Given the current heat wave, some readers may just want to stay indoors and find something of interest to read. If that describes you, you might want to read the interview below with UCLA Professor of Law Stephen Bainbridge. We provide an excerpt, but the full interview is available at the link below.
Elon Musk Has So Many Lawsuits They’re Teaching a Class in Law School
By Kevin T. Dugan, New York Magazine, Sept. 2, 2022
The thing about Elon Musk is that whatever it is he’s involved with, the guy wants you to think it’s about something else, something bigger. Tesla isn’t about cars — it’s about the future or the environment or innovation. SpaceX isn’t a rocket-maker; it’s a save-the-human-race-from-extinction company. With Twitter v. Musk, the suit isn’t just about whether the world’s richest man can save $43 billion or so by backing out of an agreement to buy Twitter. There’s a deeper question, one Musk may not like observers asking: Does Elon Musk think he’s bigger than the law?
Law is often made through unusual cases, and there’s a trail of them behind Musk, going as far back to his days with Zip2, his first internet mapping company from shortly after dropping out of Stanford. Since then, he has been challenging corporate law in bigger and weirder ways. There’s Tesla’s 2016 acquisition of SolarCity, of which Musk was chairman and the major shareholder. There’s the “funding secured” tweet two years later about taking Tesla private, which ended with a settlement with the Securities and Exchange Commission and his resignation as Tesla’s chairman. Despite settling, Musk continues to say that he actually didn’t do anything wrong with the tweet — and earlier this year, he won a suit against a group of shareholders that challenged the SolarCity deal even though Tesla’s directors settled.
So when I saw that UCLA Law professor Stephen M. Bainbridge was offering a course next year called “Law of Elon Musk,” I reached out to get his thoughts on Musk’s past brushes with courtroom drama and what this may reveal about what’s in store as the Twitter trial nears. We spoke just days before a whistleblower complaint from Twitter’s former head of security, Peiter “Mudge” Zatko, became public. Since then, Musk has begun to change tactics, using Zatko’s complaint as a basis for new arguments. Whether the judge will let him do so, or whether that change will be effective, still remains to be seen.
Bainbridge’s expertise is in corporate and securities law, and he has been blogging about the law (and Catholicism, wine, and ethics) since before Martha Stewart was accused of insider trading...
Full story/interview at https://nymag.com/intelligencer/2022/09/elon-musk-law-school-class.html.
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https://ia601402.us.archive.org/25/items/big-ten/musk%20bainbridge.mp3
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