A Delaware Court judge said this week that Elk Musk’s now-controversial $56bn (£47bn) pay award will not be reinstated. The decision comes after months of legal wrangling despite the award being approved by shareholders and directors in the summer.
Judge Kathleen McCormick upheld her January decision, in which she claimed that Musk had too heavily influenced the board members. Reacting to the verdict, Mr Musk wrote on X: “Shareholders should control company votes, not judges.” Tesla vowed to appeal against the ruling, saying the decision was “wrong.”
“This ruling, if not overturned, means that judges and plaintiffs’ lawyers run Delaware companies rather than their rightful owners – the shareholders,” the electric car company said in a post on X.
Judge McCormick said that the pay package would have been the largest ever for the boss of a listed company. Mr Musk, the boss of X (formerly Twitter), SpaceX, and Tesla, is the world’s richest person. According to the Bloomberg Billionaires Index, his current net worth is estimated at around $350bn.
He has made his views known across an extraordinary range of topics on his platform, and his status looks set to rise even further after Donald Trump’s triumph in the 2024 US presidential election. The new president has chosen Mr Musk to head a new Department of Government Efficiency (or Doge—as in the dog-related meme).
Trump has said Doge will help the administration “dismantle Government Bureaucracy, slash excess regulations, cut wasteful expenditures and restructure Federal Agencies.”
