On October 15, the Delaware Supreme Court heard arguments in In re Tesla, Inc. Derivative Litigation, more commonly known as Richard J. Tornetta v. Elon Musk, et al. and Tesla, Inc., the stockholder derivative action rescinding Elon Musk’s …

On September 15, 2025, Elon Musk filed a disclosure with the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) indicating that he had acquired approximately 2.57 million shares of Tesla Inc. in open-market transactions on September 12, at a cost of nearly …

In August 2024, Delaware enacted what are widely considered the most significant and controversial amendments to the state’s corporate statute in at least a generation. Principally, those amendments exalt freedom of contract over what was, in the words of the …

The proposed amendments to Delaware corporate law have sparked intense debate among corporate legal scholars and practitioners. A flurry of commentary has focused thus far on the proposed changes to Section 144, which governs transactions with controlling shareholders. This post, …

The recently introduced Delaware Senate bill that would amend the Delaware General Corporation Law (DGCL) provision dealing with conflict of interest transactions (SB 21) has blown up the financial news, corporate law blogosphere, and corporate law social media.[1]

Most …

On the evening of June 20, 2024, William B. Chandler, III, a former chancellor of the Delaware Court of Chancery and now a practicing Delaware lawyer, gave testimony in the state’s House of Representatives that culminated the legislative response to …

Controlling shareholders function as a dual-edged sword in corporate governance. They can reduce agency costs by monitoring management but also pose risks of self-dealing that can harm minority shareholders. In recent years, Delaware courts have increasingly focused on the latter …

Are “lost-premium” provisions – clauses that typically allow a target to recoup the premium its shareholders were denied because a buyer wrongfully backed out of a deal – enforceable? In a surprising decision last year, the Delaware Court of Chancery …

On February 23, 2024, the Delaware Court of Chancery issued its decision in West Palm Beach Firefighters’ Pension Fund v. Moelis & Company, which invalidated a stockholder agreement between Moelis & Company (the “Company”) and its founder and controlling …

Corporate law’s trial of the century was set to begin on October 17, 2022, in a small Wilmington, Delaware courtroom. Twitter v. Musk had it all. Celebrity. The world’s richest person. A product that helped foment revolutions around the world …

On June 1, the Ninth Circuit en banc in Lee v. Fisher issued a consequential decision calling into question the scope of the implied right of action recognized by J.I. Case Co. v. Borak  and creating a stark split with …

More than 40 years after its invention by lawyer Martin Lipton, the poison pill remains the subject of important judicial decisions and academic debate over corporate governance questions, in both the United States, its country of origin, and Japan, its …

Every pundit and commentator has by now analyzed the ongoing battle between Elon Musk and Twitter over Musk’s attempt to walk away from their deal. Almost all of these evaluations have rated Twitter as having a considerably stronger case, because …

For decades, Delaware and federal law governing contests for corporate control have focused on building walls to keep corporate raiders outside the gates, while doing relatively little to stop activist hedge funds. The prevailing academic view has been similar: Scholars …

No rule of corporate law may be more foundational than the internal affairs doctrine. The doctrine provides that the internal affairs of a corporation – the “matters peculiar to the relationships among or between the corporation and its current officers, …

I appreciate the engagement by long-term pill observer Eric Robinson with my Corporate Vote Suppression piece. I am also glad that he agrees that the pill in The Williams Companies Shareholder Litigation ought to be struck down, though he narrowly …