Tesla CEO Elon Musk loses bid to get $56 billion pay package reinstated
Tesla CEO Elon Musk lost his bid to get his 2018 CEO pay package reinstated on Monday when a Delaware judge upheld her prior ruling that the compensation plan was improperly granted.
Tesla CEO Elon Musk lost his bid to get his 2018 CEO pay package reinstated on Monday when a Delaware judge upheld her prior ruling that the compensation plan was improperly granted.
The package, worth about $56 billion, was the largest compensation plan in U.S. history for a public company executive. Tesla said in a post on X, that it plans to appeal the ruling, which Musk, in a separate post on his social media site, called “absolute corruption.”
In January, Chancellor Kathaleen McCormick voided the pay plan, ruling that Musk had individually “controlled Tesla” and dictated the terms of his compensation to a board that didn’t fairly negotiate. She called the process leading to approval of that pay plan “deeply flawed.”
Following the opinion, Tesla conducted a shareholder vote in June 2024 at its annual meeting in Austin, Texas, asking investors to “ratify” Musk’s 2018 CEO pay plan. Musk’s attorneys attempted to sway the judge to reverse her opinion after the trial, leaning on the results of that vote.
McCormick wrote in her opinion on Monday that, “Even if a stockholder vote could have a ratifying effect, it could not do so here.” She added that, “Were the court to condone the practice of allowing defeated parties to create new facts for the purpose of revising judgments, lawsuits would become interminable.”
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