Letter to Chancellor McCormick

On may 31st of 2023, I found out the hard way that I had a brain tumor the size of a tennis ball. I was lucky, it was the best kind of tumor in the worst possible place. I have been unemployed since Jan 2022 because of this tumor, and probably lost my job in 2019 as well. I am still unemployed.

On June 5th of this year, my wife was taken to the local mental hospital because her dementia had flared up, she thought I was dead and that she was all alone, and knew she wasn't capable of basic actions like cooking for herself. We were lucky in that my sister-in-law was certified as a home care aide, and was able to come and get here and take her back to CA, from Springfield OR where I live now.

I escaped the hospital on July 10, after 40 days. I have been recovering since. I am super positive, because while most people have to think about their worst moment in life, I know. My worst moment was laying in the hospital bed, waiting for the nurse to come and turn off the bed alarm so I could get up to pee in the toilet 3 steps to my left. I knew, from previous times, that if the nurse didn't react to the call button in time, I would have to pee myself, and then lay on a paper towel thing in my wet hospital gown for hours until a nurse had enough time to bring me a fresh gown, fresh sheets, and coach me through taking a shower.

It was awful, gross, and humiliating. After that, very little bothers me. Jordan Peterson has a rule: Compare yourself to who you were yesterday, not to someone else today. This saying has become my mantra. I am 8 months through what will probably be a 12 month recovery. I can't drive at the moment, which severely limits me because I live outside of town.

My wife came back to me on Jan 26th, and I have refused to accept her dementia as a death sentence. Since her return, I have seen her blossom, she is now regularly reading again here and there. Having her with me, while exhausting being a 50's housewife, its actually making me a better UI/UX engineer, because I'm constantly confronted with excess cognitive load, and I have to come up with solutions. H and C were confusing her on the shower, but I got water proof flame and snowflake stickers, and she can now adjust the temperature without coaching from me, which is quite a leap.

I am a relatively recent investor in Tesla, but I've been a technologist for many years, and made most of the money I'm living on now from investing a small amount in Apple years ago. Discouraged after the last Apple Demo, I looked for something else to invest in and started looking at Tesla, and then ended up buying quite a bit. Elon is quite obviously a genius, and a man of great vision. He very much deserves his billions, and despite the sturm and drang from the media, he has actually used his money well and wisely. He has also recently changed, the demonic Elon of a couple of years ago is gone, new happy Elon is much more stable and balanced.

A friend of mine was complaining about money for billionaires when I was talking to her about setting up a neighbors Starlink, and how the FCC made a decision completely contrary to the technical facts. I pointed out to her that Starlink worked, and not providing the subsidy to SpaceX was only going to make it more expensive for rural folks. That if you want a billionaire genius to do something, you have to give them money.

Some people grumble that Elon shouldn't have bought Twitter, that X is a distraction from Tesla. I disagree, and it's a fundamental misunderstanding of modern software development especially AI. It's not Elon's job to flip the 0's to 1's anymore, its his job to have the vision and tenacity to fund things like Dojo, 12 years before its needed.

Unfortunately, you've already made the terrible decision to set aside Elon's compensation package. Elon deserves that package; the board set impossible goals, and he met them. I wish I had owned TSLA back then, like most of the stockholders, if I had, I would have approved any plan and any visionary bold enough to say "this is how I can make your investment 10x" bigger.

But there's another decision in front of you. Ya know, there's a reason people hate lawyers, and the billions in legal fees these lawyers have asked for is why. These lawyers have added nothing to the world, and they want to become billionaires themselves? To add insult to injury, they have asked for it in Tesla stock. So first they argue that the compensation is too much, then they argue that they want a piece of the company? The mind boggles. These lawyers bought 9 shares. Give them 1 share for every documented hour they worked on the case, with a vesting period of 5 years, and nothing else.

Essentially, these lawyers are playing games. This is blatant stock manipulation using lawfare. First, they want the stock at a depressed price when its not certain that Elon will continue to lend his vision to the company. Then, when he comes back, they can reap double as Elon's vision continues to pay dividends.

Just say no, Chancellor. Providing these greedy people who never knew their fathers this level of compensation is the worst sort of drain on our society.

#DelawareCourt81