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Elon Musk — the CEO of Tesla and SpaceX and owner of X, formerly Twitter — speaks during the New York Times annual DealBook summit in New York City, Nov. 29, 2023.

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A Delaware judge on Tuesday voided the $56 billion pay package of Tesla CEO Elon Musk, ruling that the company’s board of directors failed to prove “that the compensation plan was fair.”

Tesla’s share price slid about 3% in after-hours trading Tuesday following news of the decision in the Delaware Chancery Court lawsuit filed by Richard Tornetta, a shareholder in the electric automaker.

The pay package that Tesla granted Musk in 2018 was the largest compensation plan in public corporate history, the judge noted, making the Tesla and SpaceX boss a centi-billionaire and the richest person on the planet.

The plan offered Musk the chance to secure 12 tranches of Tesla stock options, which would vest if the company’s market capitalization increased by $50 billion and Tesla achieved a revenue target.

“Was the richest person in the world overpaid?” asked Chancery Court Judge Kathaleen McCormick in her 200-page ruling. “The stockholder plaintiff in this derivative lawsuit says so. He claims that Tesla, Inc.’s directors breached their fiduciary duties by awarding Elon Musk a performance-based equity-compensation plan.”

McCormick in her decision found that Tornetta had proved that Musk “controlled Tesla,” and that the process leading to the board’s approval of his compensation was “deeply flawed.”

Musk had “extensive ties with the persons tasked with negotiating on Tesla’s behalf,” including management members “who were beholden to Musk,: among them General Counsel Todd Maron, who was his “former divorce attorney.”

“In the final analysis, Musk launched a self-driving process, recalibrating the speed and direction along the way as he saw fit,” the judge wrote. “The process arrived at an unfair price. And through this litigation, the plaintiff requests a recall.”

“The plaintiff is entitled to rescission,” McCormick wrote.

“The parties are to confer on a form of final order implementing this decision and submit a joint letter identifying all issues, including fees that need to be addressed to bring this matter to a conclusion at the trial level,” McCormick said.

CNBC has requested comment from Musk, his lawyer and Tornetta’s attorney, on the decision.

In a tweet late Tuesday afternoon, Musk wrote, “Never incorporate your company in the state of Delaware.”

McCormick noted her ruling hinged on a finding that Musk, rather than its board of directors and shareholders, controlled Tesla, at least when it came to the question of setting his compensation.

The judge wrote, “In addition to his 21.9% equity stake, Musk was the paradigmatic ‘Superstar CEO,’ who held some of the most influential corporate positions (CEO, Chair, and founder), enjoyed thick ties with the directors tasked with negotiating on behalf of Tesla, and dominated the process that led to board approval of his compensation plan.”

Tesla and Musk’s attorneys, the court decided, “were unable to prove that the stockholder vote was fully informed because the proxy statement inaccurately described key directors as independent and misleadingly omitted details about the process.”

Earlier this month, Musk began angling for 25% of voting control over Tesla.

He currently owns about 13% of the company’s stock outright.

“I am uncomfortable growing Tesla to be a leader in AI & robotics without having ~25% voting control. Enough to be influential, but not so much that I can’t be overturned,” he wrote in a post on X, the social media site formerly known as Twitter.

Musk owns X and runs it.

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Alibaba says smart car spinoff Banma plans to list shares in Hong Kong

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Alibaba says smart car spinoff Banma plans to list shares in Hong Kong

Alibaba’s global headquarters in Hangzhou, Zhejiang Province, China, on May 9, 2024.

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Alibaba-backed Banma, a provider of technology for smart cars, is planning to list shares on the Hong Kong Stock Exchange, according to a filing.

In a filing dated Aug. 21, Alibaba said it currently owns about 45% of Banma and will continue to control over 30% of the company’s stock after the listing. Banma said in a filing that the announcement does not guarantee a listing will take place.

Banma, founded in 2015 and based in Shanghai, is “principally engaged in the development of smart cockpit solutions,” Alibaba’s filing says. In March, Alibaba announced that it was deepening its partnership with BMW in China, building an artificial intelligence engine for cars with a solution built by Banma, “Alibaba’s intelligent cockpit solution provider.”

In addition to Alibaba, Banma is backed by investors including China’s SAIC Motor, SDIC Investment Management and Yunfeng Capital, a Chinese investment firm started by Alibaba co-founder Jack Ma.

Alibaba in the past referred to Banma as a joint venture “between us and SAIC Motor.”

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These little robots are changing the way solar farms are built, saving time and money

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These little robots are changing the way solar farms are built, saving time and money

Clean energy gets a robot boost

Private renewable energy projects are still moving forward despite a pullback in government support, and new technology is making that construction more efficient.

Solar farms, for example, take meticulous planning and surveying, involve long hours and require significant labor. Now, robots are taking on the job.

CivDot is a four-wheeled robot that can mark up to 3,000 layout points per day and is accurate within 8 millimeters. The machine can ride over rugged terrain and work through rough weather.

It is the brainchild of California-based Civ Robotics.

“Our secret sauce and our core technology is actually in the navigation and the geospatial — being able to literally mark coordinates within less than a quarter inch, which is very, very difficult in an uneven terrain, outdoor surfaces, and out in the desert,” said Tom Yeshurun, CEO of Civ Robotics.

The data for manual surveying is uploaded into the Civ software, then the operator chooses the area they want to mark and presses go. The robot does the rest, saving both time and money.

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“The manual surveying equipment, if you use that in the field and you have three crews, they will need three land surveying handheld receivers. That alone is already equal to how much we lease our machines in the field, and all the labor savings is just another benefit,” Yeshurun said.

Civ Robotics has more than 100 of these robots in the field that are primarily being used by renewable energy companies, but they are also used in oil and gas. It is currently working with Bechtel Corporation on several solar projects.

“These were usually pretty highly paid field engineers that we would send out there, and they might be able to do 250 or 350 pile marks a day. With the CivDot robot, we’re able to do about 1250 a day,” said Kelley Brown, vice president at Bechtel.

Brown said the company has used the robot in thick and muddy terrain in Texas and out in the deserts of Nevada.

“And so you have to think about things like the tires, or you may have to think about clearance. Are you trying to get over existing brush and such, across the solar field? So that’s one thing that we contemplate. I think the other is, you know, this runs on batteries, so you’ve got to contemplate battery swaps,” she added.

Civ Robotics is backed by Alleycorp, FF Venture Capital, Bobcat Company, Newfund Capital, Trimble Ventures, and Converge. Total VC funding to date is $12.5 million.

There are other robotics solutions for markings, but the competition is mostly doing work on highways and soccer fields. Yeshurun said those rivals can’t handle the terrains that the solar industry faces as it expands into new territories.

 CNBC producer Lisa Rizzolo contributed to this piece.

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Sony raises PlayStation 5 prices in U.S. as tariffs start to hit

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Sony raises PlayStation 5 prices in U.S. as tariffs start to hit

The PlayStation DualSense controller and PlayStation 5 console.

Jakub Porzycki | Nurphoto | Getty Images

PlayStation 5 game consoles will cost $50 more in the U.S. starting this week, Sony announced on Wednesday.

The price for an entry-level PlayStation 5 Digital Edition will increase from $450 to $500, and a PlayStation 5 with a disc drive is going up to $550 from $500. Sony’s high-end PlayStation 5 Pro will cost $750, up from $700. The PlayStation 5 was first released in 2020.

President Donald Trump’s sweeping tariff plan announced in April went into effect earlier this month on most countries. The U.S. currently has a 30% tariff on imports from China, and higher tariffs on goods from the world’s second-largest economy are currently “paused,” according to the administration. Sony’s home country of Japan was hit with a 15% tariff.

While Sony didn’t attribute the increase to Trump’s tariffs, consumer companies have been warning for months that higher prices are on the way.

“Similar to many global businesses, we continue to navigate a challenging economic environment,” Sony said in its blog post.

The company said that retail prices for console accessories such as controllers haven’t changed.

Earlier this month, Sony officials said the company was working on supply chain diversification to combat U.S. tariffs, and said that the console hardware it sells in the U.S. is produced outside of China.

“It is difficult to speak to our hardware pricing strategy as that has implications for our future competitive strategy,” ” Sony officials said, according to a translated transcript of a call with financial analysts posted on its website. “But we intend to take a flexible approach to such decision-making by monitoring consumer price sensitivity as we think about total full-year segment profits, lifetime value, manufacturing, units sold in, and our content sales potential.”

In May, Microsoft raised the price of its Xbox video game consoles. Nintendo delayed pre-orders of its Switch 2 by a few weeks in April, attributing the delay to tariffs. Although Nintendo did not raise the price of its new consoles, it hiked the price of the original Switch earlier this month.

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