When it comes to legal fees, $6 billion would be the crème de la crème. Not even the lawyers who represented class-action lawsuits filed in the wake of Enron’s collapse got a sixth of that — they pocketed $688 million. Yet the lawyers who successfully argued that Elon Musk’s $56 billion compensation package was excessive and illegal are vying for a $5.6 billion payout.
Their reasoning? They worked on contingency for more than five years, meaning if the outcome wouldn’t have been their preferred one, they would have gotten zilch. Instead, they argued their win for Tesla shareholders “was massive.”
Musk of course was very unhappy with the lawyer’s request, which was submitted to a Delaware judge on Friday. In an X post on the same day, Musk said, “The lawyers who did nothing but damage Tesla want $6 billion. Criminal.”
In January, a Delaware state court judge struck down Musk’s $56 billion Tesla CEO pay package from 2018 that cemented his place as the world’s richest person. The judge found that the “process leading to the approval of Musk’s compensation plan was deeply flawed.”