The long title of this course would be The Corporate and Securities Law of Elon Musk. In his various capacities. As co-founder of PayPal, CEO and chief product architect of Tesla, CEO and chief engineer of SpaceX, and lead investor with SolarCity, one of the 10 most followed users of Twitter, and (as of May 2022) bidder for Twitter, Musk has generated an enormous amount of corporate law and securities litigation. In many situations, Musk’s push the edge of the envelope style led to the creation of new law.

The organizing principle of this course is what economists refer to as the principal-agent problem (a.k.a. agency costs). As someone who manages an immense amount of other people’s money, Musk constantly faces the temptation to pursue his own interests and goals rather than focusing on the welfare of those who have entrusted him with their savings. This course examines some of the ways in which law constrains (or fails to) Musk’s divergences from shareholder interests. In addition to legal materials, attention will be paid to business school case studies.

New York Magazine, Elon Musk Has So Many Lawsuits They’re Teaching a Class in Law School:

[W]hen I saw that UCLA Law professor Stephen M. Bainbridge was offering a course next year called “Law of Elon Musk,” I reached out to get his thoughts on Musk’s past brushes with courtroom drama and what this may reveal about what’s in store as the Twitter trial nears. …

[O]ver the course of looking at Elon Musk’s legal dramas, do you see a narrative here? Is he becoming, for instance, more aggressive in his treatment of the law and what he is trying to get away with?
The story that I see is the story of an incredibly smart and adventurous guy who’s capable of generating ideas that produce enormous amounts of value but who would be a pain in the butt as a client because he often leaps before he looks. He has not shown a tremendous amount of respect for the Delaware courts in terms of dotting all the I’s and crossing all the T’s in some of these transactions.