Office Hours: Tomorrow's vote will decide whether Musk extorts Tesla shareholders for the biggest bonus in history
We'll know tomorrow, and in the potential litigation to follow
Friends,
Tomorrow, Tesla shareholders vote on whether to give Elon Musk a bonus worth about $50 billion. That’s roughly what Congress appropriated for Ukraine earlier this year after months of legislative and political negotiation.
The Delaware Chancery court has found that the bonus is excessive and wasn’t the product of negotiation between Tesla and Musk.
Several leading companies that advise shareholders on how to vote, including ISS and Glass Lewis, have recommended that shareholders reject it.
Several large institutional investors have already signaled a negative vote, including the giant California Teachers Retirement Fund.
Norway’s sovereign wealth fund — the eighth-largest Tesla shareholder — has said it will also vote against Musk’s bonus. (Nicolai Tangen, the fund’s chief executive, told the Financial Times, “We are seeing corporate greed reaching a level that we haven’t seen before and it’s really becoming very costly for shareholders in terms of dilution.”)
Yet Musk is extorting Tesla shareholders for the bonus, warning that if they don’t vote in favor of it, he’ll redirect his energies to some of the other companies he owns: X, his artificial intelligence startup xAI, The Boring Company, or SpaceX.
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