Tesla shareholders cannot say that they were not warned. On Thursday, 72 per cent of non-Musk Tesla shareholders voted in favour of awarding Elon Musk 304mn shares of the EV maker. That is the identical amount from a 2018 pay grant that was earlier this year invalidated by a Delaware corporate law court.
The court said first that the 73 per cent of shareholders who had approved the deal in 2018 were uninformed about how tight Tesla directors were then with Musk. After that determination, the court said the shares, now worth about $54bn, was excessively dilutive to other shareholders.
After all that litigation and a new board approval and proxy process, a solid shareholder majority said that they were still fine with giving Musk his shares. The Delaware court theoretically can ignore the most recent vote and proceed with cancelling the grant. But they equally could decide it is not worth overriding shareholder democracy for a second time.