Yup, we have another opportunity for Elon Musk to make new law.

This time, it comes in the form of an extraordinary proxy statement recommending that shareholders vote to ratify the compensation package that Chancellor McCormick invalidated in Tornetta v. Musk, and that they vote to reincorporate the company in Texas.

There are many many questions raised and I’m sure I’ll be revisiting a bunch of them over the next couple of months, but I’m zeroing in on one in particular: the pay package ratification vote.  Can they really do that?

And hoo boy did this get long, so behind a cut it goes; however, I personally find the most interesting part to be the realpolitik of it all if it ends up in a courtroom, so knowledgeable readers may want to skip to that part at the end.

More under the jump

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I’ve frequently posted about omissions liability under the federal securities laws; you can read many of those posts, in reverse chronological order, here, here, and here.  But, here’s the CliffsNotes version of where we are now, after the Supreme Court’s decision today in Macquarie Infrastructure Corp. v. Moab Partners, L. P..

Once upon a time, there was a statute, Section 10(b) of the Exchange Act. That statute made it unlawful:

To use or employ, in connection with the purchase or sale of any security registered on a national securities exchange or any security not so registered, or any securities-based swap agreement any manipulative or deceptive device or contrivance in contravention of such rules and regulations as the Commission may prescribe as necessary or appropriate in the public interest or for the protection of investors.

The Commission did, in fact, adopt those rules and regulations, in the form of Rule 10b-5, which made it unlawful:

(a) To employ any device, scheme, or artifice to defraud,

(b) To make any untrue statement of a material fact or to omit to state a material fact necessary in order to make the statements made, in the light

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Just posting the obligatory plug of a couple of new things.  First up, I reviewed Stephen Bainbridge’s book, The Profit Motive: Defending Shareholder Value Maximization for the Harvard Law Review.  Here is the abstract:

Professor Stephen Bainbridge’s new book, The Profit Motive: Defending Shareholder Value Maximization, uses the Business Roundtable’s 2019 statement of corporate purpose as a jumping off point to offer a spirited defense of shareholder wealth maximization as the ultimate end of corporate governance. Beginning with an analysis of classroom standards like Dodge v. Ford Motor Co., and continuing through the modern era, Bainbridge argues both that shareholder value maximization is the legal obligation of corporate boards, and that it should in fact be so, partly because of wealth maximization’s prosocial tendencies, but also because of the lack of a viable alternative. Drawing on his decades of work as one of America’s most influential corporate governance theorists, Bainbridge offers up sharp critiques of the kind of enlightened managerialism reflected in the Business Roundtable’s statement, and advocated by academics like Professor Lynn Stout and practitioners like Martin Lipton. Along the way, he also has harsh words for trendy alternatives such as “environmental, social, and governance” (ESG) investing

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Andrew Jennings recently featured Nicole Iannarone and her work on the Business Scholarship Podcast.  You can access the episode here.  It focuses on a paper on securities arbitration and some of her recent work.  I’d like to direct your attention to the last five minutes or so.  It discusses being appointed as an arbitrator.  

If you’re a business law professor, you’re probably pretty well qualified to serve as arbitrator.  It might also give you insight into what happens in these kinds of disputes.  Because I’m involved with a securities arbitration bar association, I’m deemed to be a non-public arbitrator so I don’t get selected often.

But if you’re fair-minded and not in a major city, there is a real need for more competent arbitrators.  The paperwork and training doesn’t take all that long, and it’s pretty interesting if you get selected.

It’s the moment we’ve all been waiting for and – the Delaware Supreme Court holds that all conflicted controller transactions require MFW protections to win business judgment review.

It also appears that the special committee must be composed completely of independent directors – none of this, oh, well, one turned out to be conflicted but it didn’t matter much business, which to me actually tightens the standard that I kind of assumed was being employed, and was employed in the Chancery decision in Match itself.

Also, I have previously remarked on the disjunction between requiring MFW for conflicted transactions, but only board independence for considering litigation demands against controlling shareholders.  In my paper, After Corwin: Down the Controlling Shareholder Rabbit Hole, I said:

litigation demands are, in a real sense, different from ordinary conflict transactions. If directors are too conflicted to consider the merits of a transaction, the court evaluates its fairness. By contrast, if directors are too conflicted to consider the merits of bringing litigation, shareholders themselves are permitted to assume control of corporate machinery to bring the action in their stead. For that reason, demand excusal may legitimately be viewed as its own category of problem.

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The Tulane Corporate Law Institute this year was unusually contentious, and that’s because a lot of corporate practitioners – defense side – were unhappy with a number of recent Delaware decisions.

Tornetta v. Musk made headlines because of the colorful personalities involved, but it actually rested on fairly commonplace, well-established Delaware standards of review.  More unsettling, I think, from the corporate bar’s perspective, were decisions like  Sjunde AP-Fonden v. Activision Blizzard (which I blogged about here), Crispo v. Musk (which I blogged about here), and West Palm Beach Firefighters’ Pension Fund v. Moelis & Co. (which I blogged about here), because those cases upset settled expectations of practitioners.  (VC Laster obliquely referred to some of the complaints in his decision denying interlocutory review in TripAdvisor: “Rule 42 does not invite a trial court to consider the level of media attention that a decision has received. That does not mean that the Delaware Supreme Court could not consider it. The justices might conclude that given the media attention and practitioner-driven stormlets over Delaware’s place in the corporate universe, Delaware’s highest court should weigh in. But that is not a consideration that Rule 42 instructs a…