Lipton, the Tulane professor, cited the many complications: “Musk attacking the Delaware courts, his allies threatening to leave the state, and the state legislature on the verge of passing a new statute that reads like a direct rebuke to the Delaware courts.”

“It’s not clear to me whether that’s likely to influence the Delaware Supreme Court — in either direction,” she added.

What Musk and the Tesla directors are arguing in their appeal is that the lower court applied the wrong, heightened legal test to evaluate actions taken by Tesla’s board around the compensation plan.

They said McCormick incorrectly subjected the board’s actions to the “entire fairness” standard, then misapplied it. That standard is applied to protect shareholders when a controlling shareholder negotiates a self-interested deal with the board.

Musk’s status as a limited minority stockholder at the time of the negotiations, they said, should not have led to his designation as a controlling shareholder.

New York University School of Law professor Marcel Kahan said the Supreme Court will decide what particular issues to address in the case and he suspects that it will want to clarify the definition of “controlling shareholder.”

That matter is now the subject of the controversial proposed legislation in Delaware to amend the state’s corporate law. The proposed changes would exempt shareholders with less than 33.3% ownership.

“My guess is the court will want to put its five cents in on ‘controller creep,’” Kahan said, referring to the court’s expansion of circumstances that can subject a shareholder to “controller” status.

“I would not at all be surprised if the court comes to a different finding on whether Musk is a controlling shareholder than the Chancery court,” Kahan added.

Musk and the Tesla directors are also arguing that McCormick’s invalidation of a second Tesla shareholder vote about Musk’s compensation constituted yet another error because the vote showed that the electric vehicle company’s shareholders “resoundingly rejected” her initial finding that Musk was overpaid.

The fact that Tesla stockholders have since received a return of more than $700 billion on their investment in Musk, they said, shows the compensation plan exemplified alignment between executive and stockholder interests.

With McCormick’s decision, shareholders “have lost their say in compensating the company’s once-in-a-generation CEO” and “lost certainty in the company they own.”

“The bottom line of the Court of Chancery’s decisions is that a compensation plan resulting in spectacular growth should be revoked because it was somehow unfair to the very stockholders who benefited from that growth and overwhelmingly approved the plan — twice.”

For Musk to keep his $56 billion, said Kahan of New York University, the court would have to reverse both McCormick’s finding that Musk was a controlling shareholder at the time he negotiated his pay deal with Tesla’s board and her finding that the shareholder revote failed to “cleanse” — take steps to legally validate — the flawed transaction.

As for cleansing, he said, “I can see the court saying, ’You were a little too tough here.’” Cleansing solely shifts the burden of proving whether $56 billion was fair from the defendants to the plaintiffs.

“If $56 billion is too high, it doesn’t follow that zero is the right amount, right? Zero may be too low.”

In that case, the court could send the case back to the lower court and instruct it to pick an amount of fair compensation.

Alexis Keenan is a legal reporter for Yahoo Finance. Follow Alexis on X @alexiskweed.

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