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**APRIL 24, 2024**

On the Prospect website

Plaintiff Trying to Reverse Noncompete Ban Is Trump's Tax Adviser

G. Brint Ryan has advised Trump on tax policy. His company is dedicated
to 'liberating our clients from the burden of being overtaxed.' BY
DAVID DAYEN

Challenge to Fashion Merger Shows a New Antitrust Philosophy in Action

The bid to block a tie-up between two fashion conglomerates goes beyond
consumer prices, and looks at market competition and labor harms. BY
DAVID DAYEN

My Dinner With Andreessen

Billionaires I have known: Part One of a three-part series BY RICK
PERLSTEIN

Meyerson on TAP

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**** A Fix for Tesla's Troubles? Paying Elon
a Cool $56 Billion, Of Course.

You were thinking they'd invest in better, more affordable cars?

Tesla is in trouble.

Yesterday, the company announced that its profits for the first three
months of this year fell by 55 percent from the first three months of
2023. Sales declined by 8.5 percent. Its stock price has fallen by 65
percent since its high point three years ago, and by roughly 40 percent
just since January 1. The company recently laid off 10,000 of its
workers.

So what's a CEO to do? What investments can Tesla make to restore its
plummeting industry leadership? Build a more affordable product? That
was the hope some investors had for later this year, though yesterday,
the company announced it wouldn't get around to that until late 2025.
Its chief focus, CEO Elon Musk made clear, was building partly
autonomous robotaxis-its own model of the robocabs that have been
crashing their way around San Francisco.

Perhaps Musk could also focus a bit more on the company, since his
associates have noted that he seems more interested in SpaceX and X (the
company that used to be Twitter) these days. Perhaps he could be less of
an obstreperous right-wing jerk, since the percentage of Democrats
buying Teslas, which they once patronized because of their inherently
green aspects, has fallen by 60 percent, according to a survey

reported in

**The Wall Street Journal**, ever since Musk began broadcasting his
ideological and characterological affinities with Donald Trump.

More broadly, the days when Tesla was the only, and then the dominant,
player in the electric-car market are long gone. Even without its
lassitude in producing more affordable vehicles, even without the siren
songs of space shots and Twitter calumnies that have distracted Musk
from his cars, Tesla's role in the market has inevitably shrunk as
U.S., Asian, and European competitors have scaled up their own
production.

So, are a chastened Tesla and Musk redirecting the company's resources
into building a better, more affordable car? Not exactly.

Instead, the company reaffirmed yesterday that it will ask its
shareholders to authorize a special payment to Musk of roughly $56
billion.

Now, there's a well-established American corporate tradition of
rewarding their CEO fuckups with large paychecks. David Calhoun, whom
Boeing recently showed the door after various other doors were found to
be loosely attached, if attached at all, to some Boeing-made planes,
will get a going-away present of between $26 million and $45 million,
according to a report

in

**Fortune**. Warner Bros. Discovery had a lousy year in 2023, losing $3
billion, but it somehow managed to reward its CEO, David Zaslav, with a
$50 million paycheck.

[link removed]

All this is chump change, of course, compared to what Musk has asked
Tesla to pay him. Fifty

**billion**dollars is a thousand times more than Zaslav's puny 50
million. It's roughly the same size as the GDP of Montana-not our
richest state, to be sure, but not our poorest either. Unlike every
other payoff to fuckup CEOs, or, for that matter, to

**non**-fuckup CEOs, it's so large it could make a measurable
difference in America's Gini coefficient, which tracks a nation's
levels of economic inequality.

Why does Musk, already the world's richest human, want a $56 billion
paycheck from Tesla? Some reporting has suggested he wants to recoup the
roughly $44 billion he shelled out to purchase Twitter-a purchase that
was bad for Tesla, bad for Twitter, and bad for truth.

Why is Tesla's board so insistent on shoveling the equivalent of the
economic value of Montana to Musk? For one thing, the board doesn't
exactly run herd on Elon.

**The**

**Wall Street Journal**'s reporting

has made clear Musk's domination of his ostensible overseers, as this
passage from one of the

**Journal**'s stories suggests:

In the culture Musk has created around him, some friends, including
directors, feel there is an expectation to consume drugs with him
because they think refraining could upset the billionaire, who has made
them a lot of money, some of the people said. More so, they don't want
to risk losing the social capital that comes from being close to Musk,
which for some feels akin to having proximity to a king.

Which makes clear why Tesla's board announced earlier this month that,
notwithstanding a Delaware court's ruling that struck down a previous
version of this payout, they were going to submit it again to the
company's shareholders.

And finally, why have those corporate shakedown artists whom the media
refer to as "activist investors" been silent in the face of this massive
misappropriation of shareholders' money? When corporations pay their
workers "too much," or go in for affirmative action hiring, the cries of
outrage from the likes of Bill Ackman, Carl Icahn, and Nelson Peltz
assault the heavens, assuming the heavens tune in to CNBC. But when the
world's richest man appropriates $56 billion for himself, these
billionaires, in a burst of either class solidarity or naked envy,
remain strategically mute. So much for Ackman, Icahn, and Peltz.

There is, however, one positive by-product to Elon Musk's
determination to grab $56 billion from his shareholders and employees:
It strengthens the case-growing stronger every day-for expropriating
the fortunes of the rich.

~ HAROLD MEYERSON

Follow Harold Meyerson on Twitter

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