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Elon Musk clashed with Nicolai Tangen, chief executive of the Norwegian oil fund, after the fund last year voted against the Tesla boss’s huge pay package, newly released text messages show.
Norges Bank Investment Management (NBIM), which manages $1.7tn of Norway’s oil wealth and is Tesla’s seventh-largest shareholder with a 1 per cent stake, last June voted against Musk’s $56bn pay package, the biggest for a chief executive in corporate America, at Tesla’s annual general meeting.
Tangen later invited Musk to a dinner — with Ferrari chief Benedetto Vigna, among others — at Tangen’s private residence in Oslo. The chief executives of Novo Nordisk, Nestlé, DoorDash and Adidas were also invited to attend the dinner ahead of the oil fund’s annual investment conference in April this year, according to previous messages that became public last year.
The latest correspondence between the two from October shows that Musk turned the invitation down: “When I ask you for a favour which I very rarely do, and you decline, then you should not ask me for one until you’ve done something above nothing to make amends.
“Friends are as friends do,” Musk added. The messages, which were released under a freedom of information request on Tuesday, were first reported by E24, a Norwegian business daily.
NBIM said it chose to publish the exchange of messages between the men in light of the increased interest in the situation. “As the [messages] show, some of the dialogue was linked to our voting record at Tesla, where we voted no to Elon Musk’s pay package, among other votes,” the company said.
Musk was approached for comment but did not immediately respond.
NBIM has long used its holdings in global companies to resist large pay packages for executives. Tangen told the Financial Times last year that it would in particular target “large salary packages that were not justified by performance, or were opaque or insufficiently long-term.”
In the messages, Musk also sent Tangen a screenshot of correspondence with an unidentified associate where the oil fund boss is accused of being “a dangerous politician” and that he has “political ambitions using the oil fund to promote himself”.
Musk’s pay package, worth $56bn when it was initially awarded in 2018, was initially rejected by Delaware judge Kathaleen McCormick at the start of 2024, and again in December last year by the same judge.
Consisting of stock options, it is now valued at more than $100bn thanks to the nearly 40 per cent surge in Tesla shares since the US election.
Tesla has vowed to appeal against the decision. “This ruling, if not overturned, means that judges and plaintiffs’ lawyers run Delaware companies rather than their rightful owners — the shareholders,” it said after the December ruling.
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