From Reuters:
Judge voids Elon Musk's 'unfathomable' $56 billion Tesla pay package
By Tom HalsJanuary 30
[The ruling] nullifies the largest pay package in corporate America. The judge found the share-based compensation was negotiated by directors who appeared beholden to Musk, currently ranked by Forbes magazine as the world's richest person.
"Swept up by the rhetoric of 'all upside,' or perhaps starry eyed by Musk’s superstar appeal, the board never asked the $55.8 billion question: Was the plan even necessary for Tesla to retain Musk and achieve its goals?" wrote Kathaleen McCormick of Delaware's Court of Chancery.
Why on earth would anybody voluntarily gift the world’s richest man the largest corporate pay package in history?
O silly earthling, the answer to that question can’t be found on this planet. You must cast your gaze toward the heavens, to find your answer.
Musk testified during the week-long compensation trial in November 2022 that the money would be used to finance interplanetary travel."It's a way to get humanity to Mars," he testified. "So Tesla can assist in potentially achieving that."
[Judge] McCormick wrote that many of the directors on Tesla's board, including current members Kimbal Musk, Elon Musk's brother, and James Murdoch, son of media tycoon Rupert Murdoch, lacked independence because of their close personal ties with the CEO. Two of Tesla's other current directors, Robyn Denholm and Ira Ehrenpreis, showed a lack of independence in the pay decision, she said.The board currently has eight members including its CEO.
These days, not everyone in the tech universe can rely on a constellation of bros to guide them to a soft, cushy landing like Elon.
From the New York Times article “Watch Me Lose My Job on TikTok”:
By Yiwen Lu
January 30, 2024
As companies from startup Discord to Google have shed hundreds of jobs in recent weeks, some tech workers are taking to social media to share their layoff experiences, and many of these videos have gone viral. They show people crying as they talk with human resources or going through their daily routine knowing a mysterious appointment on their calendar is likely to result in their termination.[...]
After receiving a 30-minute “catch-up” meeting invitation from a new manager this month, Mickella Simone Miller, who worked remotely as a project manager based in Salt Lake City, filmed a video about her day working from home, including choosing a coffee mug that said, “The world is falling apart around us, and I’m dying inside.” The video ended with her listening to her company announce it was eliminating her role.
To be fair and balanced, maybe there is no real harm in giving an inexhaustibly rich space hobbyist—who is more fixated on humanity on Mars than humanity on earth—a pay package that Reuters said “was around six times larger than the combined pay of the 200 highest-paid executives in 2021.”
Updated 5:04 PM PST, January 30, 2024NEW YORK (AP) — According to Elon Musk, the first human received an implant from his computer-brain interface company Neuralink over the weekend.
In a Monday post on X, the platform formerly known as Twitter, Musk said that the patient received the implant the day prior and was “recovering well.” He added that “initial results show promising neuron spike detection.”
And speaking of spreading the wealth around to the already wealthy, check out the big-budget gift-giving by Robert Bigelow, the owner of Budget Suites:
Hotelier Robert Bigelow gives Trump $1 million for legal fees
By Alexandra Ulmer
January 30, 2024"I gave him $1 million towards his legal fees a few weeks ago. I made a promise to give him $20 million more, that will be to the super PAC," the Nevada-based owner of Budget Suites of America said in an interview.[...]
Bigelow, who also founded Bigelow Aerospace and funds investigations into extraterrestrial life, said he felt Trump was being unfairly targeted in the criminal cases and that his sympathy towards the former president had motivated the donation.
"I was just sympathetic. They didn't solicit anything from me," Bigelow said. The $20 million would be spread out but "starts right away," he added.
With stories like these, it is easy to get lost among all the millions and billions flying around in the orbit of earth’s untouchables.
Here is an excerpt from one of my favorite passages on earth, in order get grounded again:
The following excerpt from Carl Sagan's book Pale Blue Dot was inspired by an image taken, at Sagan's suggestion, by Voyager 1 on 14 February 1990. As the spacecraft was departing our planetary neighborhood for the fringes of the solar system, it turned it around for one last look at its home planet.
Pale Blue Dot by Carl Sagan
Look again at that dot. That's here. That's home. That's us. On it everyone you love, everyone you know, everyone you ever heard of, every human being who ever was, lived out their lives. The aggregate of our joy and suffering, thousands of confident religions, ideologies, and economic doctrines, every hunter and forager, every hero and coward, every creator and destroyer of civilization, every king and peasant, every young couple in love, every mother and father, hopeful child, inventor and explorer, every teacher of morals, every corrupt politician, every "superstar," every "supreme leader," every saint and sinner in the history of our species lived there--on a mote of dust suspended in a sunbeam.[...]
Our posturings, our imagined self-importance, the delusion that we have some privileged position in the Universe, are challenged by this point of pale light. Our planet is a lonely speck in the great enveloping cosmic dark. In our obscurity, in all this vastness, there is no hint that help will come from elsewhere to save us from ourselves.
The Earth is the only world known so far to harbor life. There is nowhere else, at least in the near future, to which our species could migrate. Visit, yes. Settle, not yet. Like it or not, for the moment the Earth is where we make our stand.
It has been said that astronomy is a humbling and character-building experience. There is perhaps no better demonstration of the folly of human conceits than this distant image of our tiny world. To me, it underscores our responsibility to deal more kindly with one another, and to preserve and cherish the pale blue dot, the only home we've ever known.
— Carl Sagan, Pale Blue Dot, 1994
Copyright © 1994 by Carl Sagan, Copyright © 2006 by Democritus Properties, LLC.
All rights reserved including the rights of reproduction in whole or in part in any form.