$56bn out of pocket and poorer than Jeff Bezos... don’t you feel sorry for Elon Musk?

The Tesla boss had his dizzying pay package slapped down – could it be that he might, for the first time, understand the meaning of the word ‘no’, asks James Moore

Musk rebuffed: The Tesla boss has seen his pay package struck down (AP)

Elon Musk is having a rollercoaster of a week. Just a day after trumpeting that one of his companies had planted a chip in someone’s brain, he was venting furiously on his platform X (formerly Twitter), as a result of a Delaware court slapping down his dizzying Tesla pay package.

The plan, agreed back in 2018, could have seen the business polymath take home an eye-watering $56bn (£44bn), mostly in Tesla’s stock.

Yet Kathaleen McCormick, the first woman to lead Delaware’s Court of Chancery (the place to go for corporate litigation in the US) decided that the so-called “Superstar CEO” had dominated the process which led the board of directors to approve the award – which was more than 33 times larger than Musk’s last pay package. This, she ruled, effectively shortchanged the group’s shareholders – some of whom chose to file the lawsuit.