Such a dismaying level of capital expenditure — building brand-new factories would be immensely costlier for Tesla than it was for competing carmakers that invested in that capacity decades ago — would mean the company's stock price had better go up because its revenue would be wholly consumed by growth.You can see the disconnect, the required suspension of disbelief, the absolute commitment to the delusion of shareholder value satisfying all management requirements.

OK, maybe the Tesla stock pattern persists and somehow gets to a $650 billion market cap. If that's based on my martini-addled 5 million vehicles a year, and if Tesla can figure out how to actually make a profit on those cars, that's still 2 million fewer than GM achieved last year, with near-record sales in the US and actual record sales in China.

The Tesla board, with a straight face, is asking shareholders to vote for this.

I know, I know. Amazon. There's your $600 billion-plus market cap with infrequent profits, the visionary CEO, the remaking of an entire business sector (retail), and the creation of unforeseen enterprises, from cloud computing to virtual voice assistants.

Sorry, but this is a carmaker we're talking about, despite the Tesla board's insistence that it's the "world's first vertically integrated sustainable energy company."

And the wild notion that Tesla will get to $650 billion relies on the idea that, like Amazon, Tesla will dominate the auto industry in the coming years, though nearly every other car company in the world is enjoying robust sales and epic profits and rapidly expanding into new competitive areas beyond Tesla's bread and butter, electric vehicles, which now make up just 1% of the global market.

I won't even get into the wild ride that Tesla investors would be signing on for, given the stock's history of dizzying volatility, with routine swings of $100 a share in either direction.

Critics on Wall Street routinely knock the shareholder-value theory because it ignores the duty that companies have to customers, employees, society, and, increasingly, the environment. If executives are rewarded based on the stock price's going up, these critics say, they'll fall into the short-term trap of making that their only job.

The brave new world of Tesla's stock

The Tesla proposal is shareholder value taken to a surreal new frontier.

Despite running a relatively mature business in a capital-intensive industry that shows no signs of achieving any goals anytime soon, Musk has crafted a story that investors now value at almost $60 billion. The board is betting he can pump another $600 billion into that yarn.

I should note that the overt nuttiness of this in no way invalidates Musk's mission to use Tesla and SolarCity to accelerate humanity's exit from the fossil-fuel era. If he pulls it off, we'll all benefit.

And over the past few months, after reporting on Tesla for over a decade, I've come to appreciate the theory that investing in Tesla is a way of forcing the auto industry to embrace Musk's master plan. In that way, society shares in the win at no cost — Tesla's stockholders are footing the bill and assuming the risk.

But beyond the fact that, if approved, this compensation proposal sets Musk up for a monumental failure and could be read by cynics as the board gesturing toward a leadership change, what's troubling about it is that it makes Tesla's story all about its finances, not about its products.

Why would you spend a single dollar on a Tesla vehicle, which will depreciate to zero, when you could use it to buy Tesla stock and watch it appreciate to infinity and beyond?

Expecting too much from Musk

This is happening at a critical moment when many Tesla observers, myself included, see a company whose core business of building and selling $100,000 all-electric vehicles looks potentially quite solid and sustainable, but whose more adventurous aspects, especially the Model 3, are stalled.

Musk isn't one to settle, so it's unlikely he'd call off the Model 3 and fall back on the core business for a few years. But his new pay package ensures he'll do nothing to align Tesla's share price with what the company is worth based on a rational analysis of its operations.

Not for nothing, it also implies a nearly constant dilution of shareholders — including Musk, who owns 20% of the company — through many, many additional capital raises in the coming years.

Tesla critics are almost always wrong. They were wrong about the company going out of business in 2008, wrong about it being unable to create a market for electric cars, wrong about it entering the mass market with the Model 3, wrong about the stock going down.

The temptation, given that pattern, is to assume Tesla is invulnerable. Up to this point, the company — and Musk in particular — has resisted that conclusion. Not anymore.