Does Elon Musk deserve a $56 billion pay package?

Should Elon Musk get a $56 billion pay package? Should we even care? Many people have weighed in on this, from Tesla shareholders to a Delaware judge to regular guys on the street like me.

Tesla shareholders, which comprise thousands of Tesla/Musk fanboys as well as serious institutional investors, originally voted for this unprecedented and record-breaking ten-year pay package for the company's eccentric and divisive CEO back in 2018. This was partly because the company actually did hit enough of the various benchmarks and targets set back in 2018 (Tesla is not performing as well as hoped, particularly of late, but it has been doing some things right). But it was also partly in an attempt to keep the famously mercurial individual's attention on Tesla, and not on his various other pet projects, like social media, space exploration, AI, etc, and even to prevent him from possibly leaving the company.

The pay package went before a Delaware judge (also unprecedented), which ruled in January that Musk had unfairly controlled the company's compensation process, and that Tesla's disclosure of the pay package was inadequate. The judge took the extraordinary step of striking the down the package, calling it "unfathomable" and "deeply flawed".

Now, though, Tesla's shareholders have doubled down and reinstated the pay package, regardless of the legal ruling, although the award is now only worth about $45 billion sincere value of Tesla stocks have fallen substantially in recent months. The proposal is also now officially approved as a board resolution.  Moreover, the meeting voted to move Tesla's incorporation from Delaware to Texas on order to avoid more "woke" legal grief. 

It's not clear where things will go from here. Legal experts are unclear as to whether the shareholders approval will be enough to overturn the Delaware court's decision. As always, chaos and controversy follows Musk around everywhere he goes.

Law students and the Israel-Hamas issue

An excellent extended article by award-winning journalist Robyn Doolittle in the Globe and Mail does a really good job of looking at the complexities, the misunderstandings and the high emotions involved in the reactions of students and faculty to the Israel-Hamas conflict.

She does this in the context of the Lincoln Alexander School of Law at Toronto Metropolitan University, an avowedly progressive school that embraces equity, diversity and inclusion. Specifically, it investigates the reactions and pushback caused by a pro-Palestinian petition circulated in the early days of the conflict.

In among all the detail that Ms. Doolittle sets forth, and all the interview clips she reports, a few things jump out at me:

• The importance of distinguishing between criticism of the state of Israel (its politics, its rhetoric and its beliefs) and antisemitism (hostility to Jewish people in general).
• The extreme conservatism of the legal profession (or at least the high-end, commercial wing of the legal profession, as often described as "Bay Street lawyers").
• The way in which the Israel-Palestine issue polarizes people, unlike almost any other single issue.
• The way in which law students (and even teaching staff) are in existential fear of the legal establishment, which expects them to toe the line on pain of excommunication.
• And finally, be careful what you put your name to, and read it carefully first.

Several other thoughts occurred to me too as I read the article. It's worth a read.

Irony lives in the Republican Party (or are they maybe serious?)

This is priceless. 

Lara Trump, Donald Trump's daughter in law, who, coincidentally, is now chair of the Republican National Committee (RNC), made an impassioned speech about election fraud at a convention in Detroit.

"If you cheat in an election, we will find you, we will track you down, and we will prosecute you to the full extent of the law." Thing is, I believe this was said in all seriousness, with no trace of irony.

So, the political party of Donald Trump, who is currently facing multiple trials for attempting to do just that, cheat in an election, is trying to take the moral high ground on electoral integrity. 

The RNC under Lara Trump even has a new "electoral integrity division", so you know she's serious. The division is being led by Christina Bobb, who has just been charged in Arizona with trying to interfere with the state's 2020 election results.

You couldn't make this stuff up.

Welcome to the world of the "mouse-mover"

Well, here's a bizarre concept. The more I read on the internet, the more weird stuff jumps out at me.

Wells Fargo Bank has recently fired over a dozen employees for using "mouse-mover" or "mouse-jiggler" software. So, yes, there are computer programs out there that will move a computer's mouse or trigger phantom keyboard entries without any human intervention, so as to give the impression that the computer is being used, i.e. that the owner is working.

I mean, I guess it's quite clever, but it means that there is a market out there for such a service. And this is because, in this post-pandemic era of working-from-home, there are a whole load of people who want to appear to be working when they are actually out cutting the grass or smoking dope or working out or whatever it is they do.

And here's the kicker, the reason this is an issue in the first place is because companies like Well Fargo (and I'm sure many more) are employing their own software to check that absent employees are using their computer mouse or typing things (anything). Because, apparently, moving your mouse equates to work. 

I knew that some companies installed spyware on their employees' computers to check on what they are doing. And that's bad enough. But apparently there are some who just want to check that employees are moving their mouses!

This seems inconceivable to me. Can't they check that the employees are actually achieving concrete results, like bringing in customers, producing reports, or whatever? Or is that just incredibly naive and old-fashioned of me?

Trans Mountain pipeline at risk over quality of Albertan crude oil

So, you know that Trans Mountain Pipeline extension (TMX) the government spent billions of taxpayer's money on to transport Alberta heavy crude oil to the Pacific coast? Well, it may have nearly tripled shipping capacity, but it turns out that a lot of American refiners on its West coast don't like it.

The oil that is. The heavy crude oil that is produced in Alberta's oil sands is very "sour" (i.e. it has a high sulphur content), has high acidity, and comes with a high vapour pressure. All of this can damage refining equipment, cause polluting vapour leaks, or is just not compatible with the specifications of the machinery.

There are fears that this could dampen demand for Canadian oil, or lead to lower prices. West coast American refineries were expected to be the top buyers of crude oil delivered through TMX, and they are unlikely to make major upgrades or changes to their equipment just to accommodate the Canadian oil. Therefore, there is now a lot of uncertainty over the pipeline's future (or at least its profitability).

The economic benefits of a more moral Canadian economy

In a thought-provoking opinion piece, political advisor and pundit Allan Gregg weighs in on the perennial bête noir (and what Finance Minister Chrystia Freeland recent called "the Achilles heel of the Canadian economy"), productivity, a subject I have also written on recently.

There has been much hand-ringing over the decline in Canada's productivity, a measure of gross domestic product per capita. Over the last 40 years, Canada's economic growth per population has been sadly lagging that of its peers (although, anecdotally, that does not seem to have translated into anything disastrous, if you ask me). As things stand, the OECD predicts that Canada's economy will grow slower than all other advanced economies (per capita, that is, part of the calculation being attributable to Canada's relatively high immigration rates).

Mr. Gregg has a few solutions to offer. The first is to do away with corporate subsidies. Whether in the form of tax incentives or direct funding and loans, $50 billion a year is put into such subsidies at the federal level, almost as much as is spent on healthcare, and as much as 80% of it is useless and does not lead to increased productivity or boost real income for Canadians in any way. That's $40 billion a year going into propping up failing companies and subsidizing their already-rich shareholders. There is an argument to just stop such corporate welfare (although Mr. Gregg does not consider the potentially disastrous employment effects of allowing such companies to actually fail). 

Likewise with corporate share buybacks: when a company buys back its own shares, the only people who benefit are those same rich shareholders. It does not strengthen the company or improve its productivity in any way. Why then do we allow them? Once again, the practical impossibility of such a government intervention is not considered: this is very much a theoretical brainstorming session on the author's part.

Education is a major driver of personal income, and with 200,000 to 300,000 young Canadians dropping out of high school every year, many potentially higher incomes are being squandered. Again, there is a real world practical caveat being ignored here: not every child can go on to higher education - some have neither the drive, the intelligence, nor the aptitude for it, and the higher education system would not be able to cope with it anyway.

Most of Mr. Gregg's potential solutions, though, focus on rectifying social inequities, which in addition to the moral benefits would, he argues, have a huge economic boon. The gap between the rich and the poor has continued to widen, he contends, and Canada's Gini Index, a measure of income or wealth inequality, has increased shamefully. (In fact, as far as I can see, at 31.7, Canada's Gini Index is not that bad, and has been steadily falling since 2006. Indeed, it is better than that of the UK, many European countries, and certainly the USA.)

Leaving that aside, Mr. Gregg suggests that closing the 10% employment gap between Indigenous and non-Indigenous people, for example, could add 100,000 people to the Canadian work force, and generate $27 billion, or about 1.7% of GDP, to the Canadian economy (this according to the National Indigenous Economic Development Board).

Closing the 18% employment gap between foreign-born and Canadian-born workers of equal qualifications - immigrants are typically much more highly educated than those born in Canada, with 55.1% having a bachelor's degree or better, compared to 28.5% for Canadian-born - could boost GDP by about $50 billion, or 2.5%, if barriers were removed and new Canadians of equal qualifications were paid the same as their Canadian-born counterparts (this according to RBC Economics).

And finally, if women made up their 10% employment gap and their $7,200 average pay gap, almost 2 million new employees could be added to the labour force and (according to McKinsey) as much as $150 billion, or 7.5% of GDP, could be added to the economy.

The total of all these measures together would be in the region of $268-$317 billion, or 12-15% of our total national wealth, Mr. Gregg estimates. The hurdles to be cleared en route would be prodigious, and in practice only a small proportion of these gains could ever be realized, but the potential gains are clearly huge.

Hunter Biden's conviction is not in the same league as Trump's

It seems bizarre to me that Hunter Biden's conviction for gun crimes is being equated in some circles with Donald Trump's conviction on 34 counts of falsification of business records with intent to defraud the voting public.

Hunter Biden is not standing for President of the United States last I checked. Donald Trump, for our sins, is. Joe Biden was not involved in his son's bad decisions. The worst you could argue is that he should have been, although that would be a stretch, and being a good father is not a major requirement of the presidency, not should it be (can Trump be said to be a better father?)

If anything, the Biden trial served to confirm the probity of the American justice system. And Joe Biden's grave and measured response to his son's conviction - his respect for the verdict, painful as it may be, and a heartfelt hug - marks a pointed difference from Trump's denial, outrage and histrionics.

There are many better bases on which Americans can hang their votes. Policies, maybe? International respect? Ability to tell the truth? Fathering? Not so much.

Still, Trump and the more rabid elements of the right-wing American press now talk about the "Biden Crime Family" and the "Biden Family Criminal Empire". And some, not content with the conviction, are portraying Hunter Biden's trial as a fake cover-up for the family's "true crimes". Conspiracy theories abound as to what these putative crimes may be, and truthfulness, or even a basic level of truthiness, are not a necessary element. Trump's son, Jr., for example, talks about the Biden trial "trying to create that illusion of equal justice under the law"

Canada has its own problems, most countries do. But America today is a sad old place, and the longer this stuff goes on, the lower the country's image sinks in the eyes of the rest of the world.

Elizabeth May is, once again, the adult in the room

Once again, Green Party leader Elizabeth May has shown herself to be the adult in the room. She took the responsibility of obtaining special security clearance and reading the unredacted version of the National Security and Intelligence Committee of Parliamentarians (NSICOP) report, and reporting back to Canadians that perhaps the sky is not falling.

Although circumscribed in what she was allowed to divulge publicly, Ms. May did the work for us and was able to confirm that the Canadian parliamentarians that the report fingers as having engaged in "semi-witting or witting" collusion with countries like China and India were not in fact current sitting parliamentarians. 

This is a big deal, and will maybe have put many people's worst fears to rest. "There is no list of MPs who have consciously, deliberately, sought to sell out Canada to preference another government." She now has, she says, "no worries about anyone in the House of Commons".

Thank you Ms. May. Why could someone else not have said that? Why could the government not have told us, without giving too much away, what the report is and is not saying?

Ms. May's succinct summary made it clear that, while the press' worst suspicions (stoked, it might be said, by the Committee itself) may not be appropriate, all is still not well as regards foreign interference in top-level Canadian politics. Some (unnamed for now) former MP is still alleged to have maintained a "relationship" with a foreign intelligence officer and provided them with confidential information, and legal prosecution may well be appropriate in this case. These are still allegations, however egregious, and so no names should be made public just yet. Also, a small number ("fewer than a handful") of current MPs/Senators may also be caught up in "meddling" that amounts to something less than treasonous activities.

Compare Ms. May's calm and sensible approach to the issue with Pierre Poilievre's, who still says he has no intention of reading the report because that would tie his hands and disallow him from talking about the issue (and scoring cheap political points in the process). It didn't seem to stop Elizabeth May, and we should be very grateful for that.

All in all, the media firestorm that has blown up around the foreign interference issue, and around the NSICOP report in particular, seems to have been overblown. Surprise? Not really.

UPDATE

Jagmeet Singh, leader of the NDP, also read the same report, and somehow came away with entirely different conclusions.

Where Ms. May found relief in the details of the report, Mr. Singh found alarm. Where Ms. May found no evidence of sitting parliamentarians having engaged in witting collusion with foreign countries, Mr. Singh found quite sufficient evidence to talk about "treason": "What they're doing is unethical. It is in some cases against the law. They are indeed traitors to the country." Where Ms. May's reaction was calm and measured, Mr. Singh's was hectic and distressed, bordering on panicky. He has a bit of a flair for the dramatic, and sometimes he just can't help himself.

As though realizing that Mr. Singh had got a bit carried away, a party spokesperson did later issue a statement saying that Singh's comments should not be taken as confirming or denying that the parliamentarians cited in the report are currently serving.

How can two individuals have two such different reactions to the same information? Both are lawyers and should know how to read and parse a report. Of course, it's all about interpretation, but it may also be about image. Singh is often at pains to show that he is cross - very cross! - with Prime Minister Trudeau, because he does not want his voters to think he is soft on the Liberals, despite his sticking with them, through thick and thin, as part of the supply and confidence agreement between the two parties. Ms. May, with just two Green Party members in parliament and no formal agreement of support, has no such need.

Pierre Poilievre, meanwhile, seems serene in his ignorance, and still has no intention of reading the report, he says.