Tesla redefines FSD subscriptions to boost Musk's pay package

Tesla now reports 1.74 million active Full Self-Driving subscriptions, a 67% increase from a year ago. This metric follows the 2025 CEO Performance Award and includes both upfront payments and monthly subscriptions. This means owners who bought FSD outright, even years ago, are counted as subscribers. This matters because reaching 10 million active FSD subscriptions is one of the milestones Elon Musk must hit to earn his 2025 pay package.

Tesla stopped selling FSD as a one-time purchase on February 14, 2026. New customers can only get it as a subscription, at $99 a month in the US. However, everyone who paid upfront before that, at prices that reached $15,000, stays in the count as long as the car is active. The only exclusion is free trials. Tesla did not disclose how many of the 1.74 million are still paying every month.

The same approach appears elsewhere in the letter. Tesla’s “cumulative deliveries” figure, now 10.2 million, also counts “any unsupervised Robotaxis placed into commercial operation,” again to match the pay package, which has a 20 million vehicle milestone.

Tesla says more than 75% of new deliveries in North America included FSD subscriptions in Q3, “a nearly twenty percentage point sequential increase.” It says it believes “FSD is driving demand in markets where it is available.” This is a big number, and Tesla doesn’t define it. The letter doesn’t say whether it counts subscriptions started at delivery with an introductory offer, or how many of those buyers are still paying after a few months. The active-subscription metric excludes free trials, but Tesla doesn’t say the same about the attach rate.

Musk’s 2025 award has 12 tranches. Each requires a market cap milestone and one operational milestone. The operational list includes 20 million vehicles delivered, 10 million active FSD subscriptions, 1 million Optimus robots, 1 million robotaxis in commercial operation, and adjusted EBITDA targets. As of June 30, Tesla considered only one of them probable: 20 million deliveries.

Tesla added 260,000 net FSD subscriptions in Q3, its best quarter yet. At that pace, it would take about eight years to reach 10 million. At the pace of the last 12 months, about 700,000 a year, it would take closer to 12. The award runs until 2035.