The co-founder of 1789 Capital said a Delaware judge’s blockage of Elon Musk’s Tesla pay package shows ‘why Central Bank Digital Currencies (CBDCs) are a non-starter.”
“If you think a piratical judge stealing money from Elon and unilaterally denying the shareholders of Tesla the right to run their own company is wrong, a CBDC would allow government thievery at scale at the push of a button,” Chris Buskirk, who also is publisher of American Greatness, posted on X yesterday. “CBDC = Slavery.”
A Delaware judge this week reaffirmed her earlier decision to invalidate Elon Musk’s $56 billion compensation package from Tesla, the company he founded, despite a subsequent shareholder vote in favor of the plan.
Chancellor Kathaleen St. J. McCormick ruled that the shareholder vote could not rectify the flawed process that led to the original approval in 2018. She emphasized that procedural grounds did not exist to overturn the prior decision based on new evidence created after the trial.
The legal team representing the shareholder bringing the case contesting Musk’s pay package had requested 29 million Tesla shares worth $5.6 billion, or, alternatively, $1 billion in cash as compensation for their efforts, reported Legal Newsline.
“Notably, the $5.6 billion requested by the plaintiffs attorneys in the case is $3 billion more than Musk’s original pay package value,” said the report. “The stock options initially granted to Musk by Tesla in 2018 were initially worth $2.6 billion, but had surged to $56 billion in value by January when Chancellor Kathaleen McCormick of Delaware's Court of Chancery blocked the package.”
CBDCs are digital forms of a nation's fiat currency that would be issued and regulated by The Federal Reserve.
Critics of CBDCs, such as Buskirk, raise concerns about privacy and the potential for government overreach, as CBDCs could allow central banks to monitor individual transactions and control access to funds.
Buskirk co-founded 1789 Capital with investors Omeed Malik, and Rebekah Mercer, with an initial fund of $150 million. The company’s initial investment, made in October 2023, was in Last Country, Inc., the new media company founded by Tucker Carlson and Neil Patel.
For more than 15 years Buskirk has been an investor in growth stages companies across the financial services space as well as in real estate, digital marketing, consumer brands, and media. He has founded, built, and successfully sold multiple finance businesses including in insurance, reinsurance, specialty lending, and tax-credit financing.
