My story for the magazine this week is about Delaware, but it’s also about the future of American capitalism. Most Fortune 500 companies are incorporated in the state, which exercises vast regulatory authority over how publicly traded companies operate. Thanks to Elon Musk, Delaware’s status as America’s corporate capital is now under threat. When a Delaware court voided a $55 billion pay package that Tesla had awarded Musk, he declared war on the state, reincorporating Tesla and SpaceX in Texas and urging other companies to follow suit. A handful of major companies have joined him. Many of those companies have reincorporated in Texas or Nevada, which are both aggressively courting companies unhappy with Delaware, indicating that corporations can expect gentler treatment in their respective jurisdictions. Musk is tapping into growing discontent among corporate executives who believe that Delaware’s judiciary is applying excessive scrutiny to their actions. Critics fear that the state, dependent on the revenue that it derives from corporate chartering, is being drawn into a race to the bottom that will result in weaker checks on executive malfeasance, such as constraining billionaire chief executives from self-dealing or otherwise abusing the rights and interests of shareholders. FEATURES ON THE COVER
‘The Last 12 Weeks’In 1992, David Wood was convicted of murdering young women and girls and burying them in the desert outside El Paso, earning him the nickname the Desert Killer. He has been on death row ever since. “The Last 12 Weeks,” a new podcast from Serial Productions and The New York Times in collaboration with The Marshall Project, takes you behind the scenes as a capital defense team races against the clock. With an extraordinary level of access to a capital case in its final stretch, the longtime death penalty reporter Maurice Chammah takes listeners into the room with the lawyers as the clock ticks down. In the end, will the lawyers’ efforts be enough to persuade a deeply skeptical court system and stop an execution three decades in the making? Read Chammah’s introduction to the story and listen to all five episodes here.
The Sentencing of the Gilgo Beach KillerThis week, Rex Heuermann, the serial killer who pleaded guilty to the murders of eight women, was sentenced to life in prison. In 2023, Robert Kolker wrote an article for the magazine about the hunt for the Gilgo Beach killer, in which 13 years passed before Heuermann was arrested. I’ve conducted interviews with people close to the Gilgo case during every chapter of its bizarre 13-year timeline. The story they tell — at times self-serving and at other times soul-searching — demonstrates, inadvertently and otherwise, how institutional rot helped contribute to the delays and paralysis of the investigation. What started out as indifference and apathy soon curdled into obstinance, willful ignorance and corruption. From the moment those women were found at Gilgo Beach, the law-enforcement culture of Suffolk County seemed so preternaturally ill suited to handle this case that a killer was allowed to roam free. Which was all the more galling, given what we know now — that everything the police needed to solve the case, they had almost on Day 1.
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FROM THE ARCHIVES Unjust Desserts |
