Greed and Derangement at Tesla; Anti-Jewish Vandalism in New York

I’ve been on partial book leave from the Intrinsic Value column, a fair arrangement (which I negotiated with myself) until time allows for a more regular schedule, which I hope will be soon.

In the meantime I wanted to weigh in on two matters. First, the Elon Musk $50-billion plus compensation, on the verge of receiving shareholder approval. When Musk’s package of 20 million options was announced in 2018, I wrote in the Washington Post that it evidenced “the long devolution of the ethos of shareholder value to what might be termed unhinged managerial taking.”

Noting that the package would potentially deliver to Musk $55 billion worth of Telsa stock (an estimate that turned out to be close to spot on), the piece queried: “How much motivation does a man need? He already owns a fifth of the company, worth more than $9 billion. By comparison, Musk’s fellow high-tech founder and chief exec, Alphabet’s Larry Page, was paid $1 last year. And no options. Evidently, his board feels that owning 20 million shares will be enough to persuade Page to rise and shine and go to work in the morning, or wherever it is that folks in the Valley do their thing.”

My feelings have not changed. When founders—who know everything about the companies they have created — sell stock to the public—who know nothing—they are morally as well as legally placed in a position of trust.  With all the advantages of insider-ship, they are obligated to treat investors as they would wish to be treated were their roles reversed.

The capitalist genie is fully unleashed by this arrangement. Founders have an enormous stake, and outside investors will supply further capital trusting they are in safe hands.

When a founder stacks the board and awards himself options, he is expropriating some of the company he sold to investors—the very folks to whom he is morally obliged. To speak of furnishing an incentive to a founder who, in this case, already had a $9-billion investment, is absurd. It is not capitalism, it is expropriation on a massive scale. Musk, a brilliant and semi-deranged visionary decided (after the fact) that he needed more Tesla shares to bail him out of the debt he foolishly undertook to buy Twitter/X. That’s his problem, not the problem of stockholders in Tesla.

You can read the 2018 Post column here.

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The second matter, I was deeply upset to read that the home of Anne Pasternak, director of the Brooklyn Museum, was defaced with red paint splashed across her front door and windows. A banner was attached in front reading: Anne Pasternak / Brooklyn Museum / White Supremacist Zionist.” Beneath that statement the vandals wrote “Funds Genocide.”

The crime occurred early Wednesday—and the homes of two museum trustees and another museum official were defaced in the same manner. Ms. Pasternak is Jewish—reportedly, so were the other targets.

New York City Mayor Eric Adams has promised to investigate and prosecute. Presumably, his investigation will probe the extent to which the malicious attacks were coordinated and by whom. The German Consulate in New York was smeared with red paint at 3;30 am Wednesday.  As the New York Post reported, the Permanent Observer Mission of the State of Palestine to the United Nations (its official designation) was vandalized, and two American flags were burned in front of the Consulate General of Israel, in Manhattan.

This has moved terribly beyond free speech. It is an attack on civil society—our civil society. Prosecutors will hopefully seek the maximum-permitted jail sentences. Until and unless the vandals who attacked the leaders of the Brooklyn Museum are put away, no cultural leader—no leader of any stripe—will be free to enjoy normal freedoms or civil liberties without the fear of extremist vandalism or worse. This comes on the heels of other deplorable assaults on the civic fabric, including on Monday, when a man leading a masked gang on a New York City subway car—the most quintessential public space — demanded that “Zionists” aboard identify themselves and leave the train.

It is important for cultural and political leaders — of all political stripes--to condemn such acts, and to make clear they are neither normal nor acceptable, regardless of one’s views on the Middle East. Sen Chuck Schumer, to his credit, has done so. I was dismayed to see that, while The New York Times reported the Brooklyn vandalism online, Wednesday afternoon, no account was seen in local print editions Thursday. An assault on the private homes of cultural leaders, in violation of both law and decency, is surely “fit to print.” I would hope the newspaper of record feels a responsibility to print this news in black and white.