The Vatican’s new leader has entered the debate over corporate wealth and inequality, singling out Tesla CEO Elon Musk’s record-breaking pay deal as an emblem of the widening gap between the rich and everyone else.

In his first media interview since becoming pontiff, published on Sunday by Crux, Pope Leo XIV said he was troubled by massive corporate compensation packages, arguing that they fuel global inequality and deepen polarization both within and outside the Catholic Church.

The Pope pointed to Musk’s proposed $1 trillion compensation plan as a prime example. “Yesterday, the news broke that Elon Musk is going to be the first trillionaire in the world. What does that mean, and what’s that about? If that is the only thing that has value anymore, then we’re in big trouble,” he said.

Tesla’s board unveiled the extraordinary package earlier this month, tying Musk’s payday to ambitious operational milestones: raising the carmaker’s valuation to $8.5 trillion, selling 12 million vehicles over the next decade, and deploying one million robotaxis.

Tesla Chair Robyn Denholm has defended the proposal, saying it is designed to keep Musk’s focus on Tesla’s long-term future despite his commitments to SpaceX, Neuralink, xAI, and his forays into politics.

“To me, the plan is super ambitious, and that is what motivates Elon,” Denholm told CNBC. Speaking to Bloomberg on Friday, she stressed that Musk “gets nothing if he doesn’t achieve the goals.”

Shareholders are set to vote on the package at Tesla’s annual meeting in November. If approved, it would cement Musk’s path toward becoming the world’s first trillionaire — a milestone that has stirred debate far beyond Wall Street.

A Troubled History of Musk’s Compensation Deals

This is not the first time Musk’s compensation has been the subject of intense scrutiny. Back in 2018, Tesla shareholders approved a $56 billion stock-based package, one of the largest in corporate history at the time. The deal, structured around 12 performance milestones, was hailed by Tesla’s board as a bold incentive to keep Musk focused on the company.

But the massive payout quickly triggered backlash. Many believed it was excessive, especially for a CEO who already owned a significant stake in Tesla. A group of investors later challenged the package in court, alleging that Tesla’s board had failed to exercise independent oversight and that Musk wielded outsized influence over directors.

Earlier this year, a Delaware judge struck down that 2018 pay package, ruling that the board’s approval process was “deeply flawed” and lacked fairness to shareholders. That legal setback forced Tesla’s board to revisit Musk’s compensation — setting the stage for the new $1 trillion proposal now under shareholder consideration.

The Pope’s Broader Warning

For Pope Leo, the issue is not Musk alone, but what his compensation represents. He recalled that “60 years ago, CEOs made maybe four to six times more than their workers, but now, according to the last figures I saw, it is 600 times more.” He described the widening disparity as a central force behind social and political divisions.

The Pope’s remarks echo concerns he raised in June at a summit of global leaders convened by the Catholic Church, where he called for a “more equitable distribution of resources.” Then, he warned that “the unacceptable disproportion between the immense wealth concentrated in the hands of a few and the world’s poor” fuels injustice and can “readily lead to violence and, sooner or later, to the tragedy of war.”

Leo XIV’s remarks have added embers to the raging debates over inequality – now increasingly intersecting with faith, ethics, and governance. As the first U.S.-born pope — a 69-year-old Chicago native who also holds Peruvian citizenship — his message carries both global and domestic resonance, especially against the backdrop of widening wealth gaps in the United States.

“Add on top of that a couple of other factors, one which I think is very significant, is the continuously wider gap between the income levels of the working class and the money that the wealthiest receive,” he said.

However, the November vote will test whether Tesla shareholders share Denholm’s belief that “super ambitious” targets justify an unprecedented payout, or whether the Pope’s warning about unchecked inequality resonates more widely.

Google is once again facing legal fire from the publishing world, this time over the company’s controversial AI Overviews. Penske Media Corporation (PMC), owner of titles including Rolling Stone, Billboard, Variety, Hollywood Reporter, Deadline, Vibe, and Artforum, has filed a lawsuit accusing the tech giant of illegally repurposing news content to generate AI summaries that undercut publishers’ business models.

The suit marks the first direct legal challenge against Google and its parent company, Alphabet, over the rollout of AI Overviews. It also signals that the search giant’s long-running tensions with publishers are far from over — only now, the battleground has shifted from traditional search links to AI-driven answers.

PMC’s lawsuit argues that Google has upended the long-standing “exchange of access for traffic” that sustains the open web. Publishers allow Google to crawl their sites in return for visibility and clicks. But with AI Overviews, PMC claims, Google is effectively consuming their journalism to provide instant summaries that reduce the need for users to click through.

“As a leading global publisher, we have a duty to protect PMC’s best-in-class journalists and award-winning journalism as a source of truth,” CEO Jay Penske said. “Furthermore, we have a responsibility to proactively fight for the future of digital media and preserve its integrity — all of which is threatened by Google’s current actions.”

The lawsuit goes further, accusing Google of using its dominance to “coerce PMC into permitting Google to republish PMC’s content in AI Overviews” and even to train its AI models.

PMC says it has already experienced “significant declines in clicks from Google searches since Google started rolling out AI Overviews,” which translates into losses across ad revenue, subscriptions, and affiliate deals.

“These revenue streams rely on people actually visiting PMC sites,” the filing states. The only way to opt out would be to withdraw from Google Search entirely — a move PMC calls “devastating.”

Google spokesperson José Castañeda rejected the claims, saying AI Overviews make search “more helpful” and in fact send traffic to a “greater diversity of sites.”

“Every day, Google sends billions of clicks to sites across the web, and AI Overviews send traffic to a greater diversity of sites,” Castañeda said. “We will defend against these meritless claims.”

A fight with precedent: from Google News to AI Overviews

The lawsuit echoes earlier showdowns between Google and publishers across the globe.

In Spain, Google shut down its Google News service in 2014 after a law required platforms to pay publishers for using snippets of their content. In France, Google was forced by antitrust regulators to negotiate licensing deals with publishers after years of disputes over the unpaid use of headlines and article previews. In Australia, the 2021 News Media Bargaining Code compelled Google and Facebook to strike agreements with local media companies to compensate them for content that drove platform engagement.

These earlier battles hinged on the same core issue — whether tech platforms profit disproportionately from journalism while undermining the traffic that sustains it. Now, publishers warn that AI Overviews pose an even greater threat by bypassing clicks altogether.

As the lawsuit puts it, Google’s new approach “cannibalizes or preempts search referrals.” Industry voices say this could erode the very foundation of digital journalism, with publishers losing not only advertising income but also subscriptions and brand visibility.

Google itself has inadvertently admitted that the overview undermines publishers’ traffic. In a filing submitted last week, ahead of a trial over its dominance in the advertising technology market, Google acknowledged that “the open web is already in rapid decline.” The admission, spotted by analyst Jason Kint and reported by Search Engine Roundtable, marks a sharp departure from the company’s upbeat public narrative.

Stakes for Google and the industry

For Google, defending AI Overviews is critical to its push to keep search competitive against Microsoft’s AI-powered Bing and a growing wave of generative AI startups. For publishers, the risk is existential: without traffic, they lose revenue, and without revenue, the ability to produce original journalism falters.

The timing adds to the pressure. Google recently avoided being broken up in a U.S. antitrust case, though a judge ruled the company illegally maintained its monopoly in search. European regulators are separately investigating whether AI Overviews violate competition law.

This suit is both a business defense and a symbolic stand for PMC. The company, by suing Google, is effectively declaring that previous fights over licensing were only the beginning — and that the legal showdown over how journalism is treated in the AI age is just getting underway.