Tesla begins legal bid to OK Elon Musk's mega-pay

STORY: Tesla has begun the legal battle to get approval for Elon Musk’s $56 billion pay deal.

Shareholders last week approved the package - a record sum in U.S. corporate history.

But the firm still has to convince the court that first voided the payout.

Delaware judge Kathaleen McCormick ruled that the process leading up to package had been controlled by Musk.

She said Tesla also concealed from shareholders key details about the targets he had been required to hit.

Now the EV maker says it has fixed those problems.

Besides the vote, the pay deal was reviewed by a special committee of the board, and the firm has provided hundreds of pages of added information.

Though the sum seems enormous, WealthWise Financial boss Noreen Gilbert says Musk should have been paid:

“The pay package had actually been agreed upon years prior, based on metrics that Elon Musk had to make good on, and he had made good on all of those metrics. So the fact is he should have been paid that amount, he jumped through all the hoops to make that happen”.

Tesla has now written to judge McCormick, asking that parties to the legal dispute over the pay now set out their takes on the shareholder approval.

One shareholder who brought the case against the package has already said he thinks the vote has “no legal effect”.