Glass Lewis & Co. have urged stakeholders to vote down the exorbitant $56 million pay packet that Elon Musk might receive.
The proxy service advisor has criticized the billionaire, and Tesla’s shares tumbled 4% after a 71-page document was released, as reported by Bloomberg.
This document was adamantly opposed to Musk receiving the landmark payout, which, if it goes ahead, will be the biggest ever for an American CEO.
Musk $56 billion pay vote
Musk is asking shareholders to rethink the 2018 pay package recently snubbed in a federal court in Delaware. This was due to an original court decision that denied Musk a record windfall from stockholders.
Court Judge Kathaleen McCormick said the billionaire’s compensation package “wasn’t fair” when she threw out Musk’s most recent plea.
Commentators have viewed the CEO’s hunt for this windfall as an attempt to claw back the mass losses of the Twitter takeover, which has seen the social platform’s share value plummet.
She continued, saying the “defendants maintained that the plan is an exceptional deal when compared to private equity compensation plans, but they did not explain why anyone would compare a public company’s compensation plan with a private equity compensation plan. The defendants insisted that the plan worked in that it delivered to stockholders all that was promised, but they made no effort to prove causation.”
Musk’s response to his pay deal being binned was delivered on his social media platform X:
Never incorporate your company in the state of Delaware
— Elon Musk (@elonmusk) January 30, 2024
Glass Lewis has also said that Tesla shareholders would benefit from voting against the company’s move to incorporate the car manufacturer in Texas.
This was also wrapped up in the advisory firm’s criticism of Musk for a“slate of extraordinarily time-consuming projects.”
These projects include Musk’s obsession with xAI and being involved in the battle for the best artificial intelligence solution. The billionaire has whipped up close to $6 billion in support for the company in what has been a year dominated by AI investment.
As we reported earlier this year, Musk also recently had to hike his staff’s salaries to fend off poachers for top AI talent.
Tesla has also been in its rockiest form, as mass redundancies and price slashes of its vehicles dominated the press.
This really shows that Musk could use that $56 billion to improve the landscape of his many projects before time runs out for the billionaire.
Image: Ideogram.
