Delaware Judge Kathaleen McCormick has once again sided against Elon Musk…
After ruling against the billionaire in July 2022 when he tried to break his $44 billion contract to buy Twitter, and again in January 2024 when she initially rescinded Musk’s record (but “deeply flawed” according to her) $56 billion performance-based compensation package (determining that Tesla deceived shareholders when the all stock compensation was approved in 2018), she has once again ruled that pay package.
Musk’s legal team argued that McCormick should reverse her earlier decision because Tesla had conducted a shareholder vote to “ratify” the 2018 pay plan at the company’s annual shareholder meeting in June, per CNBC.
In fact, 72% of Tesla shareholders voted in June to approve the company’s CEO’s pay package.
The judge said Musk’s attorneys made an argument with multiple “fatal flaws,” including their argument that the shareholder vote was enough to validate the pay package after the fact.
“The large and talented group of defense firms got creative with the ratification argument, but their unprecedented theories go against multiple strains of settled law,” McCormick said in her ruling.
McCormick ruled that the vote on the payment package did not have a “ratifying effect”