International

Musk to testify at trial over his $50 bn Tesla compensation

Photo: Hoy Dinero

| By AFP | Juliette Michel |

Tesla tycoon Elon Musk will take the stand on Wednesday as part of a trial over his $50 billion pay package as CEO of the electric car giant.

Musk will testify in the same Delaware court where he faced a lawsuit by Twitter to make sure he went through with his buyout of the social platform.

The $44 billion purchase of Twitter has put Musk under a deluge of scrutiny after he conducted massive layoffs, scared advertisers and opened the platform to fake accounts.

The unrelated Tesla case is based on a complaint by shareholder Richard Tornetta, who accused Musk and the company’s board of directors of failing in their duties when they authorized the pay plan.

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Tornetta alleges that Musk dictated his terms to directors who were not sufficiently independent from their star CEO to object to a package worth around $51 billion at recent share prices.

The Tesla shareholder accuses Musk of “unjustified enrichment” and asked for the annulment of a pay program that helped make the entrepreneur the richest man in the world.

According to a legal filing, Musk earned the equivalent of $52.4 billion in Tesla stock options over four and a half years after virtually all of the company’s targets were met.

When the plan was adopted it was valued at a total of $56 billion.

The non-jury trial began Monday with testimony from Ira Ehrenpreis, head of the compensation committee on Tesla’s board of directors, who said the targets set were “extraordinarily ambitious and difficult”.

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Ehrenpreis argued that the board wanted to spur Musk to focus on Tesla at a time when the company was still struggling to gain traction.

‘Highly unusual’

The trial will run through Friday and is being presided over by Judge Kathaleen McCormick, the same judge who was to preside over the Twitter case.

There is no deadline for her decision which could take months.

It’s “highly unusual” for this kind of case to be brought to trial, Jill Fisch, Law professor at the University of Pennsylvania, told AFP.

“There aren’t all that many successful challenges to executive compensation (as) the courts have typically treated this as a business decision,” she added.

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But the court found in this case that Musk’s ownership of about 22 percent of Tesla and his role as CEO “could have an undue impact” on the board and other shareholders, she noted.

Musk canceled an in-person appearance on Sunday at an event on the sidelines of the G20 in Bali to be in court.

Asked why he had not traveled to the tropical Indonesian island, the new Twitter boss joked that his “workload has recently increased quite a lot” after his takeover of the social media giant.

International

FBI Warns of Possible Iranian Drone Attack on U.S. West Coast

The Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) has warned police departments in California about a possible Iranian plan to carry out a drone attack against the west coast of the United States, according to a report published Wednesday by ABC News.

The warning was issued through a memorandum sent to agencies participating in a Joint Terrorism Task Force, outlining the possibility of a surprise attack involving unmanned aerial vehicles launched from a vessel off the U.S. coastline.

According to the document, intelligence suggested that in early February 2026 Iran may have considered an attack against unspecified targets in California if the United States carried out airstrikes on Iranian territory.

However, the memo also noted that authorities lack additional details about the timing, method, specific targets, or individuals responsible for the alleged plan.

Reports cited by U.S. media indicate that the alert coincided with the start of a military offensive by the administration of Donald Trump against the Iran, a development that has heightened tensions across the Middle East.

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Law enforcement sources with counterterrorism experience told the Los Angeles Times that the warning is part of a routine precautionary advisory based on information from the U.S. Coast Guard.

The sources emphasized that there is no credible indication of an imminent attack and no evidence that Iran currently has the capability to successfully carry out such an operation.

California is home to the largest Iranian community in the United States. According to the Migration Policy Institute, more than half of Iranian immigrants in the country lived in the state in 2019, including around 140,000 people in Los Angeles County alone.

The city also hosts a neighborhood widely known as “Tehrangeles,” where a large Iranian community began settling in the 1960s and continued to grow following the Iranian Revolution.

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International

Trump Says Iran Is Welcome at 2026 World Cup but Warns of Security Concerns

The President of the United States, Donald Trump, said Thursday that the national football team of Iran is “welcome” to participate in the 2026 World Cup, although he suggested it might be safer for the team not to take part in the tournament.

“The Iranian national soccer team is welcome at the World Cup, but I really don’t think it’s appropriate for them to be there, for their own safety,” Trump wrote on his social media platform Truth Social.

His comments came a day after Iran’s sports minister, Ahman Donyamali, said that there are currently no conditions for the country to participate in the tournament following the killing of Iran’s Supreme Leader, Ali Khamenei, during a military offensive launched on February 28 by Israel and the United States.

“After the corrupt government killed our leader, there are no conditions that allow us to take part in the World Cup,” the Iranian official said. He added that the country has faced two wars in the past eight or nine months, resulting in thousands of civilian deaths, making participation in the tournament unlikely.

On Tuesday, the president of FIFA, Gianni Infantino, met with Trump at the White House.

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Following the meeting, Infantino said that Trump reiterated that Iran’s national team would be allowed to compete in the FIFA World Cup 2026.

“We discussed the current situation in Iran and the fact that the Iranian team has qualified to participate in the FIFA World Cup 2026. During the conversation, President Trump reiterated that the Iranian team is, of course, welcome to compete in the tournament in the United States,” Infantino wrote on Instagram.

International

Iran issues threat to Trump as conflict escalates over Strait of Hormuz

The head of Iran’s Supreme National Security Council, Ali Larijani, threatened U.S. President Donald Trump on Tuesday, warning him to “beware of being eliminated.”

The Republican president had warned on Monday that he would strike Iran “very hard” if the Islamic Republic blocked oil shipments through the Strait of Hormuz, which has effectively been closed since the war began eleven days ago.

“Iran is not afraid of your empty threats. Others more powerful than you tried to destroy the Iranian nation and failed. Beware that you are not eliminated,” Larijani wrote on X.

Earlier, Iran’s Revolutionary Guards — the ideological military force of the Islamic Republic — also said their forces would move to block oil exports from the Gulf.

Meanwhile, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu said Israel’s military offensive against Iran is far from over.

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“Our aspiration is that the Iranian people free themselves from the yoke of tyranny; ultimately, that depends on them. But there is no doubt that with the measures taken so far we are breaking their bones, and we are not finished yet,” Netanyahu said in a statement.