“Thank you for your support!” was the phrase that businessman Elon Musk launched on his own in X on Wednesday night. With this, plus a graphic, one of the richest men in the world announced that he was counting on the votes of Tesla shareholders to approve a salary package of US $ 56 billion, which will be voted on this Thursday afternoon. But this is only one of the steps that he must take to obtain the resources, in a context of a series of controversies that affect his other companies.
The approval of the electric car manufacturer’s shareholders would occur despite the Delaware court’s decision that had annulled said compensation, which had been approved by the company in 2018. Following the court decision, the businessman had threatened to build artificial intelligence and robotics products outside of Tesla. For the judge who ordered the ban, the compensation package was proposed by a conflicted board with close personal and financial ties to its top executive.
Despite the approval, Musk must still continue litigating in the Supreme Court to obtain the salary package.
The votes in favor were achieved despite the reluctance of some of the company’s large investors, among those who opposed it were Norway’s sovereign wealth fund, and the California public employee retirement system. Musk owns around 22% of the vehicle manufacturer’s shares, and the other large institutional investors are Vanguard, which owns 7.32%, Blackrock with 5.91%, Sate Street with 3.51%, Geode Capital with 1.78%, Morgan Stanley with 1.26%, Capital World Investor with 1.23%, Norges Bank, from Norway with 0.99%, and JP Morgan with a 0.88%, among others.
The approval, furthermore, occurs in a year where the paper falls 26% – in 2023 it had jumped 101.72% -, and marks a collapse of 55% from the peak reached in November 2021.
The company has also reported disappointing results: for the first quarter of the year, Tesla reported profits of US$1,129 million, a decrease of 55% compared to the same period of the previous year. Meanwhile, revenues fell 9% year-on-year to US$21,301 million, while automobile sales plummeted 13%.
However, the news of the approval has been well received by the market, which saw a 3.7% rise in Tesla’s stock.
He paid US$44 billion in 2022 to take control of the social network Twitter – which even led him to sell Tesla shares – and since then many of his big announcements have been made through that medium. But he has also used it to polemicize. The last of these was when this week he announced that he would ban Apple devices from his companies if the iPhone manufacturer integrates OpenAI at the operating system level.
“It is an unacceptable security breach,” the Tesla CEO said in a post on X.“And visitors will have to register their Apple devices at the door, where they will be stored in a Faraday cage.”
Apple, at the Worldwide Developers Conference, announced a number of AI features in its apps and platforms, as well as a partnership with OpenAI to bring ChatGPT technology to its devices. Said integration would be available at the end of this year.
In parallel, rocket maker SpaceX and Musk, who is its CEO, were sued this week by eight engineers who claim to have been illegally fired for raising concerns about alleged sexual harassment and discrimination against women.
The engineers – four women and four men – claim that Musk ordered their dismissal in 2022 after circulating a letter in which they called the billionaire a “distraction and embarrassment” and urged the firm’s executives to Disavow comments of sexual content what he had done on social networks. The lawsuit was filed in state court in Los Angeles.
The legal challenge says that Musk’s conduct encouraged a “pervasively sexist culture” at SpaceX, where female engineers were routinely subjected to harassment and sexist comments and their concerns about workplace culture were ignored.
