NEW YORK – Imagine if someone exited a government role with a literal black eye, managed a company facing dwindling profits, and found themselves under the scrutiny of federal investigators. Most would agree they’re enduring a rough year.

However, Elon Musk is not most people.

Despite these challenges, the world’s wealthiest individual, Elon Musk, has only seen his fortunes rise. Tesla, his electric vehicle empire, is set to potentially make him even richer. Shareholders are contemplating approving a lucrative trillion-dollar compensation package for Musk, banking on his ambitious visions including a “robot army” and other technological marvels, despite some previous promises still awaiting fulfillment.

“Elon Musk’s brilliance lies in steering investors’ focus towards Tesla’s potential future, spanning five or ten years, while they overlook immediate hurdles,” explains Garrett Nelson from CFRA Research. Brian Mulberry from Zacks Investment offers a more candid take, saying, “An average CEO would likely not endure this.”

At the year’s onset, Musk took on an additional role, aiming to slash $2 trillion in government expenditures as the head of President Donald Trump’s Department of Government Efficiency. However, this ambitious goal was soon halved. Ultimately, DOGE claimed to have saved $240 billion, though these figures are notoriously unreliable. Moreover, the Trump administration finds itself in a bind, as it scrambles to refill crucial positions that DOGE had cut, potentially jeopardizing those savings.

“There is a pattern of them announcing great big firings, and then turning about and saying, ’No, that’s a mistake,’” said Elaine Kamarck, a Brookings Institute senior fellow who has compiled a list of 17,000 positions being refilled. “They cut without a plan, without regard to function.”

Musk used the same slash-and-burn tactics after he took over Twitter and evidence of that backfiring has emerged this year, too.

In the past two months, he’s settled a pair of lawsuits filed by 2,000 former Twitter employees and executives alleging that they were pushed out under false pretenses or never given severance as promised. The amount the ex-workers got was undisclosed, but if they received even a fraction of the combined $628 million they were demanding, the cost will cut deeply for a company whose advertising has plunged since his takeover.

More bad news for Musk came Wednesday when Tesla announced earnings had plunged 37% in the third quarter. Vehicle sales rose 6% as customers rushed to take advantage of a federal tax credit before it expired last month, but the figure for the full year is expected to drop significantly as car buyers turned off by Musk’s right-wing political stances have boycotted the business.

This time a year ago Musk was telling investors sales could grow 20% to 30%.

The stock fell earlier this year as the bad news piled up. But after Musk appeared in the Oval Office in May for his farewell to DOGE sporting a shiner, it has doubled and is now posting a year-to-date gain of nearly 9% after the close of regular trading Wednesday. His net worth has also jumped — up $62 billion this year to $483 billion, according to Forbes magazine.

Investors are mostly buying Musk’s line that plunging car sales don’t matter as much now because the future of the company lies more with his new driverless robotaxis service, the energy storage business and building robots for the home and factory. To make his task worth while, Tesla’s directors are asking shareholders to sign off on his enormous new pay package at an annual meeting next month.

But there are big questions surrounding these endeavors, particularly the driverless cabs.

Musk’s robotaxis, which began picking up passengers in Austin, Texas, and San Francisco this summer, can’t yet be called driverless because they still require “safety monitors” who are ready to seize control in case something goes wrong, which occasionally happens. One of them drove down the opposing lane, for example.

The robotaxi plans need approval from regulators in various states even as the ones in Washington have swarmed the company.

They’ve opened four investigations into Tesla so far this year, including one into why it hasn’t reported accidents involving its self-driving software quickly to the government as required. Another launched earlier this month is looking into dozens of reported accidents in which Teslas using self-driving software ran red lights and broke other traffic rules, occasionally crashing into other vehicles and causing injuries.

Musk has disappointed before, talking big and missing deadlines repeatedly, only to deliver for shareholders eventually. Tesla investors who held on through a tough 2018 as the company struggled to produce its Model 3 vehicle at a profit, eventually saw their stock soar as sales jumped.

One money manager who rode that earlier surge then bought again earlier this year, says she’s confident Musk’s magic is still there and he can pull off the seemingly impossible again.

“He frequently teeters on the edge of disaster,” said Nancy Tengler in a statement, “and then pulls back just in the nick of time.”

One difference now is most other Tesla investors also believe this and have bought up the stock, leaving little room for error.

Shares of U.S. companies in the S&P 500 index are valued at 24 times what investors expect them to earn next year. By contrast, Tesla is trading at 250 times expected profits, enough to make you believe that Musk, instead of having a very bad year is having a spectacular one.