Tesla will put the company’s status to a shareholder vote, Elon Musk announced on Thursday, just two days after a Delaware judge struck down a huge pay package agreed to by the automaker’s management, Reuters reported.

Judge Kathleen McCormick of Delaware on Tuesday characterized Musk’s $56 billion package in 2018 as an “unbelievable amount” that places an unfair burden on shareholders. She also found that the package was negotiated by Musk with Tesla executives who seemed beholden to him for various reasons.

The salary negotiated by the South African billionaire was the largest in US corporate history, estimated by consultancy Equilar to be about six times the combined pay of the world’s highest-paid CEOs in 2022.

At the moment, Musk is the richest person on the planet, Bloomberg estimates his fortune at $202 billion. But the vast majority of that amount comes from Musk’s stake in Tesla, and Musk had to sell billions of dollars worth of shares in the automaker to finance the October 2022 acquisition of Twitter.

A lawsuit in the state of Delaware against Musk and Tesla executives was filed in 2018 by an investor named Richard Tornetta, who claimed the pay package was unfair. Although Tornetta only owned 9 shares of Tesla, the deal was also criticized by large pension funds and other entities that held stakes in the company.

Musk wants to move Tesla into newspapers

“Never register your company in Delaware,” Musk wrote on “X,” his new Twitter handle, shortly after Judge McCornick’s ruling. He also opened a poll asking his followers if Tesla should move its paperwork from Delaware to Texas.

More than 87% of the more than 1.1 million votes cast on his page as of this writing said yes.

“The public vote is clearly in favor of Texas! Tesla will immediately initiate a shareholder vote to move its registration to Texas,” Musk announced in a follow-up post.

Musk has been a fan of this Republican state in the southern United States for several years, moving Tesla’s headquarters from the city of Palo Alto, located in California, to Austin, the capital of Texas, in 2021. A year earlier, he also announced that he was personally moving to Texas.

One of Tesla’s largest factories in the United States is also located in Texas, which also produces the Cybertruck, the iconic electric van that Elon Musk has been promising for years.

Tesla also plans to build a lithium recycling plant in Texas, which it says plans to power up to one million electric batteries by 2025.

But Reuters notes that Delaware is also known for being business-friendly, with more than 65 percent of Fortune 500 companies and more than half of all publicly traded U.S. companies based in the small East Coast state. The United States.