Musk opts for 99.9% salary reduction

Elon Musk, the technology wunderkind who is easily one of South Africa's most successful commercial exports, has seen his pay package plunge 99.9%.

This 42-year-old co-founder of Tesla Motors, PayPal and Space Exploration Technologies (SpaceX) - which plans to produce rockets for commercial flights into space and eventually colonise Mars - has insisted on being paid only $1 a year for his services.

But, thanks to Canadian minimum wages being fairly strict, Tesla Motors still awarded him $33280 last year.

Musk grew up in Pretoria, and attended Pretoria Boys High before moving to Canada at the age of 17 in 1988 to avoid doing national service.

Now he lives in California, and his net worth is estimated at about $10-billion, according to Bloomberg's Billionaires index.

Most of Musk's wealth has come from starting and owning companies rather than getting a salary.

He is Tesla's biggest shareholder with a 23% stake, and owns large chunks of SpaceX and SolarCity.

The alarming 99.9% fall in his salary is no reflection on his performance, however.

Rather, it reflects the fact that Tesla awarded him share options the previous year of $78.1-million, compared with only $36709 last year.

That large chunk of share options given to him in 2012 was meant to be his compensation for a 10-year term, based on achieving specific goals.

One of those goals was for Tesla's market capitalisation to hit $43.2-billion by 2022 - nearly double it's $25.8-billion now.

Still, Tesla's market capitalisation has already swollen sixfold from $3.9-billion in January last year.