Tesla offers Musk a $1 trillion stock-based compensation plan
Tesla’s board proposed a $1 trillion equity-based pay plan for Elon Musk, the biggest CEO in history, in the ongoing legal battle over past pay.
Tesla Tsla.o has reached a confidential deal to resolve two lawsuits relating to deaths in two California crashes in 2019, according to court documents.
The settlement comes weeks after Florida ju-deputies ordered Tesla to pay $243 million in compensatory and punitive damages to another fatal 2019 crash crash on the Autopilot-equipped Model S.
Tesla hired a trio of prominent new lawyers and asked the judge to either find a legally unfair verdict and abandon the case or order a new trial.
The electric vehicle manufacturer, which has resolved several other lawsuits, including vehicles and autonomous driving technology, rejected a $60 million settlement proposal for the Florida lawsuit, which was filed last month.
The Florida verdict and the two California settlements are important as much of Tesla’s $1.4 trillion valuation rests on Elon Musk’s promise to quickly expand CEO Robotaxis and the fully automated driving (FSD) software that supports them. FSD is an advanced version of autopilot.
One lawsuit, a settlement notice filed Tuesday, relates to the death of a 15-year-old boy traveling through Alameda County, California, where his father put his father in a vehicle with his father when he was on the rear end by a Tesla Model 3 involving autopilots, rolling over the victim’s vehicle and causing him to crash into the center barrier. The boy succumbed to injuries caused by the collision.
Another case is linked to a December 2019 death, when two people travelling through the intersection of Gardena, California, traveled in the Civic, California, when an autopilot equipped Tesla Model S didn’t stop at high speeds and crashed into the victim’s car.
Tesla did not respond to requests for comment. Representatives of the plaintiff’s lawyers did not comment on the Alameda case and did not respond to requests for comment on the Gardena case.
According to a notice filed last week and seen by Reuters on Tuesday, the trial is expected to continue against some drivers of the Model S vehicles and other defendants, while Tesla’s settlement is solely with Tesla.
Neither notice discloses the terms of the agreement. They said the dismissal of the lawsuit was conditioned on “satisfactory completion of the specified terms.”
Trials for both cases were scheduled to begin next month – one in Alameda County Superior Court and the other in Los Angeles County Superior Court. According to the court’s order, a judge at Alameda Superior Court left the scheduled court on Tuesday, with Tesla and the plaintiffs agreeing to withdraw the petition at the Los Angeles trial.
(=Reporting by Abhirup Roy in San Francisco, Mike Scarcela in Washington DC, and Zaheer Kachwala in Bengaluru, Edited by Shinjini Ganguli and Muralikumar Ananttharama
