Tesla chief executive Elon Musk’s record-breaking $56bn (£47bn) pay award will not be reinstated, a judge has ruled.

The selection in the Delaware court comes after months of legal wrangling and despite it being approved by shareholders and directors in the summer.

Judge Kathaleen McCormick upheld her previous selection from January, in which she argued that board members were too heavily influenced by Mr Musk.

Reacting to the ruling, Mr Musk wrote on X: “Shareholders should control business votes, not judges.”

Tesla vowed to appeal against the ruling, saying the selection was “incorrect”.

“This ruling, if not overturned, means that judges and plaintiffs’ lawyers run Delaware companies rather than their rightful owners – the shareholders,” the electric car business said in a post on X.

Judge McCormick said the pay package would have been the largest ever for the boss of a listed business.

She said Tesla had failed to prove the fairness of the pay package, which dated to 2018.

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Mr Musk, the boss of X (formerly Twitter) and SpaceX as well as Tesla, is the globe’s richest person. His current total assets is estimated at around $350bn, according to the Bloomberg Billionaires Index.

He has used his platform to make his views known on a vast array of topics, and his position seems set to climb higher still following Donald Trump’s win in the 2024 US presidential election. The president-elect has picked Mr Musk to navigator a newly created Department of Government Efficiency (or Doge – like the dog-related meme).

Trump has said Doge will assist the administration “dismantle Government Bureaucracy, slash excess regulations, cut wasteful expenditures and restructure Federal Agencies”.

A Tesla shareholder vote on the settlement passed by 75% in June, but the judge did not consent the pay should be so large despite what she called Tesla’s lawyers’ “creative” arguments.

“Even if a shareholder vote could have a ratifying result, it could not do so here,” she wrote in her view.

The judge also ruled the Tesla shareholder who brought the case against the business and Mr Musk should receive $345m in fees but not the $5.6bn in Tesla shares they had asked for.

Some observers said a ruling in favour of Mr Musk and Tesla would have dealt a blow to dispute of earnings laws in Delaware.

The concept of dispute rules is to protect all investors, not just minority investors, said Charles Elson of the University of Delaware’s Weinberg Center for Corporate Governance.

Mr Elson said Judge McCormick’s view was well-reasoned.

“You had a board that wasn’t independent, a procedure that was dominated by the chief executive, and a package that was way out of any sort of reasonable bounds,” he said. “It’s quite a combo.”

Mr Elson said he expects Tesla might try to reconstitute a similar pay package in Texas where the business moved its legal base earlier this year after the pay ruling.