Month: November 2025

• Norway’s sovereign wealth fund said it has voted against Elon Musk’s $1 trillion pay plan.
• The bank, which manages a $2 trillion fund, said it had concerns about the size of the package.
• The fight over Musk’s pay is heating up, with investors set to vote on the plan on Thursday.

The bank behind the world’s largest sovereign wealth fund has just dealt a blow to Elon Musk’s $1 trillion payday.

Norges Bank Investment Management, which manages Norway’s $2 trillion sovereign wealth fund, said on Tuesday it had voted against the Tesla CEO’s proposed pay package ahead of the company’s annual shareholder meeting on Thursday.

The bank said that while it appreciated the “significant value” created under the billionaire’s leadership, it had concerns about the size of the package, dilution, and the lack of mitigation of Musk’s “key person risk” for Tesla.

The fund, which is Tesla’s sixth-largest institutional investor, also voted against Musk’s previous pay package in 2024. In January, leaked messages revealed an icy text exchange between the Tesla boss and Norges’ CEO Nicolai Tangen, with the billionaire telling Tangen that “friends are as friends do.”

Norway’s sovereign wealth fund is the largest institutional investor to publicly say how it has voted on the $1 trillion pay package. The fund has a 1.2% share in the EV giant.

Tesla’s CEO compensation plan has come under fire from some investors, including the California Public Employees Retirement System (CalPERS) and the New York State Retirement Fund.

Proxy firms Glass Lewis and ISS have also urged shareholders to vote against it, prompting Musk to label them “corporate terrorists” in a recent earnings call.

Several other big investors, including Florida’s State Board of Administration and ARK Invest’s Cathy Wood, have expressed support. Vanguard and BlackRock, Tesla’s two largest institutional shareholders, have not yet said how they are voting.

The 2025 CEO compensation plan would award Musk around $1 trillion worth of Tesla shares, assuming he hits a series of ambitious goals over the next decade.

These include raising Tesla’s market cap to $8.5 trillion, selling 1 million Optimus robots, boosting annual earnings way above those reported by tech giants Meta and Google, and planning his own succession.

• Appian CEO Matt Calkins said he shut down an effort to use AI to review résumés.
• He said humans should be easily able to discern what makes applicants stand out.
• It’s one way he says companies are failing to properly use AI.

Appian CEO Matt Calkins said many companies are deploying AI incorrectly. It starts with something as simple as reviewing résumés.

“We’re trying to be all modern and everything, but the reason I don’t like that is we’re trying to hire at a very elite level, and I think if we use AI, we’re going to start checkboxing,” Calkins told Business Insider during a recent dinner with reporters.

AI has upended job hunting and hiring.

While major companies like Google and Salesforce told Business Insider earlier this year that they use AI to assist in reviewing candidates, many still rely entirely on recruiters for filtering applications. Companies have said that using AI to help with the influx of initial applications, ideally freeing up recruiters to focus on top candidates.

Business Insider found that some applicants are going back to paper résumés to try to cut through the mountain of applications. Some hiring managers are returning to in-person interviews, craving more direct interaction.

Calkins said he fears that if Appian relied on AI to whittle down applications, they could miss out on a potentially special hire. Founded in 1999, Appian is a cloud computing and enterprise software company.

“We were supposed to be better than that,” he said. “We were supposed to spot the magic in people when we read their résumés, and it didn’t take AI to screen for, I don’t know, did you do well in school or something?”

‘They’re off doing silly things that aren’t going to matter.’

It’s not just on the hiring end where companies are missing out, Calkins said. He pointed to an MIT study, which found that 95% of companies have yet to see a return on their investment in generative AI. Calkins said it’s incredible to see “the technology of the century” deployed so poorly.

“It’s happening because we’re so ignorant about how to actually put AI to work,” he said. “It’s not so hard, you need to connect AI to real work. Instead of having it do side jobs, you need to connect it to the big jobs.”

Calkins said AI would be much better deployed by addressing the massive challenges that large companies face. One such problem, he said, is how corporations are “just inundated” with all kinds of communication every day.

“Most corporations get a million pieces of incoming communication,” he said. “And some are on paper, and some are on fax machines, and some are on emails, and some are texts, and some are calls that are transcribed. And they’re on all different topics, right?”

Appian has had great success addressing this, Calkins said, saying their AI can understand everything from emails to handwritten notes, route the job, and then upload it to the correct database with 99% accuracy.

“It’s just amazing, but it’s also boring. It’s back office,” he said. “Nobody will understand it if you do a Super Bowl ad about it. And so, the world is just more or less unaware of the real answer for how to use AI, and they’re off doing silly things that aren’t going to matter.”

• An appeals court is set to hear whether Sam Bankman-Fried had a fair trial.
• SBF was sentenced to 25 years in prison after a jury found him guilty of an $11 billion fraud.
• His lawyers say he should get a new trial after he unfairly previewed his testimony for prosecutors.

When Sam Bankman-Fried prepared to testify in his own criminal trial, things didn’t go according to plan.

Bankman-Fried wanted to tell jurors his side of the story. Part of that story, in his view, was that he received advice from company lawyers that made him think everything he did was OK.

US District Judge Lewis Kaplan, who oversaw Bankman-Fried’s 2023 criminal trial, wasn’t so sure. The judge had Bankman-Fried testify in court without a jury and allowed prosecutors to cross-examine him. Afterward, the judge ruled that the purported advice he got from lawyers was irrelevant to the case and would only confuse jurors.

On Tuesday, a panel of three judges is set to consider whether that hearing, which is at the heart of Bankman-Fried’s appeal, is enough to overturn his guilty verdict.

Bankman-Fried still testified for the jury the following day, but he wasn’t allowed to talk about everything he wanted to. Ultimately, the jurors convicted the former FTX CEO and cofounder of eight criminal counts, for several varieties of fraud and money laundering. Kaplan sentenced Bankman-Fried to 25 years in prison.

In an appeal brief, Bankman-Fried’s attorney, Alexandra Shapiro, described the preview hearing as a “deposition” and said it was “unprecedented.”

“The government had obtained a free preview of Bankman-Fried’s testimony, and a free practice session to better cross him when he testified before the jury,” she wrote.

SBF didn’t get a fair trial, his lawyers say

According to prosecutors, Bankman-Fried orchestrated an $11 billion fraud scheme. He took money belonging to depositors of FTX, his cryptocurrency exchange, and commingled it with Alameda Research, his hedge fund.

Bankman-Fried and his co-conspirators used that money for advertising, investments, luxurious Bahamas real estate, and political donations — all while lying to investors and lenders about where the funds were going.

At the trial, Kaplan forbade Bankman-Fried’s lawyers from making the argument that FTX was always solvent and that depositors would get all their money back. His lawyers couldn’t tell jurors what they argued in court papers, which was that Bankman-Fried’s investments were just that — investments, not theft. In particular, FTX made a $500 million investment in the now-red-hot artificial intelligence company Anthropic. That 8% stake would be worth more than $14.6 billion today. (FTX’s bankruptcy attorneys sold the Anthropic holdings at lower valuations to repay creditors.)

Bankman-Fried failed at risk management, not because he was a criminal fraudster, his lawyers said.

Prosecutors said in their appeal brief that Bankman-Fried’s trial was fair. While his preview hearing may have been unprecedented, “the absence of precedent cannot establish plain error,” they wrote.

In fact, the practice might have even helped him, they said.

“It is equally plausible that Bankman-Fried benefited from first testifying outside the presence of the jury — in his trial testimony, he avoided the long-winded answers that had come across as evasive, and abandoned certain assertions that fell apart on the stand,” they wrote in the brief.

Representing Bankman-Fried in Tuesday’s appeal hearing will be Shapiro, an experienced white-collar appellate lawyer who clerked for former Supreme Court Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg and who recently achieved legal superstar status after serving on Sean “Diddy” Combs’ trial defense team. Shapiro has also represented other high-profile white-collar defendants on appeal, including Charlie Javice and Bill Hwang.

For the US Attorney’s Office for the Southern District of New York, Nathan Rehn, also a former Ginsburg clerk, is expected to argue before the three-judge panel at the Second Circuit Court of Appeals.

In addition to arguing that Bankman-Fried didn’t get a fair shot at defending himself, Shapiro has argued that Kaplan gave the jury incorrect instructions for deciding on Bankman-Fried’s intent, and that the judge should have forced FTX’s bankruptcy lawyers to turn over more discovery material to help him prepare for his defense.

Shapiro said the appellate court should order a new trial for Bankman-Fried, and with a different judge.

In the meantime, Bankman-Fried is serving his sentence in FCI Terminal Island, a low-security prison in the Los Angeles area, while fishing for a pardon from President Donald Trump. His co-conspirator, Caroline Ellison, who was the star witness at his trial, is serving a 2-year sentence.