- In today’s CEO Daily: Diane Brady on the unlikely CEO trying to reform the U.S.’s corporate capital.
- The big leadership story: Blackstone’s COO-turned-‘accidental influencer’
- The markets: Mixed globally after Trump extended the Iran ceasefire.
- Plus: All the news and watercooler chat from Fortune.
Good morning. What’s next for Delaware, home to 1 million people and about 2.2 million businesses? Remember when Elon Musk told peers to flee America’s corporate capital, moving Tesla and SpaceX to Texas after a court tried to overturn his trillion-dollar pay package? Several companies heeded his call—TripAdvisor, Roblox, Dropbox, Affirm, Coinbase, Andreessen Horowitz, even Trump Media & Technology Group—sparking talk of “DExit.”
But Delaware is hard to quit. While states like Nevada, Texas, and Wyoming are becoming more popular places to incorporate, Delaware is still home to more than two-thirds of Fortune 500 companies and most recent IPOs. Its Supreme Court recently upheld Senate Bill 21, a 2025 overhaul dubbed the “billionaires’ bill” as it limits shareholder suits. And the spirit of Musk still looms large: his team recently accused a Delaware judge of bias over her “heart” on a LinkedIn post, so she used Scrabble tiles to reassign some cases to colleagues, one of whom ruled this month that Tesla could move three shareholder suits to Texas. Barring some appeals, Musk’s days in Delaware may finally be over.
But one CEO is still invested in the future of the state despite moving his company elsewhere.
TransPerfect CEO Phil Shawe understands Delaware courts like few others. In 2014, his co-founder and former fiancé petitioned the court to seize controlof the profitable company, forcing Shawe to buy her stake at auction in 2018, a process that he says was opaque, unfair and cost him $250 million in legal fees. Shaw moved TransPerfect to Nevada, growing revenues from $600 million then to $1.3 billion today.
Unlike Musk, Shawe stuck around, financing a $2 million anti-Delaware ad campaign during Musk’s battles, helping elect Gov. Matt Meyer in 2024, and lobbying for changes such as mandatory audio in the courtroom, stricter conflict-of-interest rules, and financial disclosure requirements for judges. “I happen to have a lot of hard-earned knowledge that not a lot of people have, and thankfully, the means to do something with it,” says Shawe. He acknowledges Delaware’s continued popularity and argues he isn’t trying to kill it. “What we’ve been trying to do for the past couple years is not tell people to leave Delaware but actually help Delaware reform its courts.” Contact CEO Daily via Diane Brady at [email protected]
The post Musk wanted to flee Delaware. This CEO wants to fix it appeared first on Fortune.
