Elon Musk‘s 2018 CEO pay package from Tesla, worth some $56 billion when it vested, must be restored, the Delaware Supreme Court ruled Friday.

“We reverse the Court of Chancery’s rescission remedy and award $1 in nominal damages,” the judges wrote in their opinion.

In the decision, the Delaware Supreme Court judges said a lower court’s decision to cancel Musk’s 2018 pay plan was too extreme a remedy and that the lower court did not give Tesla a chance to say what a fair compensation ought to be.

The decision on the appeal in this case, known as Tornetta v. Musk, likely ends the yearslong fight over Musk’s record-setting compensation.

Musk’s net worth is currently estimated at around $679.4 billion, according to the Forbes Real Time Billionaires List.

Dorothy Lund, a professor at Columbia Law School, told CNBC that while the Friday opinion may restore the 2018 pay plan for Musk, it leaves the rest of the lower court’s decision unaddressed and intact.

“The court had previously decided that Musk was a controlling shareholder of Tesla and that the Tesla board and he arranged an unfair pay plan for him,” she said. “None of that was reversed in this decision.”

“We are proud to have participated in the historic verdict below, calling to account the Tesla board and its largest stockholder for their breaches of fiduciary duty,” lawyers representing plaintiff Richard J. Tornetta said in an e-mailed statement.

Tesla did not immediately respond to requests for comment.

The Delaware Supreme Court issued the order per curiam with no single judge taking credit for writing the opinion and no dissent noted.

Musk’s 2018 CEO pay package from Tesla, comprised of 12 milestone-based tranches of stock, was unprecedented at the time it was proposed. After it was granted, the pay plan made Musk the wealthiest individual in the world.

Tesla shareholder Tornetta sued Tesla, filing a derivative action in 2018, accusing Musk and the company’s board of a breach of their fiduciary duties.

Delaware’s business-specialized Court of Chancery decided in January 2024 that the pay plan was improperly granted and ordered it to be rescinded.

In her decision, Chancellor Kathaleen McCormick also found that Musk “controlled Tesla,” and that the process leading to the board’s approval of his 2018 pay plan was “deeply flawed.”

Among other things, she found the Tesla board did not disclose all the material information they should have to investors before asking them to vote on and approve the plan.

After the earlier Tornetta ruling, Musk moved Tesla’s site of incorporation out of Delaware, bashed McCormick by name in posts on his social network X, formerly Twitter, where he has tens of millions of followers, and called for other entrepreneurs to reincorporate outside of the state.

Tesla also attempted to “ratify” the 2018 CEO pay plan by holding a second vote with shareholders in 2024.

In November, Tesla shareholders voted to approve an even larger CEO compensation plan for Musk.

The 2025 pay plan…

NBA star Kevin Durant has regained access to his bevy of bitcoins, years after getting locked out of his Coinbase account. 

“We got this fixed. Account recovery complete,” Coinbase CEO Brian Armstrong said Friday in a social media post, replying to a tweet about Durant being locked out of his account on the cryptocurrency exchange. 

The message comes just a few days after Durant and his agent Rich Kleiman joked about the predicament at CNBC’s Game Plan conference in Los Angeles.

“It’s just a process we haven’t been able to figure out,” Kleiman said Tuesday, referencing Coinbase’s account retrieval protocol. “But, bitcoin keeps going up … so, I mean, it’s only benefited us.” 

Durant purchased bitcoins on Coinbase in 2016, shortly after hearing about the token several times during a dinner with his then-Golden State Warriors teammates. 

Bitcoin was trading at between roughly $360 and $1,000 in 2016, CoinGecko’s data shows. Now, the digital asset is trading at around $116,000, according to the same crypto data provider. 

Durant and his agent, who are investors in Coinbase Global and promote the business on their sports and entertainment website Boardroom, did not disclose the size of the basketball player’s bitcoin holdings on the trading platform.

The case has sparked a wider discussion about Coinbase’s customer services, with several users recounting on social media their difficulties receiving assistance from the company to regain access to their accounts and troubleshoot other issues. 

Their complaints form the latest calls for Coinbase to overhaul its support services. In May, Coinbase revealed that cybercriminals had bribed a few of its overseas customer support agents to leak customers’ personal data. In 2021, Coinbase clients expressed their frustrations over the company’s new live phone support line, with one dissatisfied user telling CNBC at the time that the service was “a joke.” 

On Friday, Armstrong addressed users’ latest concerns over the quality of the firm’s support services.

“We’re putting a big focus on getting better at customer support at both ends – improving products so fewer people need support, and providing a faster, higher quality experience when you do,” Armstrong said Friday in an X post. 

Coinbase did not immediately reply to CNBC’s request for additional comment on what measures it would take to improve its customer service. Earlier this week, the company told CNBC that it provides an around-the-clock assistance hotline for its users, in addition to offering self-help resources for basic troubleshooting.