This illustration image created in Los Angeles on June 12, 2024 shows South African businessman Elon Musk launching an event on X ahead of the Tesla shareholders meeting with his photo on the screen . Electric car company Tesla continues to try to win a last-minute vote ahead of its June 13 shareholder meeting that would affect Chief Executive Elon Musk’s massive pay package.
Chris Delmas | AFP | Getty Images
Tesla Shareholders voted Thursday to approve Chief Executive Elon Musk’s massive 2018 compensation plan, five months after a Delaware judge found the board improperly approved the plan and ordered the company Withdraw the plan.
The vote for the compensation package at Tesla’s annual meeting in Austin, Texas, did not overturn the court’s ruling but provided Musk with a public relations victory and could aid his efforts to convince the court to grant him a performance option. .
After the preliminary results were announced, Musk took the stage and said: “I just want to say, hot weather! I love you.”
Watch Elon Musk’s speech at Tesla’s shareholder meeting now
Previously, the compensation package was equivalent to Tesla stock worth up to $56 billion. In January, a Delaware court called the payout “unimaginably high.” Judge Katherine McCormick found that Tesla board members lacked independence from Musk, failed to engage in appropriate arm’s length negotiations with the CEO and failed to provide shareholders with information before asking them to vote on his compensation plan. Comprehensive information.
Tesla shares rose 2.9% to close at $182.47 in regular trading on Thursday after Musk said on X that the proposal would be approved. The stock is still down 27% this year as Tesla attributes the decline in sales to an aging electric vehicle lineup and increased competition in China.
The annual meeting brought final votes on more than a dozen proxy proposals, including one in which Musk would move Tesla’s domicile from Delaware, where most large public companies are registered, to Texas, where the car maker home to the company’s largest U.S. factory). Shareholders voted in favor of the move.
At the last shareholder meeting in May 2023, Musk predicted that the economy would pick up in 12 months and said Tesla would deliver a mass-produced Cybertruck by the end of 2023, telling investors Tesla would “Try a little advertising” and see how it goes.
Recent inflation and employment data suggest improvements. Tesla held a Cybertruck delivery event in late 2023 and has been advertising over the past year, including on X, the social media company formerly known as Twitter, which Musk launched in late 2022 Acquired the company for $44 billion.
However, at last year’s meeting, Musk promised shareholders that he would spend less time on the app going forward, calling the business a “short-term disruption.”
He still spends a lot of time on other things. Musk is the CEO of SpaceX and brain-computer interface company Neuralink. Last year, he also launched a new company called xAI, which has raised billions of dollars to develop large-scale language models and an artificial intelligence chatbot called Grok, which uses X’s data and data center capacity.
The energetic Musk, who describes himself as “pathologically optimistic,” promised Tesla shareholders at the meeting that the company has made great progress in developing “vehicle self-driving,” or systems that turn existing Tesla vehicles into self-driving vehicles. Progress, he believes they can “10 times the value of the company.”
Although Musk has been promising this level of self-driving technology since 2016, it has yet to materialize. Meanwhile, competitors such as Pony.ai, Didi Chuxing and Waymo have developed robotaxis and have begun operating commercial services.
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