Investor's Corner
Tesla shareholder’s legal team adjusts demand to $1.44 billion in fees for Musk pay case
The legal team of Tesla shareholder Richard Tornetta, who filed a legal complaint against Elon Musk’s 2018 CEO Performance Award, has adjusted their plaintiff fee request to the Delaware Court. Tornetta’s legal team noted that they could adjust their proposed fee to just $73,948 per hour, which would amount to a cash award of roughly $1.44 billion.
The Tornetta vs. Musk case became a notable issue for the electric vehicle maker back in January when Judge Kathaleen McCormick of the Delaware Court of Chancery rescinded Musk’s 2018 CEO Performance Award. For their work in the case, Tornetta’s legal team argued that they should be granted 29.4 million TSLA shares. Such an amount would be worth over $5 billion, or more than $200,000 per hour.
Tesla has argued against Tornetta’s legal team’s arguments. As noted in a Reuters report, the electric vehicle maker argued that the legal team of the Tesla shareholder — who held nine shares when he filed his complaint against Musk’s 2018 pay package — should be paid just about $13.6 million for their work. Longtime Tesla retail shareholder Amy Steffens has also secured legal counsel to challenge the $200,000 per hour fee request of Tornetta’s attorneys.
In their recent filing, Tornetta’s legal team proposed an alternative way of looking at the fees for their work in the case. While the legal team rejected Tesla’s $13.6 million legal fee argument, and while the attorneys still argued that the court should strongly consider granting them over 29 million TSLA shares as payment, they noted that the Court could go for a cash-based alternative structure instead. Such a system would lower their hourly rate to $73,948, and would result in a payment of around $1.44 billion.
$73,948 per hour is unacceptable and highly inappropriate to request.
The ABA Rules for Professional Conduct, specifically Rule 1.5(a) states: “A lawyer shall not make an agreement for, charge, or collect an unreasonable fee or an unreasonable amount for expenses…”
In short,… https://t.co/kItq68oBAK— Jade (@ImUsuallyRighTT) June 22, 2024
Following are sections of the filing from Tornetta’s lawyers.
“While Plaintiff’s Counsel sincerely believe the award sought is appropriate, earned, and indeed conservative under Delaware law—the Action did, after all, rescind an ‘unfathomable’ $55B compensation package, the largest in history by multiples—Plaintiff’s Counsel acknowledge the requested award, if granted, would be record-setting and the subject of significant commentary. Were the Court concerned by the requested award’s size and desirous of a different approach, there are other alternatives available that address the expressed concerns about “windfalls.”
“Specifically, $35,000/hour cannot be a ‘windfall’ because that hourly rate was awarded by this Court and affirmed by the Supreme Court over a decade ago in Southern Peru. Adjusted to today’s dollars, a $35,000 hourly rate would be over $55,600/hour. It follows, a fortiori, that for a substantial verdict on the order of Southern Peru, an award of at least $55,600/hour is not a ‘windfall.’
“Indeed, even Tesla argues that this Action created compensable value equal to its calculation of the Grant’s $2.3B GDFV. But even using this low-end value estimate, the benefit Plaintiff achieved here was significantly higher than the $1.347B (pre-interest) Southern Peru benefit. Thus, a low-end cash award of roughly $1.0842B could be fashioned based solely on the affirmed, inflation-adjusted Southern Peru numbers.
“But any such award would be unfairly low for two reasons. First, as noted in Plaintiff’s Opening Brief, this Court in Southern Peru—after admonishing plaintiff’s counsel to seek a conservative fee given ‘the reality [that] their own delays affected the remedy awarded’—further reduced that request by one-third as a penalty for counsel taking so long to prosecute the case that rescission was impossible. Second, the ~$51B benefit achieved here is approximately 38x higher than the benefit achieved in Southern Peru.
“Adjusting for the one-third penalty assessed in Southern Peru—which was applied to an already conservative 22.5% request by that plaintiff—brings the inflation-adjusted lodestar to $73,948/hour, which yields a fee of approximately $1.44B. Adjusting further to reflect the much higher result here is a matter of the Court’s discretion Plaintiff’s Counsel would submit that exercising the Court’s discretion to award a cash fee of roughly twice the inflation-adjusted Southern Peru hourly rate after reversing for the discount appropriately reflects the substantially greater benefit achieved here,” Tornetta’s lawyers wrote.
The fling from Tornetta’s lawyers can be viewed below (via Plainsite).
gov.uscourts.delch.2018-0408-KSJM.387.0 by Simon Alvarez on Scribd
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Tesla Cybercab is coming to Asia this month as US service officially begins
Tesla Asia says Cybercab will be on display in Hong Kong, Tokyo, Beijing and Shanghai this month.
Tesla’s Cybercab is heading to Asia. The official Tesla Asia account posted on X Thursday, inviting Cybercab fans to “Come experience the future of autonomy in Hong Kong, Tokyo, Beijing & Shanghai.” The post went up within hours of Tesla’s own Cybercab milestone in Texas, where the company said Thursday it had begun offering rides in across Austin.
Exact dates and venues for the Asia tour haven’t been released yet, though Tesla Hong Kong replied to the announcement with “Cybercab will be on display in Hong Kong soon,” while Tesla Japan’s response pointed fans to a sign up page for updates. Neither post mentions test rides or a service area, and nothing so far suggests Tesla is launching Robotaxi operations in any of the four cities. Based on how Tesla has run past Cybercab tours, in Europe in late 2024 and at US shopping centers that same December, the Asia stops are almost certainly static displays at Tesla stores or public venues as a means to stimulate buzz for its future driverless ride-hailing service in the big cities.
Cybercab will be on display in Asia this month!
Come experience the future of autonomy in Hong Kong, Tokyo, Beijing & Shanghai. pic.twitter.com/wGmmEastfX— Tesla Asia (@Tesla_Asia) September 4, 2026
The timing lines up with Tesla’s only prior Cybercab appearance in the region, a booth at the China International Import Expo in Shanghai last November, which Teslarati covered at the time. At that event, Tesla’s regional general manager for Shanghai framed the car as evidence of the company’s broader mission, a message Tesla has since formalized in its Master Plan Part IV, which states that “autonomous vehicles have the capacity to dramatically improve the affordability, availability and safety of transportation while reducing pollution, particularly in our increasingly dense global cities.” The same document is where Tesla lays out its “sustainable abundance” framing for Cybercab and Optimus alike, describing the two as the hardware behind an AI driven push to cut the cost of transportation and labor at scale.
Whether Cybercab actually operates as a robotaxi anywhere in Asia remains an open question, considering China has already pushed an autonomous ride-hailing market that’s run on homegrown players like Baidu’s Apollo Go and Pony AI. For now, the four city tour reads as a marketing push timed to Austin’s momentum.
Elon Musk
OpenAI cites distrust of SpaceX in decision to drop Cursor partnership
OpenAI will cut SpaceX-owned Cursor’s model access in November, citing Musk’s history of broken contracts.
OpenAI, the company behind ChatGPT, announced late Friday that it is ending its partnership with Cursor, cutting off the coding tool’s access to its models on November 12. The move comes two weeks after SpaceX completed its $60 billion acquisition of Cursor’s parent company, Anysphere, folding the popular AI coding assistant into Elon Musk’s growing SpaceXAI division.
In a post on its website, OpenAI said the decision came down to trust, not technology. “We cannot be confident that SpaceX will use our technology within our terms of service, based on our experience with Elon Musk’s companies violating contracts,” the company wrote. OpenAI pointed to two specific incidents: X, now part of SpaceX, allegedly breaking the terms of an existing OpenAI contract after Musk bought Twitter.
That lawsuit is the backdrop for all of this. Musk cofounded OpenAI in 2015, left the board in 2018, and sued Sam Altman and Greg Brockman in 2024, arguing they abandoned the company’s nonprofit mission for profit. A federal jury sided with OpenAI in May, finding Musk waited too long to sue rather than ruling on the merits of his claims. Musk said at the time he would appeal to the Ninth Circuit, calling the outcome a “calendar technicality” rather than a real judgment.
SpaceX’s interest in Cursor predates that verdict by weeks. The company first struck a deal with Cursor in April, securing an option to acquire it for $60 billion or pay $10 billion for joint development work instead. As Teslarati reported at the time, the logic was straightforward: Cursor was paying retail prices to Anthropic and OpenAI, two of its most direct competitors, every time a developer used its product, while SpaceX had idle capacity on its Colossus supercomputer, roughly the equivalent of a million Nvidia H100 GPUs, that Cursor could use to train its own models instead. SpaceX exercised the option in June, days after its own IPO, and the deal closed in mid-August.
Once it closed, Musk moved fast. On an all-hands call with more than 1,000 Cursor employees, he reportedly told staff that SpaceXAI’s Grok was playing catchup in the AI race, unlike Tesla and SpaceX in their own markets, and singled out Anthropic as the company to catch. Cursor CEO Michael Truell now reports directly to Musk inside SpaceXAI.
Losing OpenAI’s models leaves Cursor leaning harder on Anthropic’s Claude, which has its own compute agreement with SpaceX, and on Cursor’s in-house Composer model, the one SpaceX’s compute was supposed to accelerate in the first place. OpenAI framed the November deadline as maximum notice under its contract, and said it wants to “go above and beyond” to help developers through the transition. Whether Anthropic makes the same call is now the open question in AI coding.
Investor's Corner
Tesla Robotaxi gets a massive upgrade in Nevada
Nevada regulators just approved a massive expansion of Tesla’s robotaxi fleet across the entire county.
Tesla’s robotaxi footprint in Nevada just grew by roughly 500 times in a single regulatory vote.
The Nevada Transportation Authority approved Tesla’s full Autonomous Vehicle Network Company permit on Thursday, clearing the way for the company to deploy up to 5,000 driverless vehicles across Clark County over the next 12 months. The decision came during a four hour general session meeting that Tesla investor Sawyer Merritt watched live and reported on X, noting the vote replaces the interim order that had limited Tesla to just 10 robotaxis on a narrow stretch of the Las Vegas Strip.
EXCLUSIVE: Tesla has just officially received approval for its full Autonomous Vehicle Network Company permit in Nevada, clearing the way for Tesla to launch a paid public Robotaxi service in Las Vegas.
This officially allows @Tesla to deploy up to 5,000 robotaxis over the next… pic.twitter.com/DPs5UtUlrE
— Sawyer Merritt (@SawyerMerritt) August 20, 2026
That earlier cap, covered here after it surfaced on August 13, came with restrictions that looked stricter than what Tesla runs in Austin: a 45 mph speed ceiling, no airport pickups, and a geofence confined to the Strip corridor. The new approval extends Tesla’s operating authority to all of Clark County, with room to request an even wider geofence across the state.
Tesla representatives at the meeting said they have no intention of putting 5,000 cars on the road right away. Commercial rides are expected to start within 30 days, pending vehicle inspections, insurance filings, and fare approval, the standard steps every robotaxi operator in Nevada has had to clear.
Tesla’s own Robotaxi account replied to the news with a short line, The golden future is upon us.
The timing lines up with Tesla’s broader robotaxi push this month. The company is preparing to open Cybercab rides to the public in Austin as soon as this month, and it opened a sweepstakes for riders to win a seat at the launch event. Tesla filed its original application for a 5,000 vehicle Nevada fleet back in June, a request regulators trimmed to 10 vehicles when they issued the interim order in July. Thursday’s vote effectively grants the number Tesla asked for from the start.
Zoox, the Amazon owned robotaxi operator, has run in Nevada since 2025 and was capped at 100 vehicles before Thursday’s decision. Tesla’s new ceiling puts it well ahead of that comparison on paper, though the company has said its actual fleet size will depend on how quickly FSD v15 rolls out, the software update executives have called the gateway to scaling unsupervised robotaxi operations nationwide.
Tesla crosses major Unsupervised Self-Driving milestone
Tesla Robotaxi will be a 24/7 service: here’s when
