The National Venture Capital Association’s October 2025 update to its model stock purchase agreement didn’t make headlines outside the venture bar, but it quietly did something meaningful: it formally incorporated tranched financing mechanics into the model documents. That might sound like a technical tweak, but it’s actually a recognition of how common milestone-based investments have
I’m often asked by clients whether startups should have a separate stockholders’ agreement among the founders. The answer largely depends on whether they have or will have certain other startup documents in place.
First, some background on stockholders’ agreements. These are contracts entered into by owners of privately held companies to manage the following governance and ownership issues:
Continue Reading Stockholders’ Agreements for Startups: When to Sign, When to Skip
Process still matters. That’s the main takeaway from the Delaware Court of Chancery’s 200-page opinion striking down Tesla’s 2018 incentive package awarded to Elon Musk. The court rescinded the incentive package mainly because Musk was found to control Tesla and the process, the directors authorizing the package were not independent and the stockholder vote approving it was not properly informed. The ruling is a stark reminder of the importance of both director independence and an informed stockholder vote when transacting with a control stockholder.
The 2018 Stock Option Grant
In 2018, the Tesla board approved a new stock option package for Elon Musk and then submitted the proposal for stockholder approval. At a special meeting of stockholders, 81% of the shares voted in favor (or 73% without counting Musk’s and his brother’s shares). If exercised in full, the option package would have allowed Musk to purchase a number of shares constituting 12% of Tesla’s outstanding stock, subject to both milestone and leadership-based vesting. The options vested in 12 tranches, with each tranche vesting on Tesla achieving one capitalization milestone and one operational milestone, and only if Musk continued serving as either CEO or both executive chairman and chief product officer at each vesting juncture. In the most optimistic case, if Tesla’s capitalization grew from $59 billion at the time of the grant in 2018 to $650 billion by 2028 (the option expiration), all the options would vest and be worth approximately $56 billion. As things turned out, Tesla’s market cap did hit $650 billion by the end of 2020 and all the options vested in full.
Was Musk a Controlling Stockholder?
Normally, corporate boards may compensate their executives however lavishly as they wish because Delaware courts will show tremendous deference to board decisions under the business judgment rule and not second guess them. The exception to the general rule is when the compensation is being paid to a controlling stockholder, in which case the compensation or transaction is evaluated under the stricter entire fairness standard which demands a fair price and fair process. The threshold issue then is whether Elon Musk was a controlling stockholder at the time of the 2018 grant.
Control can be established either through mathematical voting control or effective operational control. On the surface, Musk’s 22% ownership stake at the time of the 2018 grant did not constitute mathematical voting control. But perhaps it did when combined with Tesla’s supermajority vote requirement for any amendment to its bylaws governing stockholder meetings, directors, indemnification rights and the supermajority vote requirement itself. The court’s main focus, however, was on Musk’s “outsized influence” over Tesla’s business affairs in general and over the compensation package in particular.
As to general control, the court found Musk exerted significant influence over Tesla’s board, and that as founder, CEO and chairman he “occupied the most powerful trifecta of roles”. Musk also frequently exercised managerial authority over all aspects of Tesla, in many cases ignoring the Board’s authority such as when he appointed himself Tesla’s “Technoking”, disclosed in a Form 8-K, without consulting the Board. The Court was also swayed by Musk’s “Superstar CEO” status, which it said resulted in shifting the balance of power toward himself and away from the board, which was supposed to exercise authority over him.
The court also found Musk exerted transaction-specific control. He almost unilaterally controlled the timing of the grant. There was no negotiation between Musk and the Board over the size of the grant, and no meaningful negotiation over the other terms. Neither the compensation committee nor the board engaged in any benchmarking analysis. Directors testified at the trial that they viewed the process as “cooperation”, not a negotiation.
Musk’s controlling stockholder status meant that the applicable standard of review would be the entire fairness standard. As a procedural matter, the defendants have the burden of proving fair price and fair process. But defendants (in this case, Musk, the other directors and Tesla) can shift the burden to the plaintiff if the transaction was approved by either a well-functioning committee of independent directors, or an informed vote of the majority of the minority stockholders. As a practical matter, burden of proof in these cases is determinative; the party with the burden almost always loses.Continue Reading Out of Control! What the Elon Musk Compensation Case Reminds Us about Transactions with Controlling Stockholders
“Never in my career have I seen such a complete failure of corporate controls and such a complete absence of trustworthy financial information as occurred here.” Such was the lament of John Ray, the legendary restructuring executive tasked with the unenviable assignment of serving as the caretaker CEO of bankrupt FTX Trading Ltd. As the criminal and civil cases by the DOJ, SEC and CFTC against FTX founder and former CEO Sam Bankman-Fried play out in the courts, what does the “complete failure of corporate controls” at FTX teach us about corporate governance, unchecked founder control and the importance of proper oversight?Continue Reading FTX, Sam Bankman-Fried and the Risk of Unchecked Founder Control
What do founders, employees and investors in privately held companies all have in
common? Limited opportunity to sell their shares. That’s because of various legal, contractual and market factors that impede the sale of such securities, so liquidity is usually limited to acquisition of or public offering by the company. In recent years, there’s been
The impact of the Coronavirus and COVID-19 on venture capital investment will likely be 
similar to what we saw in the aftermath of the 2008 recession and the 2001 dot-com meltdown. VC investors will redirect their attention away from sourcing new deals and toward managing their existing portfolios, trying to determine which should survive and
The Securities and Exchange Commission filed a complaint last week against the founder of venture-backed
mobile payments startup Jumio, Inc., charging him with causing the company to prepare false and misleading financial statements that inflated the company’s earnings and gross margins and with defrauding secondary market purchasers of his shares. The founder, Daniel Mattes, agreed
Lyft, Inc. last week completed its highly anticipated initial public offering, raising over $2.3 billion at a valuation of approximately $25 billion, and turning its co-founders Logan Green and John Zimmer into near billionaires on paper. But that’s not the only reason they’re smiling. Despite owning only 7% of the outstanding pre-IPO shares, Green and
It’s not often that the House of Representatives votes nearly unanimously on anything noteworthy these days, but that’s exactly what the House did on July 17 in voting 406-4 for the “JOBS and Investor Confidence Act of 2018”, also known on the 
street as “JOBS Act 3.0”, which is the latest iteration of the effort
Dual or multi-class capitalization structures generally allow companies to sell large amounts of shares to the public while maintaining control in the hands of the founders and early investors. Popularized by the Google IPO in 2004, weighted voting rights have since been featured in the high profile IPOs of LinkedIn, Groupon, Zynga, Facebook, Fitbit and