Good morning! It’s Thursday, October 9, 2025, and this is The Morning Shift, your daily roundup of the top automotive headlines from around the world, in one place. This is where you’ll find the most important stories that are shaping the way Americans drive and get around.

In this morning’s edition, Elon Musk’s new pay package could get him heaps of money even if he misses most of Tesla’s goals, a fire at an aluminum plant is hitting Ford’s pickup production hard, Ineos wants to start building vehicles in the U.S. to avoid tariffs, and Hyundai is recalling 135,000 Santa Fes because of a pesky fire issue.

Tesla CEO Elon Musk attends the official opening of the new Tesla electric car manufacturing plant on March 22, 2022 near Gruenheide, Germany. – Pool/Getty Images

Back in September, Tesla directors offered CEO Elon Musk the biggest executive pay package in corporate history, which is a bit of a gamble to say the least. The board reassured its investors that Musk would have to achieve some “Mars-shot milestones” to earn the $878 billion in Tesla stock over 10 years. The proposal stated that the CEO would have to  “completely transform Tesla and society as we know it.” That means it would have to take a big step forward in robotics and autonomous driving. Its stock value and profits would also have to increase. If that sort of stuff didn’t happen, Musk would get “zero.”

Welp, that’s not the case. Apparently, Musk could still “earn” tens of billions of dollars without meeting most of those targets, according to a Reuters analysis of his performance goals, as well as more than a dozen experts in executive pay, company valuations, robotics and automotive trends like automotive driving. Tesla is very much Elon’s world, and everyone else is just living in it. From Reuters:

He could collect more than $50 billion by hitting a handful of the board’s easier goals that won’t necessarily revolutionize Tesla’s products or business, the Reuters review found.