Tesla shareholders voted Thursday to restore CEO Elon Musk’s record $44.9 billion pay package that was thrown out by a Delaware judge earlier this year, sending a strong vote of confidence in his leadership of the electric vehicle maker.
The favorable vote doesn’t necessarily mean that Musk will get the all-stock compensation anytime soon. The package is likely to remain tied up in the Delaware Chancery Court and Supreme Court for months as Tesla tries to overturn the Delaware judge’s rejection.
Musk has raised doubts about his future with Tesla this year, writing on X, the social media platform he owns, that he wanted a 25% stake in the company in order to stop him from taking artificial intelligence development elsewhere. The higher stake is needed to control the use of AI, he has said.
Look, this isn’t even the standard operating procedure of society. Corporations are the ONLY situation where we seem to have decided providing the seed of creation equates to perpetual ownership.
ANYTHING else you create comes with a time limit before it takes on a life of its own beyond you.
You wrote a book? Your copyright WILL expire and it WILL be out of your control.
You invented something? That’s great. Eventually your patent expires and it becomes publicly usable.
Hell, the closest equivalent to a company? Is having a BABY. You put in a seed to create something, you do a ton of work to raise it to function. Are you going to suggest that a parent should have perpetual control over their children and the things they produce as well? And it has been established by LEGAL PRECEDENT that a corporation IS a person.
ALL of these things are accepted default procedure in our society. In NO other situation do we consider creation to be equivalent to perpetual ownership of all aspects of a thing. YOU are arguing the exception, not us.
If I write a book, I get to control if I want to write another book or not. The success of the book doesn’t dictate my control over my own writing process (individual agreements not withstanding)
Copyright has for the more than the last century been established to be 50 years longer than the life of the owner, meaning copyright deliberately exists to ensure the creator retains control for their entire life (and then some)
As far as parents go, a patent is not a requirement to make a product and gives no say in your use of your widget that you have patented. If you so choose you can patent a widget and give up trade secrets in exchange for legal protection against appropriation, but that has nothing to do with control in how you operate (it only limits control in how others operate).
I can invent a widget and not patent it and I am still allowed to sell or not sell, manufacture or not, or whatever business decisions I deem important. I can keep it a trade secret and bring it with me to the grave.
All of that is completely true and also irrelevant. The point isn’t the specific details, the point is the idea that “perpetual control” is not the default modus operandi of the structure of our system. As to the specific details of where that line is drawn, that’s something that’s up for debate. All we need as a starting point is to acknowledge that unquestioned, perpetual individual control of an entity that can create and destroy the lives of millions has at least the POTENTIAL to be a dangerous social ill, and the specific details of how we address that can come from there. If you cannot see or acknowledge that at any level, then we’re not even looking at reality from the same perspective, and we’re not starting from the same priors, so there’s no point in discussing it any further - there’s no point of agreement we’ll be able to reach.