Original link: As Elon Musk makes thousands of federal workers jobless, tycoon pushes for $56B Tesla pay deal / TheRegister.
Elon Musk is trying for the third time to get his 56 B$ bonus.
First time the judge said that the board was more Elon Musk people than shareholder people. Then Mush asked shareholders to approve and they did. After that the judge said that the voting material was misleading. And now Musk is appealing.
I can somewhat understand the first decision. But not so much the second.
The fundamentals are that CEO bonus is an agreement between the CEO and the shareholders and the shareholders elect a board to represent their interests and make decisions - it does not matter whether some random person consider the bonus too high and it is not something for the courts to decide either.
But I can sort of follow an argument that the board got elected without telling the stockholders that they would give Musk a gigantic bonus and a bonus that is a factor 1000 over "normal practice" is not the board taking care of the shareholders best interest.
But then the shareholders actually approved the bonus. If I had been a Tesla shareholder then I had voted no. But the majority voted yes. And the argument that the voting material was misleading is very thin. The reality is that almost every living person on this planet knew that the Tesla shareholders was voting on whether Musk should get a 56 B$ bonus or not. The shareholders knew despite whatever was in the material.