I know you won’t believe this, but people in Europe are complaining about Big Tech! I’ll get to that in a minute, but first, the news everyone’s been waiting for today.
Tesla’s shareholders seem to have approved Elon Musk's contentious mega pay package, which was struck down earlier this year by a Delaware judge. Ahead of today’s crucial shareholder meeting, Musk took to X to declare victory based on the voting figures he was seeing—both on the resolution calling for the reinstatement of his pay package, which could be worth more than $55 billion, and on a separate resolution backing Tesla’s corporate move from Delaware to Texas.
The votes could still change before the meeting this afternoon, so these are preliminary results, but it does look like Musk got what he wanted.
As my colleague Christiaan Hetzner notes in his report, this doesn’t overturn the Delaware judge’s ruling, but it does give a lot of fuel to Tesla’s appeal, as the voiding of the package was partly down to Tesla’s shareholders not being sufficiently informed about the formulation of the pay package.
Tesla had warned that Musk might walk away if he didn’t get all the stock options he was promised, so it’s no surprise to see Tesla’s share price soar in the wake of his victory declaration—it was up more than 7% at one point, though the rise has subsided a little since then.
The big question now (apart from the outcome of the appeal) is whether Musk will be able to convince his more critical shareholders that Tesla has enough of his attention if he now has the backing he asked for. Those opposing the resolution, such as proxy advisory firm ISS, had criticized him for spreading himself too thin between his various enterprises, which also include the likes of SpaceX and X, formerly Twitter.
In other Musk news—and continuing a theme I referred to yesterday—eight former SpaceX employees have sued him over alleged sexual harassment and retaliation. As Bloomberg reports, their filing claims he “knowingly and purposefully created an unwelcome hostile work environment based upon his conduct of interjecting into the workplace vile sexual photographs, memes, and commentary that demeaned women and/or the LGBTQ+ community.”
The employees in question wrote an open letter a couple years ago, raising the above concerns. They claim Musk had them fired as a result, rebuffing an HR official’s advice to first investigate.
Now, away from Musk and over to Europe.
Firstly, the Norwegian Consumer Council has complained to the country’s privacy authority about Meta and its plans to train its AI models on Facebook and Instagram users’ content. It says this violates the EU’s General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR), which applies in Norway even though the country isn’t in the EU (Norway is in the European Economic Area, so EU privacy rights extend there).
“If you do not want your content to be included in the training data, you must request to be opted out. However, this process has been made deliberately cumbersome by using deceptive design patterns and vague wording,” the Council said in a statement.
If this sounds familiar, that’s because it’s very similar to a complaint lodged in Austria a week ago by activist lawyer and Meta arch-nemesis Max Schrems, who has a very strong track record in the EU courts. And because Schrems is a busy guy, today his nonprofit Noyb (“none of your business”) filed yet another GDPR complaint, this time targeting Google over how it tracks users of its Chrome browser.
In a process that has been hit with multiple delays and regulatory probes, Google has been phasing out the use of third-party cookies in Chrome, supposedly as a pro-privacy move. As a replacement, it’s set up a mechanism called the “Privacy Sandbox,” which advertisers can use to access some of users’ personal data without the need for those cookies. Because this still amounts to user tracking, Google has to get user consent under the GDPR, which it has been doing with a pop-up that says—chutzpah alert!—“turn on ad privacy feature.”
Schrems views this as deception, even if the Privacy Sandbox is less invasive than third-party cookies were. “Google has simply lied to its users,” he said in a statement. “People thought they were agreeing to a privacy feature, but were tricked into accepting Google’s first-party ad tracking. Consent has to be informed, transparent and fair to be legal. Google has done the exact opposite.”
More news below.
David Meyer
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