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      Tesla Shareholders Will Vote on Elon Musk’s Big Payday. What Happens Then?

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      The company has lobbied to reinstate the package awarded to Musk six years ago — now worth about $56 billion — after a Delaware judge voided it.After months of fighting over a pay package promised to Elon Musk six years ago — one that included stock grants now worth about $56 billion — matters are finally coming to a head.At Tesla’s annual meeting on Thursday, shareholders are set to vote on whether to reapprove the compensation deal after a Delaware judge voided it in January. The outcome could shift Musk’s relationship with the company, and Tesla officials aren’t taking any chances.“If Tesla is to retain Elon’s attention and motivate him to continue to devote his time, energy, ambition and vision to deliver comparable results in the future, we must stand by our deal,” Robyn Denholm, the company’s chair, wrote to investors on Wednesday.Regardless of the vote’s outcome, further lawsuits and other battles may follow, some of which could test the corporate legal system. Here’s our guide to how different situations could play out.Tesla could use shareholder approval to argue its case for Musk’s pay in court. If it wins the vote on Musk’s compensation, the company is likely to go to Chancellor Kathaleen McCormick, the judge in Delaware’s Court of Chancery who rejected the compensation scheme, and argue that shareholders — armed with the information that she said they hadn’t had when they approved the package — have reratified the proposal. That, the company is expected to say, makes the matter moot.If McCormick declares the plan acceptable, the plaintiffs who initially sued over it are likely to appeal to Delaware’s Supreme Court. Among their potential arguments: The new vote doesn’t resolve a matter that was already decided by a judge, and shareholders’ votes may have been influenced by implied threats to Tesla’s future if the vote didn’t go Musk’s way.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      Elon Musk Reaches Deals in China on Self-Driving Teslas

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      Elon Musk met with the country’s premier, a longtime Tesla ally, and secured regulatory nods and a necessary partnership with a Chinese tech company.Tesla has concluded a series of arrangements with regulators and a Chinese artificial intelligence company during a quick trip to Beijing on Sunday and Monday by Elon Musk, the car maker’s chief executive, potentially clearing the way for the company to offer its most advanced self-driving software on cars in China.Tesla had faced a couple hurdles to offering the latest level of autonomous driving, which it calls supervised Full Self-Driving. It has needed approval from Chinese regulators, who questioned whether the company took adequate precautions to protect data. And it has needed access to extremely high-resolution maps across the country.Mr. Musk flew on his private jet to Beijing on Sunday morning and met almost immediately with Premier Li Qiang, China’s No. 2 official after Xi Jinping. Mr. Li is a longtime ally of Mr. Musk who, when he served as Communist Party secretary in Shanghai, helped clear the way for Tesla’s construction there of what is now the company’s largest car assembly plant.The government-linked China Association of Automobile Manufacturers later announced that Tesla and five Chinese automakers had obtained approval from authorities and the association for their data security precautions on dozens of car models. The rules bar automakers in China from using software that would identify the faces of anyone outside their vehicles, and include many other restrictions. Self-driving systems use cameras to guide vehicles.The cars included Tesla’s Model 3 and Model Y. The five Chinese manufacturers included BYD, which is China’s dominant electric vehicle company and Tesla’s primary global rival, and Nio, a longtime player in China’s auto sector. Tesla has run a data center in Shanghai for the past three years that handles the extensive information accumulated by the cars it has sold in China as they navigate the country’s roads. China has tightened its data security regulations in recent years to severely limit information leaving the country.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      Why Beijing Stands to Gain from Elon Musk’s Visit

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      Tesla’s C.E.O. appears to have landed a deal that moves the company closer to bringing fully autonomous driving to a giant market. But Beijing is keen to exploit the visit for its own purposes.Elon Musk meeting with Premier Li Qiang, China’s second-highest official, on a weekend visit to Beijing that boosted Tesla stock.Wang Ye/Xinhua, via Associated PressWhy Elon Musk went to China Just days after Secretary of State Antony Blinken traveled to Beijing and warned China about unfair trade practices, Elon Musk landed in the Chinese capital. The Tesla boss’s meeting with China’s No. 2 official may have paid off: Musk reportedly cleared two obstacles to introducing a fully autonomous driving system in the world’s biggest car market.The split screen again reveals the gap between Western diplomacy and corporate imperatives. Tesla has to stay committed to China even as it faces big headwinds — a conundrum that other multinationals also face, and one that Beijing is eager to exploit.Musk is betting big on self-driving, and China is key. Tesla last week reported its worst quarter in two years as a price war hurts profit. Tesla shares have plummeted (though they’ve rebounded in recent days, and are up more than 8 percent in premarket trading) amid plans for big layoffs.Musk has tried to reassure the market by pushing ahead with a low-cost model. Fully autonomous driving is also crucial. Musk told analysts last week that if investors don’t believe Tesla would “solve” the technological challenge that is autonomous driving, “I think they should not be an investor in the company.”The carmaker faces challenges in its second biggest market. Heavily subsidized Chinese rivals are eating into sales, led by the Warren Buffett-backed BYD, which is vying with Tesla for the crown of world’s biggest E.V. maker.Teslas are banned from many Chinese government sites because of concern about what data the American company collects. President Biden’s move to declare Chinese E.V.s a security threat probably won’t have made it any easier for Tesla in China.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      Auto Safety Regulator Investigating Tesla Recall of Autopilot

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      The National Highway Safety Administration said it had concerns about how Tesla handled the recall based on recent crashes and testing of cars that had been updated.The federal government’s main auto safety agency said on Friday that it was investigating Tesla’s recall of its Autopilot driver-assistance system because regulators were concerned that the company had not done enough to ensure that drivers remained attentive while using the technology.The National Highway Traffic Safety Administration said in documents posted on its website that it was looking into Tesla’s recall in December of two million vehicles, which covered nearly all of the cars the company had manufactured in the United States since 2012. The safety agency said that it had concerns about crashes that took place after the recall and results from preliminary tests of recalled vehicles.The investigation adds to a list of headaches for Tesla, the dominant electric vehicle maker in the United States. The company’s sales fell more than 8 percent in the first three months of the year compared with the same period a year earlier, the first such drop since the early days of the coronavirus pandemic.Tesla announced in December that it would recall its autopilot software after an investigation by the auto safety agency found that the carmaker hadn’t put in place enough safeguards to make sure the system, which can accelerate, brake and control cars in other ways, was used safely by drivers who were supposed to be ready at any moment to retake control of their cars using Autopilot.The agency said it had identified at least 13 fatal crashes tied to use of Autopilot. The company is also facing lawsuits from individuals who claim the system is defective, and its design contributed to or is responsible for serious injuries and deaths.The recall, which entails a wireless software update, includes more prominent visual alerts and checks when drivers are using Autopilot to remind them to keep their hands on the wheel and pay attention to the road. The recall covers all five of Tesla’s passenger models — the 3, S, X, Y and Cybertruck.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      Tesla Settles Lawsuit Over a Fatal Crash Involving Autopilot

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      A Tesla driver’s family had sought damages for the 2018 crash, which happened while the carmaker’s driver-assistance software was in use.Tesla on Monday settled a lawsuit that blamed the automaker’s driver-assistance software for the death of a California man in 2018, averting a trial that would have focused attention on the company’s technology several months before it plans to unveil a self-driving taxi.The trial stemming from the death of Wei Lun Huang, an Apple software engineer who went by Walter, was scheduled to start Monday with jury selection. The case was one of the most prominent involving Tesla’s Autopilot software, attracting significant public attention and prompting an investigation by the National Transportation Safety Board.Terms of the settlement with Mr. Huang’s children and other members of his family were not disclosed, and Tesla filed court documents seeking to prevent them from being made public.Testimony in the trial would have put Tesla’s autonomous driving software under close scrutiny, further fueling a debate about whether the technology makes cars safer or exposes drivers and others to serious injury or death.Elon Musk, the chief executive of Tesla, has said the company’s self-driving software will generate hundreds of billions of dollars in revenue. Investors have used his claims to justify the company’s lofty stock market valuation. Tesla is worth more than any other carmaker even though its shares have plunged in recent months.Mr. Musk said on X last week that Tesla would introduce a self-driving taxi, Robotaxi, in August. If Tesla has in fact perfected a vehicle that can ferry passengers without a driver — which many analysts doubt — the development will help answer criticism that the company has been slow to follow up its Model 3 sedan and Model Y sport utility vehicle with new products.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      Why Some Billionaires Will Back Trump

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      Donald Trump’s campaign is reportedly strapped for cash. Small-dollar donations are running far behind their 2020 pace. Big Trump rallies aren’t yielding his biggest cash hauls. Some large-dollar donors are hesitant, in part because they worry (with good reason) that their money will be used not for the campaign but to pay his legal bills. So he has been wooing right-wing billionaires.I have no idea how successful he’ll be, but it seems highly likely that at least some billionaires will provide substantial sums to a man who tried to overturn the last election and has been open about his authoritarian intentions — using the Justice Department to go after his political opponents, rounding up millions of undocumented immigrants and putting them into detention camps and more.Which raises the question: Why would billionaires support such a person?After all, it’s not as if they’ve been suffering under President Biden. Economists, myself included, often remind people that the stock market is not the economy. Low unemployment and rising real wages — both of which, by the way, the Biden economy has delivered, even if many people don’t believe it — have much more relevance to most people’s lives.But stock prices are probably a much better indicator of how the very wealthy, who hold a lot of financial assets, are doing. And although in 2020 Trump predicted a stock crash if Biden won, the market has, in fact, been hitting record highs under the current administration.Why, then, back a candidate who more or less promises to unleash social and political chaos?One straightforward answer is that the wealthy will almost certainly pay lower taxes — and corporations will be less regulated — if Trump wins than if Biden stays in office.If you believe, like some leftists, that Republicans and Democrats are basically the same — that both serve the interests of corporations and the elite — you’re wrong. The modern Democratic Party isn’t, despite what prominent Republicans say, Marxist or socialist. It does, however, have a track record of raising taxes on the wealthy to pay for social programs. Notably, the Affordable Care Act used new taxes on high-income individuals to pay for health care subsidies.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      R.B.G. Award Organizer Cancels Ceremony After Fallout Over Honorees

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      The Opperman Foundation said it would “reconsider its mission” but did not say whether those selected, including Elon Musk and Rupert Murdoch, would still receive the award.The organizer behind an honor named for Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg, a lifelong champion of women’s rights and liberal causes, is canceling the award ceremony scheduled for April after facing blistering criticism from her family and friends over several of this year’s planned recipients.Justice Ginsburg helped establish the award in 2019, the year before she died. It was originally intended for “women who exemplify human qualities of empathy and humility,” but four of the five intended recipients this year are men. Among them are Elon Musk, the tech entrepreneur who frequently lobs tirades at perceived critics; Rupert Murdoch, the tycoon whose empire helped give rise to conservative news media; and Michael R. Milken, the financier who was a face of corporate greed in the 1980s and served nearly two years in prison before becoming a philanthropist.“The last thing we intended was to offend the family and friends of R.B.G.,” Julie Opperman, the chairwoman of Dwight D. Opperman Foundation, which awards the prize every year, said in a statement on Monday. She added: “The foundation is not interested in creating controversy. It is not interested in generating a debate about whether particular honorees are worthy or not.”Ms. Opperman explained that the reason for including men as recipients this year was to reflect and uphold Justice Ginsburg’s “teachings regarding equality.” The foundation “did not consider politics” but focused on selecting leaders who “have made significant contributions to society,” she said.Before the foundation released the statement, the children of Justice Ginsburg had demanded that their mother’s name be removed from the prize, which until this year was called the Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg Woman of Leadership Award.Her daughter, Jane C. Ginsburg, a law professor at Columbia, said the choice of winners this year was “an affront” to the values the justice stood for.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      Tesla’s Troubles Raise Questions About Its Invincibility

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      As the share price plunges, investors wonder whether the company, led by Elon Musk, can withstand intensifying competition.Elon Musk appeared to be in a defiant mood Wednesday when he stood before employees at Tesla’s factory near Berlin a week after an arsonist set fire to a high-voltage power pylon and brought production to a standstill.“They can’t stop us,” Mr. Musk, the company’s chief executive, told workers in a giant tent beside the plant.But there are proliferating signs that Tesla may not be as unstoppable as it once seemed. The company’s car sales are no longer growing at a torrid pace. Chinese automakers and established brands like BMW and Volkswagen are flooding the market with electric cars. And Tesla has been slow to respond with new models.Mr. Musk’s many outside ventures, and his penchant for making polarizing political statements and attacking people he disagrees with, have raised questions about how focused he remains on managing Tesla. Wall Street is increasingly concerned about the company: Tesla’s share price has lost one-third of its value this year even as major stock indexes have hit record highs.“A bet on Tesla has always been a bet on Mr. Musk,” said Eric Talley, a professor at Columbia Law School who focuses on corporate law, governance and finance.In an interview with the former television anchor Don Lemon that streamed online on Monday, Mr. Musk brushed off the drop in the company’s share price as part of the cycle.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More