Rick Smith, Axon Enterprise's founder and chief executive, is the undisputed king of the Taser market. Every 30 seconds, he says, one of his Tasers is fired by somebody in the U.S., usually a police officer.
Smith spent the past two decades growing the weapons maker into a policing-software firm. Now, he's on a mission to make Axon an AI powerhouse, and the pay package he and his board put together catapulted him to the top of last year's list of the highest-paid CEOs, with a compensation package valued at $164.4 million.
At first glance, Smith has fallen to near the bottom of the charts this year, with total pay of $40,001, nearly all of it in salary. Only Jack Dorsey, with his $2.75 a year, is ranked lower. That was part of Axon's plan: The giant equity package it granted him in 2024 was designed to last seven years, growing -- potentially astronomically -- if the company hit its targets, and potentially vanishing if it didn't.
Smith has already hit three of seven goals. At the end of 2025, Axon estimated the shares underlying the full award could be worth nearly $386 million.
Axon's share price fell 6% last year, severely lagging behind the S&P 500, which analysts attributed in part to wider concerns about AI disrupting the software industry. It has continued to drop this year, but the company said share-price declines haven't unwound targets Smith already hit. Analysts remain optimistic about the company's prospects, saying Axon is too deeply entrenched in the policing market to be easily displaced.
"They are the proverbial 800-pound gorilla in the room, and so it's hard to move them out of the way," said Trevor Walsh, a senior research analyst at Citizens.
Smith, 56, is pressing forward with a new wave of AI tools that he says will revolutionize modern policing, including one that drafts police reports from body-camera audio and another that can answer policy questions mid-arrest. Axon's revenue from AI products is up more than 700% from last year.
Critics of the company say Axon has skirted serious safety concerns. Some ideas, like Taser-equipped drones in classrooms, drew swift backlash from the public.
Smith says technology is key to reducing fatal shootings. He acknowledges some of his proposals seem far out -- but says it is only a matter of time before people see how quickly the technological landscape is shifting.
"Most businesses are going to move too slow, because nobody wants to be seen as crazy," he said. "You just have to be a Kool-Aid drinker that's like, 'Hey, this exponential stuff is gonna pay off.'"
More than 18,000 law-enforcement agencies across 100 countries -- including most major police departments in the U.S. -- use Axon products, according to the company. Most pay an annual subscription for each officer. New tech, including virtual-reality training and drones, costs more.
At the Milwaukee Police Department, "officers touch an Axon product all throughout their shift," said Lt. Seann Cleveland. He added the 1,600-person department has about $15 million in Axon contracts.
But Cleveland said the city isn't ready to go all in on AI. He has seen officers reject high-tech solutions before, and he doesn't want to invest more until it is clear there is enough buy in.
Smith is confident people will catch up to his vision. Take body cameras. When Axon started developing body cameras, Smith assumed the police and the public would immediately grasp the virtues of recording interactions with law enforcement. But police departments were wary of being constantly surveilled. Some of Axon's own employees accused Smith of gambling the company's future on something no one wanted.
At a company meeting in 2013, he drew a line in the sand. He invoked U.S. Gen. George Patton and Hernán Cortés, the Spanish conquistador who famously destroyed his own ships so his soldiers couldn't retreat.
"I wanted to have something kind of dramatic that's like, 'Guys, there is no halfway,'" Smith said, adding that some people left the company. "We're either going to succeed or die trying."
Smith ultimately wouldn't be proven right until August 2014, when a police officer killed 18-year-old Michael Brown in Ferguson, Mo. The murky, sometimes contradictory accounts of the fatal shooting led to widespread calls for body cameras. A year later, the Justice Department awarded more than $20 million in grants to equip departments across the country.
By the first quarter of 2026, Axon's body cameras had collected more than 60 million hours of footage, according to the company. Such footage is now a routine part of criminal investigations, and has been used to defend both officers and victims from accusations of wrongdoing.
Smith also envisions robots and Taser-equipped drones that could be deployed in high-risk scenarios, and published a graphic novel depicting use cases. It has been controversial for Axon. Previous plans to pursue that technology, in the wake of the mass shooting at a school in Uvalde, Texas, led to the resignation of more than half of the company's ethics board.
Axon said it continues to believe robotics and autonomous technology could improve public safety, but the company has no plans to develop Taser drones for schools.
More AI-embedded products could have disastrous consequences, such as a hallucination in an AI-generated police report, said Jay Stanley, a senior policy analyst at the ACLU's speech, privacy and technology project. He is also concerned about products that use AI to filter through massive quantities of video, which can vastly expand law enforcement's surveillance capabilities.
"Having the government watch everything everybody does, looking over our shoulder literally and figuratively at all times, creates enormous opportunities for abuse," Stanley said.
Axon said its products aren't intended for continuous surveillance, and are instead designed for first responders to have as much information as possible when responding to a crisis.
"We recognize that reasonable people can disagree about where the boundaries should be," the company said. "That is precisely why we believe these technologies should be developed transparently."
Smith said the company can make policing safer, by giving officers more information and better tools than guns.
"We are giving our customers genuine superpowers," Smith told investors. "The ability to do things that simply were not possible before."
Write to Victoria Albert at victoria.albert@wsj.com
(END) Dow Jones Newswires
June 28, 2026 11:00 ET (15:00 GMT)
Copyright (c) 2026 Dow Jones & Company, Inc.
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