He (or an entity he owns and controls) owns the shares, and and another company (computershare in the case of Tesla) maintains a list of all the shareholders (r

He (or an entity he owns and controls) owns the shares, and and another company (computershare in the case of Tesla) maintains a list of all the shareholders (registrar and transfer agent). No one else “owns” them He may just own the shares directly with the company (we’ve largely done away with paper share certificates). Or he may have transferred them to his broker (Morgan Stanley?) (who in turn might custody them with a custodian BNY Mellon?) who holds them on his behalf. If he then transferred those shares to say DBS in Singapore MS/BNY is going to inform computershare “fyi we just sent all those Elon musk shares to DBS in Singapore” and DBS is going to say (FYI we know have custody of all those Elon musk shares)..,and when you go looking for those shares all you have to do is go to computershare with a court order and say where are Elon’s shares, and they’ll be like, oh over at DBS in Singapore… and for all I know the registrar can probably just send a note to DBS in Singapore and be like (ahh we got a court order to transfer these shares to some other guys so we did, subtract $44b from his account) All of this is a long winded way of saying that “shares” are just entries on a ledger maintained by the company or someone else on their behalf, which makes seizing them, typically pretty easy…