Tesla asks shareholders to restore Elon Musk’s $56bn pay deal

Tesla Chair Robyn Denholm says company believes in ‘big risks for the chance of big rewards’.

Tesla has asked shareholders to reapprove a record-breaking $56bn pay package for CEO Elon Musk after a US judge rejected the deal.

In a filing with the Securities and Exchange Commission on Wednesday, Tesla Chair Robyn Denholm said the board of directors supported the original pay deal and believed in “big risks for the chance of big rewards”.

“Elon has not been paid for any of his work for Tesla for the past six years that has helped to generate significant growth and stockholder value,” Denholm wrote.

“That strikes us – and the many stockholders from whom we already have heard – as fundamentally unfair, and inconsistent with the will of the stockholders who voted for it.”

Shareholders, who will gather for their annual meeting on June 13, will also be asked to approve a proposal to move the company’s corporate home to Texas.

The proposals come on the heels of a difficult period for the electric carmaker.

Tesla’s vehicle deliveries fell by 8.5 percent in the first quarter, and the company’s shares have fallen 37 percent so far this year even as the S&P 500 has risen about 6 percent.

Musk earlier this week told staff in a memo that the company would lay off more than 10 percent of its global workforce to be “lean, innovative and hungry for the next growth phase cycle”.

Judge Kathaleen McCormick of Delaware’s Court of Chancery rejected Musk’s compensation package in January, finding that the South Africa-born entrepreneur had heavily influenced the deal and granting him such “an unfathomable sum” would be unfair to shareholders.

Shares of Tesla fell about 1 percent on Wednesday following the news of the proposed pay package.