Tesla CEO Elon Musk has hit two moonshots, but the second award, once valued at $56 billion, was twice rescinded after a legal challenge.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 billion 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 diane.brady@fortune.com

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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.