Elon Musk

Who the hell appointed Elon Musk to be the loudest defender of white men?

From the moment the South Africa native took over what was once called Twitter in 2022, the wealthiest human being on Earth has let neo-Nazi accounts flourish while repeating their insistence that white men are an endangered species as the world grows more diverse and minorities assume positions of power.

In 2023, Musk accused South Africa President Cyril Ramaphosa of “openly pushing for genocide of white people in South Africa” because political opponents sang an apartheid-era anti-Boer song during a rally. That same year, Musk posted, “You have said the actual truth,” to a user who claimed Jews supported unchecked migration in order to destroy Western — read, white — civilization.

The mogul ended up apologizing for that babble, calling it the “dumbest post I’ve ever done.” That didn’t stop him from getting dumber ever since.

Last year, X’s Grok feature pushed the white South African genocide claim to users on its own, then insisted the Freudian slip came from an “unauthorized modification” by a “rogue employee” that violated the chatbot’s “core values.” Who that could be, one can’t say for sure. But then Musk opined in September that “relentless propaganda portraying white men as the worst human beings” is what leads some of them to transition into becoming female.

All this garbage was prelude to this month, when Musk twice shared a post that stated nonwhite men “will be 1000x times more hostile and cruel when they are a majority over Whites.”

Say this about Musk: He knows trends. And right now, the idea that white men are the most persecuted group out there is the Labubu of American conservativism.

A widely read essay in the online magazine Compact labeled Gen Z white men “the lost generation,” adrift in a world where workplaces shun them in favor of minorities. The piece earned an endorsement by New York Times columnist Ross Douhat, who added that the “simple” way to not make young white men open to racial radicalization is by “just not discriminating against them” — whatever the hell that means.

White men have fretted about their place in a changing America ever since Thomas Jefferson wrote in 1784 that a divine “revolution of the wheel of fortune” was “probable” against white people for their embrace of slavery. Fear of the sunset of white men has fueled lynchings, legal segregation, laws against immigration legal and not, lawsuits against affirmative action and so much more.

Their supposed plight has been a major plank of Trump’s political career since his first term — but it has become an obsession of his second. His administration’s social media accounts have regularly pushed posts lauding the days of Daniel Boone and Manifest Destiny while using the Ma and Pa American artworks of Norman Rockwell and Thomas Kinkade to push its noxious agenda.

At the same time, as part of his deportation campaign, Trump has pushed the concept of forcing people who weren’t born in this country to go back to their birthplaces. But foreigners aren’t the only ones bringing down the white man, according to this regime.

In December, Equal Employment Opportunity Commission Chair Andrea Lucas released a video encouraging white men — not white women, tellingly — who felt they were victims of workplace discrimination to file a claim with her agency. Vice President JD Vance shared Lucas’ request on social media along with the Compact essay, noting in the post sharing the latter that DEI (diversity, equity and inclusion) is a “deliberate program of discrimination primarily against white men.”

Trump, for his part, told the New York Times this month that the Civil Rights Act — the 1964 law signed by President Lyndon B. Johnson to help nonwhite American citizens fight decades of segregation and discrimination — “was a reverse discrimination” where “white people were very badly treated.”

As a nongringo, I’m as amused as I am sad about this industrial-scale pity party thrown by some of the most powerful men, white or otherwise, on the planet.

A poster showing the Trump Gold Card is seen as President Trump signs executive orders in the Oval Office on Sept. 19, 2025.

(Alex Brandon / Associated Press)

When Trump and his allies claim to have the interest of white men in mind, they don’t really mean the sons of small-town Appalachia like Vance’s ancestors; they’re talking about white men like them: wealthy guys who want to get wealthier. They preach racial solidarity while gutting funding for SNAP benefits and healthcare, which will disproportionately affect poor people of all ethnicities.

The Pew Research Center found that 51% of white Republicans with no college degree voted for Trump in 2024 — a significant drop from the 63% who did the same in 2016. No wonder the president and his allies are doubling down on painting minorities as usurpers of the white American Dream. “If you can convince the lowest white man he’s better than the best colored man, he won’t notice you’re picking his pocket,” LBJ said. “Hell, give him somebody to look down on, and he’ll empty his pockets for you.”

Personally, I can assure all white men — but especially the blue-collar guys — that the children of Latino immigrants I know don’t plan to treat you all the way some of your grandparents treated our fathers when they migrated to this country in the 1960s and 1970s. Our parents didn’t come for us to turn into chillones — crybabies — seeking revenge for past sins.

In fact, many Latino men sadly did join their white counterparts in the grievance Olympics, as their drift toward Trump in the 2024 election proved.

Cousins and friends who should have known better spent most of 2024 railing to me against trans athletes, Kamala Harris, unchecked migration from Central and South America, and other Fox News talking points when they weren’t talking Dodgers and Raiders. None of them desired to be white, as wokosos insisted in postelection breakdowns of what happened; these rancho libertarians just wanted the fair shake that the colorblind policies would supposedly offer and thus cast their lot with Trump in a history-making decision.

(Insert “The Price Is Right” losing horn sound here.)

To see Trumpworld now limit male grievance to just whites threatens to destroy the Trump coalition in a year where they can’t afford to lose much more support.

Leave it to Grok to back me up on this. After Musk endorsed the post claiming nonwhite men will subjugate white men, a user asked the AI chatbot: “@grok is this true”?

This is how Grok replied, edited for length but not the thrust of what it said: “No, this claim aligns with the ‘white genocide’ conspiracy theory, which lacks evidence. … It is speculative fear, not fact.”

Musk. Trump. Vance. Powerful white men. Why so afraid?

SACRAMENTO — California announced an investigation into Elon Musk’s artificial intelligence company xAI on Wednesday, with Gov. Gavin Newsom saying that the social media site owned by the billionaire is a “breeding ground for predators to spread nonconsenual sexually explicit AI deepfakes.”

Grok, the xAI chatbot, includes image-generation features that allow users to morph existing photos into new images. The newly created images are then posted publicly on X.

In some cases, users have created sexually explicit or nonconsensual images based on real people, including altered depictions that appear to show individuals partially or fully undressed. Others have generated images that appear to show minors, prompting criticism that there are not sufficient guardrails to prohibit the creation of child pornography.

The social media site has previously said “we take action against illegal content on X, including Child Sexual Abuse Material (CSAM), by removing it, permanently suspending accounts, and working with local governments and law enforcement as necessary. Anyone using or prompting Grok to make illegal content will suffer the same consequences as if they upload illegal content.”

Newsom called the sexualized images being created on the platform “vile.” Atty. Gen. Rob Bonta said his office will use “all tools at our disposal to keep Californians safe.”

“The avalanche of reports detailing the non-consensual, sexually explicit material that xAI has produced and posted online in recent weeks is shocking,” Bonta said in a statement Wednesday. “This material, which depicts women and children in nude and sexually explicit situations, has been used to harass people across the internet. I urge xAI to take immediate action to ensure this goes no further. We have zero tolerance for the AI-based creation and dissemination of nonconsensual intimate images or of child sexual abuse material.”

Newsom signed a pair of bills in 2024 that made it illegal to create, possess or distribute sexually charged images of minors even when they’re created with computers, not cameras. The measures took effect last year.

Assembly Bill 1831, authored by Assemblymember Marc Berman (D-Menlo Park), expanded the state’s child-porn prohibition to material that “contains a digitally altered or artificial-intelligence-generated depiction [of] what appears to be a person under 18 years of age” engaging in or simulating sexual conduct. Senate Bill 1381, authored by Sen. Aisha Wahab (D-Hayward), amended state law to more clearly prohibit using AI to create images of real children engaged in sexual conduct, or using children as models for digitally altered or AI-generated child pornography.

Ever since Donald J. Trump descended from a gold escalator at his eponymous Manhattan tower in 2015, he has sworn that a scorched-earth campaign against “illegal immigrants” would make life safer for Americans and that citizens had nothing to worry about.

Well.

In 2025, Trump’s campaign vow to target “the worst of the worst” was set aside in the name of not just going after all undocumented immigrants and limiting legal migration but even the goal of remigration — the idea that immigrants of any status should return to their home countries. Now, U.S. citizens Keith Porter Jr., shot at a Northridge apartment complex, and Renee Nicole Good, whose shooting sparked large protests in Minneapolis, are dead.

ICE is about to storm American streets and neighborhoods with thousands of new recruits who received just eight weeks of training instead of what used to be five months. The Fourth Amendment bans the government from subjecting Americans from “unreasonable searches and seizures” yet we now have a vice president promising that they’re forthcoming across the country.

“I think … we’re [going] to see those deportation numbers ramp up,” JD Vance told Fox News’ Jesse Watters, “as we get more and more people online working for ICE going from door-to-door.”

He repeated his boast the following day during a news conference while adding that the killing of Good — shot while trying to drive away from an agent who stood in front of her SUV during an immigration enforcement operation — was justified, adding that the 37-year-old mother of three was “brainwashed” and “radicalized in a very, very sad way.”

The beginning of 2026 now shows even those in the United States legally are targets for for the too often Keystone Kops-like, eager beaver, trigger happy federal immigration enforcement force I like to call la migra.

This isn’t anything new, of course. Since June, when ICE, Border Patrol and their sister agencies used Los Angeles as a testing ground for what they have inflicted on the rest of the country, the government has treated citizens who dare oppose mass-scale deportations — veterans, Democrats or Republicans, old and young, Latino and not — as an enemy of the “homeland.” Citizens have had their front doors blown out, been hit with pepper balls for praying outside government facilities, been wrongfully charged with assaulting agents, and have seen their identification papers dismissed as fake and thus grounds for detainment.

With the Trump administration’s accelerated recruitment drive for immigration officers and rhetorical bloodlust, don’t be surprised if these masked Bizarro Barney Fifes knock on your door or demand to see your papers. In fact, expect it.

The MAGA excuse for those caught up in la migra‘s crackdown — the way to stay out of trouble is by avoiding it — doesn’t work when the trouble comes to you.

That’s why it seems that the deaths of Porter and Good in the last week, coupled with Vance’s authoritarian promise, seems to be waking up Americans into resisting the deportation Leviathan like never before.

A woman is taken into custody by Border Patrol agents after she was accused of using her vehicle to block their vehicles while they were patrolling in a shopping center in December in Niles, Ill.

(Scott Olson / Getty Images)

Anti-ICE protests are happening across the country this weekend. On social media, conservatives and libertarians who largely stayed silent on Trump throughout 2025 are criticizing him over Good’s death and his administration’s insults against her. Trump’s approval rating has slipped since the start of his presidency, even among supporters — and ICE’s out-of-control conduct is becoming a bigger and bigger factor.

A YouGov poll conducted on the day of Good’s killing found 52% of Americans surveyed don’t like how ICE is operating, while the agency’s approval rating has gone from plus-16% to negative 14% in a year. While the poll unsurprisingly splits on partisan lines — Democrats overwhelmingly oppose ICE, Republicans still think they’re Trump’s Hardy Boys — the independents who delivered the 2024 election to Trump oppose ICE’s actions by a healthy majority.

If he’s losing the middle, he’s losing America.

Unless, of course, Trump goes full banana republic dictator and decides his regime isn’t leaving office — no matter what. And honestly, would you be shocked if this administration tried to make its wet dream a reality?

Every movement needs martyrs, and if the deaths of Porter and Good prove to American citizens and permanent residents once and for all that they’re not safe from ICE, then their deaths weren’t in vain. That’s why the Trump administration and its lackeys are straining so hard to slime Good’s name — because they know the public isn’t having its lies.

Their smears don’t have the same effect they used to, thankfully. Just look at what happened recently with Grok, Elon Musk’s AI creation on X.

You have to take what it digitally blurts out with a grain of salt — Grok once started calling itself “MechaHitler” and spewed anti-semitic conspiracies after an update that Musk swore “improved [it] significantly.”

But consider what Grok did when the billionaire Trump enabler “tweeted” of Good: “She tried to run people over.”

When asked whether it “would have authorized lethal forced based solely on this video evidence” even Musk’s creation, even Grok, replied (while noting that “ICE claims differ”):

“Based on descriptions from multiple sources… it shows the vehicle moving slowly backward and forward without clear evidence of attempting to ram officers. Under objective standards like [the Supreme Court decision] Graham v. Connor, which require an imminent threat for deadly force, I would not authorize lethal force solely on this footage.”

I guess even Grok is capable of calling out Trumpworld’s BS when it “sees” what millions of other people across the U.S. have seen with their own eyes.

UK PM Keir Starmer’s office says move to limit access to paying subscribers ‘insulting’ to victims and ‘not a solution’.

Elon Musk’s AI chatbot Grok has limited image generation on the social media platform X amid growing backlash over its use to create sexualised deepfakes of women and children.

Grok told X users on Friday that image generation and editing features were now available only to paying subscribers.

The standalone Grok app, which operates separately from X, still allows users to generate images without a subscription.

The move comes after Musk was threatened with fines and several countries pushed back publicly against the tool that allowed users to alter online images to remove the subjects’ clothes.

The European Commission said on Monday that such images circulating on X were unlawful and appalling.

The United Kingdom’s data regulator also said it had asked the platform to explain how it was complying with data protection laws following concerns that Grok was generating sexually abusive images of women.

On Friday, British Prime Minister Keir Starmer’s office called the move to limit access to paying subscribers “insulting” to victims and “not a solution”.

“That simply turns an AI feature that allows the creation of unlawful images into a premium service,” a Downing Street spokesperson said. “It’s insulting the victims of misogyny and sexual violence.”

The EU executive, for its part, said it had “taken note of the recent changes”.

But EU digital affairs spokesperson Thomas Regnier told reporters, “This doesn’t change our fundamental issue, paid subscription or non-paid subscription.”

“We don’t want to see such images. It’s as simple as that,” he said, adding, “What we’re asking platforms to do is to make sure that their design, that their systems do not allow the generation of such illegal content.”

The European Commission has ordered X to retain all internal documents and data related to Grok until the end of 2026 in response to the uproar about the sexualised images.

France, Malaysia and India have also criticised Musk’s platform over the issue.

Musk said last week that anyone using Grok to create illegal content would face the same consequences as uploading such material directly.

This is not the first time that Grok has been criticised, after the chatbot last year was slammed for providing anti-Semitic responses to questions from X users.

In July, Musk’s artificial intelligence firm xAI disabled Grok’s text replies and deleted posts after the chatbot praised Adolf Hitler and made anti-Semitic remarks.

Jan. 6 (UPI) — British Technology Secretary Liz Kendall said Elon Musk must deal with “appalling and unacceptable” images of women without their consent generated by the platform’s Grok artificial intelligence service.

The Grok bot service has been digitally undressing women and putting them in sexualized situations without their consent.

Kendall called it “absolutely appalling.”

“We cannot and will not allow the proliferation of these demeaning and degrading images, which are disproportionately aimed at women and girls,” she said. “Make no mistake, the [United Kingdom] will not tolerate the endless proliferation of disgusting and abusive material online. We must all come together to stamp it out.”

X said in a statement: “We take action against illegal content on X, including Child Sexual Abuse Material, by removing it, permanently suspending accounts, and working with local governments and law enforcement as necessary.”

X user Daisy Dixon told the BBC that she found sexualized images of herself made by Grok.

She noticed that everyday pictures she had posted of herself on the platform were changed to undress her or sexualize her. It made her feel shocked, humiliated and afraid for her safety, she said.

“Myself and many other women on X continue to report the inappropriate AI images/videos we are being sent daily, but X continues to reply that there has been no violation of X rules,” she said. “I just hope Kendall’s words turn into concrete enforcement soon — I don’t want to open my X app any more as I’m frightened about what I might see.”

Jessaline Caine told The Guardian that the government’s action is “spineless.” Caine, a survivor of child sexual abuse, said that as of Tuesday morning, Grok was still obeying requests to change an image of her at age 3 to put her in a string bikini. ChatGPT and Gemini rejected the same requests.

“Other platforms have these safeguards so why does Grok allow the creation of these images?” Caine asked. “The images I’ve seen are so vile and degrading. The government has been very reactive. These AI tools need better regulation.”

Thomas Regnier, spokesperson for tech sovereignty at the European Commission told the BBC Newshour that the Commission is taking it very seriously.

“We don’t want this in the European Union … it’s appalling, it’s disgusting,” he said.

“The Wild West is over in Europe. All companies have the obligation to put their own house in order — and this starts by being responsible and removing illegal content that is being generated by your AI tool.”

It’s illegal to create or share non-consensual intimate images or CSAM, including AI deepfakes. Fake images of people in bikinis may also qualify.

Online child safety campaigner Beeban Kidron said AI-generated images of children in bikinis may not be CSAM but they disrespect children’s privacy and agency.

“We cannot live in a world in which a kid can’t post a picture of winning a race unless they are willing to be sexualized and humiliated,” The Guardian reported she said.

Jan. 2 (UPI) — Chinese electric car maker BYD surpassed Tesla in annual sales in 2025.

BYD said it sold 2.26 million battery electric vehicles in 2025, a boost of 28% year over year, the company said in a statement Thursday. BYD’s total deliveries from BEVs and plug-in hybrids were about 4.6 million vehicles.

Tesla sold 1.64 million vehicles in 2025, which is about an 8% decline from 2024, the company announced Friday. It’s the company’s second-straight annual drop.

Tesla CEO Elon Musk once laughed at BYD cars in an interview on Bloomberg TV in 2011. He said, “I don’t think they have a great product,” CNBC reported Musk said.

Musk spent the first half of 2025 working for the federal government in the administration of President Donald Trump as the leader of the Department of Government Efficiency. He left in May amid a fight with Trump.

In November, Tesla shareholders approved a new pay package for Musk.The firm said 75% of shareholders with voting rights backed Musk’s 10-year pay deal, which could net him $1 trillion over that time by boosting his stake in Tesla by more than 423 million shares.

Though shares dropped significantly in the first quarter of 2025, they are back on track with an all-time closing high of $489.88 last month, after Musk said it had been testing driverless vehicles in Austin, Texas.

Decline in sales comes amid outrage of Elon Musk’s political forays, end in US electric vehicle tax breaks.

Tesla has lost its place as the top global seller of electric vehicles to Chinese company BYD, capping a year defined by outrage over CEO Elon Musk’s political manoeuvring and the end of United States tax breaks for customers.

The company revealed on Friday that it had sold 1.64 million vehicles in 2025, compared with BYD’s 2.26 million vehicles. The sales represented a 9 percent decline for Tesla from a year earlier.

Tesla, founded in 2003, had for years far outpaced traditional automakers in its development and sale of electric vehicles. However, the market has become increasingly crowded with competitors, with China’s electric vehicle market bounding ahead.

Musk’s embrace of US President Donald Trump in 2024 and subsequent spearheading of a controversial “government efficiency” panel (DOGE) behind widespread layoffs of federal workers has also proved polarising. The political foray prompted protests at Tesla facilities and slumps in sales.

The company’s fourth quarter sales totaled 418,227, falling short of the much-reduced 440,000 target that analysts recently polled by FactSet, an investment research firm, had expected.

Musk left DOGE in May, in what was largely viewed as an effort to reassure investors.

Tesla was also hard hit by the expiration of a $7,500 tax credit for electric vehicle purchases that was phased out by the Trump administration at the end of September. Trump’s opposition to electric vehicles has contributed to a strained relationship with Musk.

Despite the downward trends in sales, investors have generally remained optimistic about Tesla and Musk’s ambitious plans to make the company a leader in driverless robotaxi services and humanoid robots for homes.

Reflecting that optimism, Tesla stock finished 2025 up about 11 percent.

Tesla has also recently introduced two less expensive electric vehicle models, the Model Y and Model 3, meant to compete with cheaper Chinese models for sale in Europe and Asia.

Musk entered 2026 as the wealthiest person in the world.

It is widely believed that the public offering of his rocket company, SpaceX, set for later this year, could make the 54-year-old the world’s first trillionaire.

In November, Tesla’s directors awarded Musk a potentially historic pay package of nearly $1 trillion if ambitious performance targets were met.

Musk scored another huge win in December,when the Delaware Supreme Court reversed a lower court’s ruling, awarding him a $55bn pay package that had been paused since 2018.

Conversely, Tesla is at risk of temporarily losing its licence to sell cars in California after a judge there ruled it had misled customers about the safety of its driverless taxis.

A ‘great leap forward’

But Schwartz told Al Jazeera that the trend towards government data consolidation has continued in the decades since, under both Democratic leaders and Republicans.

“Surveillance is bipartisan, unfortunately,” he said.

With Trump’s second term, however, the process hit warp speed. Schwartz argues that the Trump administration’s actions violate laws like the Privacy Act, marking a “dangerous” shift away from Nixon-era protections.

“The number-one problem with the federal government in the last year when it comes to surveillance is the demolition of the Watergate-era safeguards that were intended to keep databases separated,” he said.

Schwartz noted that Trump’s consolidation efforts have been coupled with a lack of transparency about how the new, integrated data systems are being used.

“Just as the current administration has done a great leap forward on surveillance and invading privacy, so it also has been a less transparent government in terms of the public understanding what it is doing,” Schwartz said.

Already, on March 20, Trump signed an executive order that called on government agencies to take “all necessary steps” for the dissolution of what he called “data silos”.

Shortly afterwards, in April, US Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) inked a deal with the IRS to exchange personal information, including the names and addresses of taxpayers.

The memo was seen as an effort to turn private taxpayer data into a tool to carry out Trump’s goal of deporting immigrants.

A federal court in November paused the agencies’ data-sharing agreement. But other efforts continue.

In June, the Supreme Court ruled in favour of giving DOGE access to sensitive Social Security data. And just this month, the Trump administration pressured states to share information about the recipients of food assistance, or else face a loss of funding.

While immigrants appear to be one of the main targets of the data consolidation project, Venzke said that Americans of all stripes should not be surprised if their personal information is weaponised down the line.

“There is no reason that it will be limited to undocumented people. They are taking a system that’s traditionally limited to non-citizens and vastly expanding it to include all sorts of information on US citizens,” Venzke said.

“That was unthinkable just five years ago, but we’re seeing it happen now, and consequently, its potential abuses are widespread.”

Dec. 26 (UPI) — A federal judge has blocked the deportation of a British man targeted by President Donald Trump.

Imran Ahmed, founder and CEO of the Center for Countering Digital Hate, was one of five people placed on a visa ban after the government accused him of censorship.

Ahmed filed suit against Secretary of State Marco Rubio and Attorney General Pam Bondi to prevent “the imminent prospect of unconstitutional arrest.”

The suit said the case comes from “the federal government’s latest attempt to abuse the immigration system to punish and punitively detain noncitizens for protected speech and silence viewpoints with which it disagrees.”

Ahmed is a legal permanent resident of the United States, where he lives with his American wife and child. He praised the judge’s decision.

“I will not be bullied away from my life’s work of fighting to keep children safe from social media’s harm and stopping antisemitism online,” Ahmed said.

The speed of the judge’s decision was telling, said his lawyer Roberta Kaplan.

“The federal government can’t deport a green card holder like Imran Ahmed, with a wife and young child who are American, simply because it doesn’t like what he has to say,” the BBC reported she said.

Rubio said in a statement Tuesday that the five had “led organized efforts to coerce American platforms to censor, demonetize and suppress” the views of Americans with whom they disagreed.

“These radical activists and weaponized NGOs have advanced censorship crackdowns by foreign states — in each case targeting American speakers and American companies,” Rubio said. He described the five as “agents of the global censorship-industrial complex.”

The others included in the ban are former European Union technology commissioner Thierry Breton; Anna-Lena von Hodenberg and Josephine Ballon of Berlin-based non-profit HateAid; Clare Melford, co-founder of Global Disinformation Index.

Ahmed told The Guardian that it was another attempt to deflect accountability and transparency.

“This has never been about politics,” he said. “What it has been about is companies that simply do not want to be held accountable and, because of the influence of big money in Washington, are corrupting the system and trying to bend it to their will, and their will is to be unable to be held accountable. There is no other industry that acts with such arrogance, indifference and a lack of humility and sociopathic greed at the expense of people.”

Ahmed said he had not formally received any notification from the government.

“I’m very confident that our first amendment rights will be upheld by the court,” he told The Guardian.

He is expected to be in court Monday, when the protective order will be confirmed.

In 2023, Elon Musk‘s company X sued the CCDH after it reported on a rise in hate speech on the platform since Musk’s takeover. The case was dismissed but X appealed the decision.

The Delaware Supreme Court rules in favour of Musk and his $56bn compensation package.

Elon Musk’s 2018 pay package from Tesla, once worth $56bn, has been restored by the Delaware Supreme Court, in the United States, two years after a lower court struck down the compensation deal as “unfathomable”.

Friday’s ruling overturns a decision that had prompted a furious backlash from Musk and damaged Delaware’s business-friendly reputation.

The pay package was by far the largest ever, until Tesla shareholders approved a new, even larger pay plan of nearly $1 trillion in November.

The ruling means that Musk can finally get paid for his work since 2018, when he transformed Tesla from a struggling startup to one of the world’s most valuable companies.

The 2018 pay deal provided Musk options to acquire about 304 million Tesla shares at a deeply discounted price if the company hit various milestones, which it did.

Tesla estimated in 2018 that the plan was potentially worth $56bn, although given the rise in the stock price, the value ballooned to about $120bn by early November. The options represent approximately 9 percent of Tesla’s outstanding stock.

Musk never collected his stock options because, soon after shareholders approved the 2018 compensation, the board was sued by Richard Tornetta, an investor with just nine Tesla shares.

In 2024, after a five-day trial, Delaware Judge Kathaleen McCormick concluded that Tesla’s directors were conflicted and key facts were hidden from shareholders when they voted to approve the plan. She ordered that the 2018 plan be rescinded.

Musk accused Delaware judges of being activists, hostile to tech founders, and he urged businesses to follow Tesla and reincorporate elsewhere.

Dropbox, Roblox, The Trade Desk and Coinbase were among the handful of large companies that moved their legal homes to Nevada or Texas. However, Delaware remains by far the most popular legal home for US public companies.

Tesla’s board has warned that Musk, the world’s richest person who also leads the SpaceX rocket venture and the artificial intelligence startup xAI, could leave the electric car company if he does not get the pay he wants and an increase in his voting power.

In November, shareholders approved a new pay package that could be worth $878bn if Tesla meets targets for self-driving vehicles, a robotaxi network and sales of humanoid robots.

Tesla has taken steps to reduce the risk that a shareholder could tie up the 2025 package in the courts.

The Austin-based company is now incorporated in Texas, which allows Tesla to require that any investor or group of investors must own 3 percent of the company stock before suing for an alleged corporate law violation. A stake of that size would be worth about $30bn, and Musk is the only individual with that much stock.