Shares of the luxury EV startup Lucid have dropped nearly two-thirds from their all-time high last year, but some well-timed moves helped CEO Peter Rawlinson take home $236 million last year.
Despite losing more than 67% of its value since the all-time-highs it hit in November, Bloomberg is reporting that the short-lived surge in the price of Lucid stock (NASDAQ: LCID) last year allowed the company’s CEO, Peter Rawlinson, to collect more than $260 million in what the company called, “performance-based awards.”
Like many car companies in the EV-era, Lucid hopes to motivate its top executive with bonuses tied to performance— the same way Tesla pays Elon. As such, the Lucid board chose to award Rawlinson approximately 13.8 million “time-based” restricted stock units (they’re not quite shares, but they’re not not shares) last March. Those units are scheduled to vest in the four years beginning at the end of 2021 (read: 2026), with Rawlinson getting an additional 16 million performance-based stock units. The company valued the entire award at $556 million, according to a filing on Thursday, making it one of the largest compensation packages paid to any executive last year.
After the company began public trading in July of last year, it soared to a market cap of $91 billion (higher than Ford or GM, both of which had actually delivered cars to customers prior to that point). Lucid’s market value remained high enough for long enough to enable Rawlinson to collect on four of the five tranches of his performance-based RSUs, according to a public filing.
Lucid Air Dream Edition
Rawlinson’s newly vested performance stock is worth $263 million at yesterday’s closing price in New York, and makes him one of the auto industry’s wealthiest executives. When approached by Bloomberg, a spokesperson for the Newark, California-based carmaker declined to comment.
Meanwhile, the company’s fortunes seem to be on the upswing. Despite falling stock prices and numerous supply chain issues exacerbated by the fighting in Ukraine, the government of Saudi Arabia committed to buying as many as 100,000 Lucid-built electric cars over the next ten years, which should ease the minds of any investors wondering about the company’s long-term prospects.
SOURCE | IMAGES: FORD.
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