Elon Musk's 2018 CEO pay package from Tesla , worth some $56 billion when it vested, must be restored, the Delaware Supreme Court ruled Friday.
"We reverse the Court of Chancery's rescission remedy and award $1 in nominal damages," the judges wrote in their opinion.
In the decision, the Delaware Supreme Court judges said a lower court's decision to cancel Musk's 2018 pay plan was too extreme a remedy, and that lower court did not give Tesla a chance to say what a fair compensation ought to be.
The decision on the appeal in this case, known as Tornetta v. Musk, likely ends the years-long fight over Musk's record-setting compensation.
Musk's net worth is currently estimated at around $679.4 billion, according to the Forbes Real Time Billionaires List.
Dorothy Lund, a professor at Columbia Law School, told CNBC that while the Friday opinion may restore the 2018 pay plan for Musk, it leaves the rest of the lower court's decision unaddressed and in-tact.
"The court had previously decided that Musk was a controlling shareholder of Tesla, and that the Tesla board and he arranged an unfair pay plan for him," she said. "None of that was reversed in this decision."
The Delaware Supreme Court issued the order "per curiam" with no single judge taking credit for writing the opinion, and no dissent noted.