The world’s largest sovereign wealth fund has said it will vote against Elon Musk’s $56bn pay award at Tesla, as the biggest remuneration package in US corporate history comes under intense shareholder scrutiny.
Norway’s $1.7tn oil fund, the eighth largest shareholder in Tesla, said on Saturday that it was “concerned” about the size of the pay package, its structure and how it fails to mitigate “key person risk”.
Tesla shareholders will vote on the award on Thursday, after a judge in Delaware struck it down in January, calling it “an unfathomable sum”.
The Norwegian fund owns about 1 per cent of Tesla, worth about $8bn at the end of 2023. It voted against the pay package when it was first proposed in 2018, and said its stance had not changed.
Both ISS and Glass Lewis, the two largest proxy advisers, have also recommended shareholders reject Musk’s pay package.
The oil fund has taken an increasingly active line against pay packages, particularly in the US, where it has voted against more than half of all awards of more than $20mn. Last year, it voted against pay deals at some of its biggest holdings including Apple, Google owner Alphabet and LVMH.
“We are seeing corporate greed reaching a level that we haven’t seen before and it’s really becoming very costly for shareholders in terms of dilution,” Nicolai Tangen, the fund’s chief executive, said in 2022.
