The lawyers who stopped Elon Musk’s massive payday want $7 billion for themselves
CNN
A record $7 billion in attorneys’ fees for three firms that successfully challenged Elon Musk’s $56 billion Tesla pay package provides an incentive for lawyers to hold corporate boards accountable, an attorney for a company shareholder told a Delaware judge on Monday.
A record $7 billion in attorneys’ fees for three firms that successfully challenged Elon Musk’s $56 billion Tesla pay package provides an incentive for lawyers to hold corporate boards accountable, an attorney for a company shareholder told a Delaware judge on Monday. For more than six hours, legal teams for the company and a shareholder sparred over how much to award to three law firms which represented Richard Tornetta, who owned nine shares of Tesla when he sued over Musk’s pay package in 2018. The fee Tornetta has asked for on behalf of the firms equals around $7.3 billion at Tesla’s Monday stock price and amounts to a rate of roughly $370,000 for every hour worked by the 37 lawyers, associates and paralegals, court documents submitted by Tornetta’s lawyers showed. John Reed, Tesla’s lawyer, said on Monday that the fee petition never should have been filed. “It looks like a real-life lawyer joke,” he told Chancellor Kathaleen McCormick of the Court of Chancery. The legal fee represents a cut of the value that the plaintiff’s lawyers say was created for Tesla by a Delaware judge’s January ruling that rescinded Musk’s $56-billion pay package.
Nippon Steel is expected to re-file its application for a national security review by American regulators of its $15 billion takeover bid of US Steel, sources familiar with the matter told CNN on Tuesday, buying Japan’s largest steelmaker an additional 90 days to close its acquisition of an American rival after political opposition emerged in an election year.
So far, the attacks that targeted Iran-backed Lebanese militant group Hezbollah members through their pagers have had devastating consequences. At least nine people, including an eight-year-old girl, were killed, and at least 2,800 were wounded. Over 150 of those injured are in critical condition, according to the Lebanese health minister.