- Elon Musk’s controversial massive compensation package, which a Delaware court had already invalidated earlier this year, seems to have been authorized by Tesla’s shareholders. Musk took to X ahead of the important shareholder meeting today to declare victory based on the voting numbers he was seeing on two resolutions: one supporting Tesla’s corporate relocation from Delaware to Texas, and the other calling for the reinstatement of his pay package, which could be worth over $55 billion.
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- These are early findings, and the votes might still alter before the meeting this afternoon, but it seems that Musk got his wish.
- This doesn’t reverse the Delaware judge’s decision, as my colleague Christiaan Hetzner points out in his article, but it does strengthen Tesla’s case since the package was invalid in part because its shareholders weren’t given enough information when it was formulated.
- It’s not surprising that Tesla’s share price shot up when Musk declared victory—it was up over 7% at one point, though the surge has since leveled off—as the company had threatened to pull out if Musk didn’t get all the stock options he was promised.
- Now that he has the support he requested, the key issue is whether Musk can persuade his more discerning shareholders that Tesla is receiving enough of his attention, independent of the appeal’s result. He was attacked by those who were against the resolution, including ISS, a proxy consulting group, for being too involved in all of his businesses, which also included SpaceX and X, the former Twitter.
- In other Musk news, eight former SpaceX workers have sued him for allegedly engaging in sexual harassment and retaliation, carrying on a trend I mentioned yesterday. According to Bloomberg, the complaint claims that he “intentionally and deliberately fostered an unwanted hostile work environment by bringing offensive sexual images, memes, and remarks that denigrated women and/or the LGBTQ+ community into the workplace.”
- A few years ago, the concerned workers expressed their concerns in an open letter. They say that as a consequence, Musk dismissed them, defying the recommendation of an HR officer to look into it first.
- Moving on from Musk, let’s talk about Europe.
- First off, Meta’s intentions to train its AI models on the material of Facebook and Instagram users have drawn criticism from the Norwegian Consumer Council, which has taken the matter up with the nation’s privacy watchdog. It claims that doing so is against the General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) of the EU, which is applicable in Norway despite the nation’s non-member status (Norway is a part of the European Economic Area, therefore EU privacy rights apply there).
- “You must ask to be opted out if you do not want your material to be included in the training data. Nevertheless, the Council said in a statement that “deceptive design patterns and vague wording have purposefully made this process cumbersome.”
- If this seems familiar, it is because activist lawyer and Meta’s arch-enemy Max Schrems, who has a stellar record in EU courts, filed an identical lawsuit in Austria a week ago. Because Schrems is a busy man, he filed another GDPR complaint today, this time against Google for tracking Chrome users. The nonprofit organization Noyb stands for “none of your business.”
- As part of a purported pro-privacy initiative, Google has been gradually eliminating the usage of third-party cookies in Chrome, a process that has been beset by several delays and regulatory investigations. Instead, it has established a system known as the “Privacy Sandbox,” which allows marketers to see some user’s personal information without using such cookies. Google needs to get user agreement under the GDPR since this still counts as user tracking. To that end, it has been asking users to “turn on the ad privacy feature” via a pop-up window.
- Even if the Privacy Sandbox is less intrusive than third-party cookies are, Schrems sees this as deceit. In a statement, he said that “Google has simply lied to its users.” “People were duped into adopting Google’s first-party ad monitoring, even though they believed they were consenting to a privacy feature. For consent to be enforceable, it must be reasonable, clear, and informed. Google has taken a very different tack.
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- BRAND NEWSWORTHY
- Broadcom’s stock price rose. More than 14% of Broadcom’s share price has increased after the chip manufacturer said that demand was soaring due to—AI, do I need to mention this? Its Nvidia-like move to announce a 10-for-1 stock split didn’t harm, according to Reuters.
- Once again, Waymo recalls software. Waymo has recalled software for all of its driverless cars for the second time. After two of the vehicles collided with the same pickup truck that was being hauled at the time in February, a recall was issued. The Verge reports that the current recall is in response to an incident in Phoenix when one of the cars collided with a telephone pole, injuring just the vehicle. As it considers whether to launch its own recall, the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration said Wednesday that it needs further information on Waymo incidents.
- ChromeOS has more Android. Google has chosen to integrate more of the Android tech stack into ChromeOS to provide more AI to its Chromebooks. According to 9to5Google, the change could streamline Google’s engineering efforts and shorten the time it takes for Android capabilities to migrate to ChromeOS—as was the case recently when generative AI wallpapers were introduced.
Source:
fortune
