It’s not as if the Tesla Corporation is going to hand Elon Musk a trillion dollar coin and wish him a good day, but the shareholders of the corporation have approved a compensation package that could, ultimately, pay Musk a trillion dollars. Does that mean he’ll perform 1000 times better than if he was paid a measly billion? Maybe. On the one hand, the shareholders, who are the owners of the corp, think so. On the other hand, can there ever be such a thing as too much, even if the shareholders approve?

At Tesla, based in the Austin, Texas, area, shareholders have largely bought into a winner-takes-all version of capitalism, agreeing by a wide margin to give Mr. Musk shares worth almost a trillion dollars if the company under his management achieves ambitious financial and operational goals over the next decade.

Notably, it’s not for a year, but over ten years. Also notably, it requires that Musk meet goals that seem almost impossible to meet. Then again, it would be foolish to count Musk out when it comes to reaching ridiculously improbable goals. That he’s accomplished what he’s accomplished thus far might have seemed ridiculous improbable a decade ago, yet here we are.

“Those who claim the plan is ‘too large’ ignore the scale of ambition that has historically defined Tesla’s trajectory,” the Florida State Board of Administration said in a securities filing describing why it voted for Mr. Musk’s pay plan. “A company that went from near bankruptcy to global leadership in E.V.s and clean energy under similar frameworks has earned the right to use incentive models that reward moonshot performance.”

So what does Musk have to do to pocket that payday?

Much like an earlier pay plan that Tesla shareholders approved in 2018, this 12-step package asks Mr. Musk, the company’s chief executive, to vastly expand Tesla’s stock market valuation — to $8.5 trillion from around $1.4 trillion — while hitting a variety of other goals. Those include selling one million robots with humanlike qualities and 10 million paid subscriptions to the company’s self-driving software.

There are inherent questions raised by these incentives dealing with whether any of these products are good ideas at all. Do we really want or need a million humanoid robots? Are self-driving cars a good thing at all? And if Musk can pull it off, making Tesla shareholders tons of money in the process, why shouldn’t Musk get his piece of the pie?

This comes in juxtaposition to the tax-the-rich mayor-elect in New York City, who finds it unforgivable that some people make a cool mil while others can’t afford to live in the City. Zohran Mamdani’s scheme is to redistribute wealth to pay for a laundry list of freebies that will make life easier, if not viable, for the poor. From his perspective, every billionaire reflects a failure of the system, as if it’s a crime to be wealthy. Of course, from his perspective, no one deserves such extreme wealth, so it is, in a way, criminal. The rich have gotten their wealth off the backs of the hard-working poor, who struggle in a rigged game while the rich “steal” the benefits of their labor.

But is there a limit? Much as a capitalist society enables a person, whether by hard labor and good fortune. or being in the right place at the right time, or having the correct surname, to amass vast wealth, why should it be any different to be worth a billion or a trillion? Then again, to be a billionaire is a big deal. It’s a lot of money. A huge amount of money, pretty much enabling person to have anything he wants. And a trillion is, if my math skills serve, a thousand times greater.

Having such extreme wealth not only enables a person to enjoy whatever material goods strike his fancy, but to exert a level of influence and control that skews the workings of our institutions. Don’t like what the media reports? Buy it. Don’t like when people call you mean names? Hire a boatload of lawyers to sue them, even if the suits are frivolous, and shift a cost onto others to defend themselves that they can’t afford and could well ruin them, even though they’re right.

There is also the Citizens United factor, although throwing millions into a political campaign didn’t do Musk much good in the Wisconsin Supreme Court race. Or the time Musk ran the million dollar lottery to buy people’s support, even if that swiftly ran afoul of the law. Still, he didn’t miss any meals for having squandered a fortune on a pathetic loss.

Is there an upper limit, an amount of wealth so great that no one should be allowed to amass it? In a capitalist society, the answer is plain: Of course not, as any person is entitled to amass as much wealth as he can. Sure, the optics are ugly as hell, but since when do trillionaires worry about how they look to the little people? But from a structural perspective, there reaches a point where wealth is so extreme, so vast, that the guardrails can no longer restrain a person’s worst impulses.

At the moment, there are about 900 billionaires in the United States. And there is one man who might be a trillionaire. And then there are the rest of us. Does it ever reach the point where enough is enough? And if Musk is worth a trillion dollar compensation package, can others survive on less? No major corporate CEO wants to look like a second-stringer to Musk.