"Was World's Richest Person Overpaid?": US Judge Strikes Down Elon Musk Pay

The ruling threatens to drop Elon Musk to the third-richest person in the world.

In throwing out Elon Musk's $55 billion Tesla pay deal, a Delaware judge began her legal opinion with a simple question: "Was the richest person in the world overpaid?" 

After about a year's consideration and 200 pages of legal reasoning, her answer was clear: Yes. Yes he was.

Chancery Court Chief Judge Kathaleen St. J. McCormick on Tuesday agreed with a Tesla investor who claimed the 2018 pay package failed to clearly show what was required of Musk to earn the money and that the board was rife with conflicts of interest when it approved the deal to retain him as chief executive officer.