Norway’s sovereign wealth fund, one of Tesla’s biggest investors, said Tuesday that it will vote against a proposed compensation package that could pay CEO Elon Musk as much as $1 trillion over a decade.

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There will be more than a dozen company proposals up for a vote Thursday during Tesla’s annual meeting, but none have generated more division than Musk’s potentially massive pay package.

“While we appreciate the significant value created under Mr. Musk’s visionary role, we are concerned about the total size of the award, dilution, and lack of mitigation of key person risk consistent with our views on executive compensation,” said Norges Bank Investment Management, which manages the country’s Government Pension Fund Global. “We will continue to seek constructive dialogue with Tesla on this and other topics.”

The fund has a 1.16% stake, the sixth largest holding among institutional investors.

Baron Capital Management, which holds about 0.4% of Tesla’s outstanding shares said Monday that it will vote in favor of the compensation package.

“Elon is the ultimate “key man” of key man risk. Without his relentless drive and uncompromising standards, there would be no Tesla,” wrote founder Ron Baron. “He has built one of the most important companies in the world. He’s redefining transportation, energy and humanoid robotics and creating lasting value for shareholders while doing it. His interests are completely aligned with investors.”

Musk is the company’s largest investor, holding 15.79% of all outstanding shares.

Tesla management has proposed a compensation arrangement that would hand Musk shares worth as much as 12% of the company in a dozen separate packages if the company meets ambitious performance targets, including massive increases in car production, share price and operating profit.

The image that graces the cover of historian Ashley Farmer’s new biography of Pan-African activist Audley “Queen Mother” Moore is no less regal than the iconic photograph of Black Panthers founder Huey Newton in a rattan throne chair that many of us are more familiar with. 

Moore sits in an old striped armchair, wearing an African-print caftan and headdress, neck draped with beads, wrist adorned with bangles. Behind her, portraits of Malcolm X and Winnie Mandela hang on the wall. But, as Farmer notes in her introduction to Queen Mother: Black Nationalism, Reparations, and the Untold Story of Audley Moore (out from Pantheon on November 4), “What we know of Audley Moore, one of the most important activists and theorists of the twentieth century, remains largely confined to a few photos such as this one—a seven-decade history of struggle distilled down to a few still shots. Until now.” 

In her book, Farmer, a historian of Black women’s radical politics and an associate professor of History and African and African Diaspora Studies at the University of Texas at Austin, chronicles Moore’s life and activism. Moore, a civil rights leader and Black nationalist, adopted the name Queen Mother in the 1960s as a symbol of both her matriarchal presence in Black organizing spaces as well as the connection to Africa that was key to her politics. From her roots in southern Louisiana at the dawn of the 20th century to her years pounding the pavement in Harlem as an organizer for the Communist Party to her reignition of the modern reparations movement well into her later years, Moore’s story offers a potent lesson for today’s organizers on the power of persistence, longevity, and showing up. 

Born in 1897 in New Iberia, Louisiana, to a mother from a free Black community and a father born into slavery, Moore bore witness to the dying breaths of Reconstruction in the South. Though she enjoyed membership in the Creole elite upon moving with her father to New Orleans, she found herself cut off from that wealth and access upon his death while she was still in high school. Newly a member of the working class, taking up domestic labor to provide for herself and her two younger sisters, the arrival of Black nationalist Marcus Garvey, one of the foremost proponents of the Back-to-Africa movement, laid the cornerstone of Moore’s political philosophy for the rest of her life. 

“It was Garvey who brought consciousness to me,” she recalled in an oral-history interview quoted in the book. “You can experience a thing without being conscious of yourself. … [You can] see the brutality of the police all against us and so on, and yet a consciousness is not aroused.” 

From then on, Moore would see herself as a vital part of a global Black community and as working in service of Black liberation. 

Moore and her then-husband were ready to follow Garvey to Africa, making his vision of an Africa for Africans a reality—the pair had sold their grocery store and packed their trunk—before extended family interceded. Still, the two were ready to leave New Orleans, and they decamped to Harlem in the mid-1920s. Harlem proved a fertile ground for Moore to come into her own as an organizer. After attending a rally led by the local Communist Party, she was invigorated by a speech wherein party leader James Ford expounded on imperialism in Africa and the struggle of the international working class. By 1936, she was a card-carrying party member, selling copies of The Daily Worker and helping to articulate a vision of a fight against capitalism and white supremacist imperialism both at home and abroad. 

During Moore’s time in the party, she rose through the ranks, organizing around bread-and-butter issues like tenants’ rights and grocery affordability, eventually leading the Upper Harlem Branch’s Women’s Commission. She’d go on to run for the New York State Assembly on the Communist Party ticket and help elect a Black Communist to represent Harlem on the New York City Council. Farmer writes: “Moore’s ideological compass was always pointed at Black Nationalism. But she had a malleable approach to organizing that led her to join groups, protests, and causes that were pro-Black even if they were not explicitly nationalist.” 

Though J. Edgar Hoover’s FBI began targeted surveillance of Moore in 1941, it wasn’t this threat that weakened her ties to the Communist Party but rather the party’s own lack of a commitment to her Black nationalist vision that led her to renounce membership in 1950. 

Even after her time in the Communist Party, Moore retained the understanding that civil rights alone wouldn’t give her the results she wanted; it would take capital to ensure that Black people could be truly free. Symbolic and material reparations were not a novel idea, but back home in Louisiana, where Moore returned in 1956 with her sisters after a successful campaign to reclaim the house that their half-brother had kicked them out of decades earlier, Moore launched the modern reparations movement. She tasked the Universal Association of Ethiopian Women, her organizing home which until then had largely been advocating for Black men on death row, with researching historical claims to reparations for Black Americans. 

Ever the tactician, Moore was capacious in her vision, appealing to more-moderate constituencies with plans for hiring quotas and job-training programs as well as to armed Black separatists like those of the Republic of New Afrika, who wanted to found a sovereign Black nation in Mississippi. 

The fight for reparations carried Moore through the second half of the 20th century. She continued advocating, benefitted by a longevity in the movement that most Black nationalist leaders were denied, their lives too often cut short. Until her death, in 1997, if Black people were gathering to discuss political objectives, whether in the United States or the United Kingdom or Africa, Queen Mother Moore was there to remind them that, even as the political landscape changed—Africa decolonized, voting rights achieved—reparations were critical to any vision of a liberated Black political future. 

Farmer mirrors Moore’s tenacity in her insistence on chronicling her subject’s life at all, in the face of an academic establishment claiming that, without substantial archives, a definitive biography was a fruitless project. Our understanding of the history of Black activism, with its points both high and low, will be fuller for Farmer’s portrait of Moore, who offers those of us who struggle toward justice a model for playing the long game.

The post The ‘Queen Mother’ of the Reparations Movement Gets Her Due appeared first on The Texas Observer.

By JIM GOMEZ, Associated Press

MANILA, Philippines (AP) — Typhoon Kalmaegi has left at least 26 people dead in the Philippines, mostly in flooding set off by the storm, which barreled across the central part of the country on Tuesday, disaster response officials said. Floodwaters trapped scores of people on their roofs and submerged cars.

A Philippine air force helicopter with five personnel on board crashed in a separate incident in southern Agusan del Sur province while flying to help provide humanitarian assistance to provinces battered by Kalmaegi.

The Super Huey chopper crashed near Loreto town and efforts were underway to locate the air force personnel aboard, the military’s Eastern Mindanao Command said in a statement.

Military officials didn’t immediately provide other details about the crash, including the condition of the five air force personnel aboard and what could have caused the crash.

Kalmaegi was last spotted over the coastal waters of Jordan town in the central province of Guimaras with sustained winds of 81 mph and gusts of up to 112 mph. It was forecast to blow away into the South China Sea late Tuesday or early Wednesday after hitting the western province of Palawan.

Bernardo Rafaelito Alejandro IV, deputy administrator of the Office of Civil Defense, said that at least 26 people were reported killed — many in flooding in Cebu province and other central island provinces pummeled by Kalmaegi, the 20th tropical cyclone to batter the Philippine archipelago this year. Details of those typhoon deaths were still being verified, he said.

Among the dead was an older villager, who drowned in floodwaters in Southern Leyte, where a province-wide power outage was reported after the typhoon made landfall around midnight in one of its eastern towns. A resident died after being hit by a fallen tree in central Bohol province, provincial officials said.

Gwendolyn Pang, secretary-general of the Philippine Red Cross, said that an unspecified number of residents were trapped on their roofs by floodwaters in the coastal town of Liloan in Cebu, and added that cars either were submerged in floods or floated in another Cebu community.

“We have received so many calls from people asking us to rescue them from roofs and from their houses, but it’s impossible,” Pang told The Associated Press on Tuesday morning. “There are so many debris, you see cars floating so we have to wait for the flood to subside.”

Cebu province was still recovering from a 6.9 magnitude earthquake on Sept. 30 that left at least 79 people dead and displaced thousands when houses collapsed or were severely damaged.

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In Eastern Samar, one of the east-central provinces first lashed by Kalmaegi early Tuesday, fierce wind either ripped off roofs or damaged about 300 mostly rural shanties on the island community of Homonhon, which is part of the town of Guiuan, but there were no reported deaths or injuries, Mayor Annaliza Gonzales Kwan said.

“There was no flooding at all, but just strong wind,” Kwan told the AP by telephone. “We’re OK. We’ll make this through. We’ve been through a lot, and bigger than this.”

In November 2013, Typhoon Haiyan, one of the most powerful tropical cyclones on record, slammed ashore into Guiuan. it then raked across the central Philippines, leaving more than 7,300 people dead or missing, flattening entire villages and sweeping scores of ships inland. Haiyan demolished about 1 million houses and displaced more than 4 million people in one of the country’s poorest regions.

Before the typhoon’s landfall, officials said that more than 387,000 people had evacuated to safer ground in eastern and central Philippine provinces. Authorities warned of torrential rains, potentially destructive winds and storm surges of nearly 10 feet.

Interisland ferries and fishing boats were prohibited from venturing into increasingly rough seas, stranding more than 3,500 passengers and cargo truck drivers in nearly 100 seaports, the coast guard said. At least 186 domestic flights were canceled.

The Philippines is battered by about 20 typhoons and storms each year. The country also is often hit by earthquakes and has more than a dozen active volcanoes, making it one of the world’s most disaster-prone countries.

Joeal Calupitan and Aaron Favila contributed to this report.

By KELVIN CHAN, Associated Press Business Writer

LONDON (AP) — Artificial intelligence company Stability AI mostly prevailed against Getty Images Tuesday in a British court battle over intellectual property.

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Seattle-based Getty Images, which owns an extensive online library of images and video, had filed suit against Stability AI in a widely watched case that went to trial at Britain’s High Court in June.

The case was among a wave of lawsuits filed by movie studios, authors and artists challenging tech companies’ use of their works to train AI chatbots.

According to a judge’s ruling released Tuesday, Getty narrowly won its argument that Stability had infringed its trademark, but lost its claim for secondary infringement of copyright.

Both sides claimed victory.

“This is a significant win for intellectual property owners,” Getty Images said in a statement.

Shares of Getty dipped 3% before the opening bell in the U.S.

Stability said it was pleased with the ruling.

“This final ruling ultimately resolves the copyright concerns that were the core issue,” Stability General Counsel Christian Dowell said.

Getty argued that the development of Stability’s AI image maker, called Stable Diffusion, was a “brazen infringement” of its library of images “on a staggering scale.”

While Getty accused Stability of infringing both its copyright and trademark, the company dropped its primary copyright allegations during the trial, indicating that it didn’t think its arguments would succeed.

Getty also sued for trademark infringement because its watermark appeared on some of the images generated by Stability’s chatbot.

Justice Joanna Smith said in her ruling that Getty’s trademark claims “succeed (in part)” but that her findings are “both historic and extremely limited in scope.”

Stability argued that the case doesn’t belong in the United Kingdom because the AI model’s training technically happened elsewhere, on computers run by U.S. tech giant Amazon. It also argued that “only a tiny proportion” of the random outputs of its AI image-generator “look at all similar” to Getty’s works.

Tech companies have long argued that “fair use” or “fair dealing” legal doctrines in the United States and United Kingdom allow them to train their AI systems on large troves of writings or images.

Getty is also still pursuing a claim of “secondary infringement” of copyright, saying that even if Stability’s AI training happened outside the U.K., offering the Stable Diffusion service to British users amounted to importing unlawful copies of its images into the country.

Smith dismissed Getty’s argument, saying that Stable Diffusion’s AI didn’t infringe copyright because it doesn’t store “store or reproduce any Copyright Works (and has never done so).”

Getty is also pursuing a copyright infringement lawsuit in the United States against Stability. It originally sued Getty in 2023 but refiled the case in a San Francisco federal court in August.

The Getty lawsuits are among a slew of cases that highlight how the generative AI boom is fueling a clash between tech companies and creative industries.

Anthropic agreed to pay $1.5 billion to settle a class-action lawsuit by book authors who say the company took pirated copies of their works to train its Claude chatbot.

Separately, a federal judge dismissed a lawsuit from a group of 13 authors who made similar accusations against Facebook owner Meta Platforms in training its AI system Llama.

Warner Bros. has sued Midjourney for copyright infringement, alleging that its image generator enables subscribers to create AI-generated images and videos of copyrighted characters like Superman and Bugs Bunny.

Disney and Universal also sued Midjourney earlier in a separate, joint copyright lawsuit, alleging the San Francisco-based startup pirated the libraries to generate and distribute unauthorized copies of famed characters like Darth Vader and the Minions.

AP Technology Writer Matt O’Brien contributed to this report.