From Rebecca Bellan via Veritas:

As if Elon Musk didn’t have enough on his plate, the world’s richest man is headed to court to defend his $56 billion Tesla pay package. Richard Tornetta, a Tesla shareholder who filed suit in 2019 to rescind Musk’s 2018 pay deal, claims the package — “the largest compensation grant in human history” — is unjustly paid to Musk without demanding he focus entirely on the carmaker.

The trial is yet another drama Musk will have to juggle as he works to overhaul Twitter. Musk’s deal to buy the social media company went through at the end of October, and since then Musk has set to work laying off swathes of employees, getting sued for said layoffs and generally scheming out loud on the platform about charging users $8 per month to get a blue tick next to their names.

The Twitter buy didn’t exactly help Musk’s case in the lawsuit over his pay package. Aside from Tesla, Musk already serves as CEO of SpaceX, the Boring Company, OpenAI and Neuralink. With Twitter, Musk will only lend credence to Tornetta’s claims that Musk is a “part-time executive” at Tesla.

Tornetta also claims the board set low bars on performance targets for Musk and that the grant was “demanded for the avowed purpose of colonizing Mars (the planet).”

Tesla has said Musk’s pay package delivered a tenfold increase in value to shareholders.

The trial will be decided by Kathaleen McCormick on Delaware’s Court of Chancery. McCormick oversaw Twitter’s suit against Musk that ended in him agreeing to close his $44 billion deal, an acquisition which he financed in large part by selling his Tesla stock.