Tesla shares slide after judge voids Elon Musk's $56 billion compensation

L4sBot@lemmy.worldmod to Technology@lemmy.world – 182 points – Elon Musk's $56 billion Tesla compensation voided by judge, shares slide
cnbc.com

Tesla shares slide after judge voids Elon Musk's $56 billion compensation::The compensation package the Tesla board gave CEO Elon Musk set a record for publicly traded corporations, a Delaware judge noted in her ruling.

12

You are viewing a single comment
View all comments

Tesla and Musk’s attorneys, the court decided, “were unable to prove that the stockholder vote was fully informed because the proxy statement inaccurately described key directors as independent and misleadingly omitted details about the process.”

I'm guessing this was the key problem. Courts are very reluctant to set aside corporate decisions like CEO pay packages for soft reasons like general unfairness. But when you start getting into dishonesty and not meeting basic requirements, it's kind of forcing the judge's hand.

Full decision for those interested, it's long. I like this part:

Defendants also argue that Musk needed additional incentives to stay on at Tesla or he would spend more time at SpaceX, where he could fulfill his galactic ambitions to establish interplanetary travel, colonize Mars, and potentially earn more money in the meantime.858 That argument begs another question: if encouraging Musk to prioritize Tesla over his other ventures was so important, why not place guardrails on how much time or energy Musk had to put into Tesla?

Defendants also argue that Musk needed additional incentives to stay on at Tesla or he would spend more time at SpaceX, where he could fulfill his galactic ambitions to establish interplanetary travel, colonize Mars, and potentially earn more money in the meantime.

Not like he even actually does anything at Tesla anyway, between all the people they've got to babysit him and his spending all his time shit posting on Twitter.

If a person can be the CEO of multiple companies, but normal humans aren’t generally allowed to hold two of the same job “because it means we’re not giving either job our full focus”, then it stands to reason that the job of CEO doesn’t require anything approaching the full focus of a human, and thus they are being overpaid by multiple orders of magnitude.

But we already knew all that.

It's not uncommon for a CEO to sit on other boards or multiple of them. I really never saw how C class positions were as demanding as people revered them to be.