Elon Musk takes stand in $56 billion Tesla pay trial

WILMINGTON, Del. — Elon Musk, identified for his combative testimony, is ready to take the stand in a Delaware courtroom on Wednesday to defend towards claims that his $56 billion Tesla Inc pay package deal was based mostly on straightforward to attain efficiency targets and affect with the board of administrators.

Tesla shareholder Richard Tornetta sued Musk and the board in 2018 and hopes to show that Musk used his dominance over the electrical car maker’s board to dictate phrases of the package deal, which didn’t require him to work at Tesla full-time.

Musk’s testimony earlier than Chancellor Kathaleen McCormick comes as he’s struggling to supervise a chaotic overhaul of Twitter Inc, the social media platform he was pressured to purchase for $44 billion in a separate authorized battle earlier than the identical decide after making an attempt to again out of that deal.

Musk, the world’s richest particular person, tweeted this week that he was remaining at Twitter’s San Francisco headquarters across the clock till he mounted the corporate’s issues.

Tornetta has requested the courtroom to rescind the 2018 package deal, which Tornetta’s lawyer Greg Varallo mentioned was $20 billion bigger than the annual gross home product of the state of Delaware.

The authorized crew for Musk and the Tesla administrators, who’re additionally defendants, have solid the pay package deal as a set of audacious targets that labored by driving 10-fold progress in Tesla’s inventory worth, to greater than $600 billion from round $50 billion.

They’ve argued the plan was developed by unbiased board members, suggested by exterior professionals and with enter from giant shareholders.

On Monday and Tuesday, the courtroom received a style of Musk’s testimony by quick clips from his 2021 deposition within the litigation. In a single clip, Musk dismissed the concept that the board ought to have mentioned requiring that he spend extra time with Tesla.

“That might have been foolish,” mentioned Musk, who can be the chief govt of rocket firm SpaceX and based tunneling enterprise The Boring Co.

Musk has a historical past of combative testimony and sometimes seems disdainful of attorneys who ask probing questions. He has known as opposing attorneys “reprehensible,” questioned their happiness and accused them of “extortion.”

Final yr, Musk instructed a lawyer for a shareholder suing him over the 2016 acquisition of SolarCity that he was “a nasty human being.”

Musk may also present his appeal in courtroom. He apologized from the stand to a British diver who he known as “pedo man” in a tweet and who sued Musk for defamation. The jury within the case discovered Musk didn’t defame the diver.

The disputed Tesla package deal permits Musk to purchase 1% of Tesla’s inventory at a deep low cost every time escalating efficiency and monetary targets are met. In any other case, Musk will get nothing.

Tesla has hit 11 of the 12 targets, in accordance with courtroom papers.

Shareholders typically can not problem govt compensation as a result of courts sometimes defer to the judgment of administrators. The Musk case survived a movement to dismiss as a result of it was decided he could be thought of a controlling shareholder, which implies stricter guidelines apply.

“There isn’t any case during which a 21.9% shareholder who can be the chief govt has obtained a structured payout plan of this magnitude,” Lawrence Cunningham, a company regulation professor at George Washington College, mentioned of the shortage of precedent.

(Reporting by Tom Hals in Wilmington, Delaware; Extra reporting by Jody Godoy; Modifying by Noeleen Walder and Invoice Berkrot)

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