Though shareholders backed Mr Musk’s pay package, legal experts say it is not clear if the court that blocked the deal will accept the re-vote and allow the company to restore his pay.

But former Tesla backer Steve Westly told the BBC earlier this year keeping Musk is not a necessity.

“Elon is a unique visionary …but I don’t know if that means he’s essential to be running any or all of those companies today,” he said.

“No one stays on top forever, especially when you’re trying to lead seven companies at once.”

And for all the successes under Mr Musk, there have also been failures.

For years Tesla didn’t make a profit at all, then a tweet about the company becoming private caused financial chaos, ending in an investigation by regulators resulting in him standing down as CEO.

I’ve spoken to two former employees who claim that speaking out about safety concerns at Tesla cost them both their jobs and their professional reputations.

Tesla nearly went bankrupt. Not all SpaceX rocket launches work and each failure costs the company millions of dollars. The Neuralink chip started to malfunction shortly after it was implanted, though this has since been fixed.

Mr Musk recently claimed that Starlink has now broken even financially – but Bloomberg published a report suggesting that he had underplayed the huge cost of launching its satellite network infrastructure.

But the US has a different view about risky businesses.

“The US market is not only huge, but also more predisposed to taking big shots,” Mustafa Suleyman, who co-founded Google DeepMind and has just joined Microsoft, told the BBC.

The UK could do with being “more tolerant and more celebratory of failures,” he added.

If Mr Musk has been bruised by failure, he doesn’t show it. He is outwardly loud, dominant and defiant.

He says today that he has sent a cake to Delaware, which tried to block his $56bn Tesla pay deal.

It is emblazoned with his favourite phrase “vox populei, vox dei” – the voice of the people is the voice of God.

Additional reporting by Dearbail Jordan.