% in early trading. Japan’s Nikkei 225 was down 0.45%. China’s CSI 300 was up 0.45%. The South Korea KOSPI was up 2.7%. India’s Nifty 50 was down 0.13% before the end of the session. Bitcoin fell to $122.6K.
Around the watercooler
Dizzying deal delirium: How the AI bubble bursts by Jeffrey Sonnenfeld and Stephen Henriques
Without data centers, GDP growth was 0.1% in the first half of 2025, Harvard economist says by Nick Lichtenberg
Legendary Apple designer Jony Ive wants to fix our relationships with the phones he helped created—and has up to 20 different OpenAI gadgets to do so by Marco Quiroz-Gutierrez
350 hiring managers gave their honest thoughts about Gen Z—and only 8% believe they’re ready for the workforce by Emma Burleigh
CEO Daily is compiled and edited by Joey Abrams and Jim Edwards.
