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Just when I thought lawfare was out, they pull me back in.
So.. a Delaware judge has once again unilaterally decided to void Elon Musk's $50 billion pay package.
For those following along, the timeline goes something like this. The exact details may be a bit fuzzy, but I think I have the broad strokes correct:
Elon Musk and the board of Tesla sign a compensation agreement where if Tesla stock goes up by some outrageous amount, Elon Musk will get an enormous reward. But it it doesn't, Elon will get very little.
People laugh (ha!) because the targets are so outlandish that there is no way in a million years that Tesla could ever...
Tesla stock meets and exceeds the targets
Some asshat with like 8 shares of Tesla sues, claiming that the pay package harmed him even though the price of Tesla stock has gone up like 1000%.
A Delaware judge sides with the asshat and voids the compensation agreement.
Elon asks for a shareholder vote on the pay package and wins with 72% of the vote despite a politically motivated campaign to pressure big funds to vote against it.
It goes back to the judge who says, nope, still doesn't count.
The judge awards the lawyers for the plaintiffs $345 million
Basically what this means is that, if you register your company in Delaware, a judge can prevent you from making legally binding contracts. If you make the wrong enemies, your shares in a company can be stripped from you. The lawyers who sue you will make a fortune.
There's a folk belief in the United States that companies register in Delaware to avoid taxes somehow. I thought this myself, but when it came time to register my own company, I learned that this is not accurate. Registering in Delaware doesn't save you any money and actually costs you quite a bit ranging from maybe $300/year for a small corporation to perhaps $100,000 for large one. People register their companies in Delaware because there is the perception that there is a large body of case law that protects companies against frivolous lawsuits.
Obviously, this is over now. You'd be a fool to register a company in Delaware. To quote Paul Graham:
That the decision looks "boring" on some level says nothing about the motivation for it. It is not uncommon for arbitrary authority to cloak itself in the trappings of inevitable procedure... even when another authority could have come to a completely opposite decision based on the same procedure.
Anyway, it's $55B, not $10B, and if they'd awarded him a new grant there would have been various negaive accounting and tax consequences and in any case, there would immediately be a second shareholder lawsuit on the grounds that since the company had no obligation to pay Musk anything at all, the new grant constituted a gift to him and a violation of Tesla's fiduciary duty to its shareholders.
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