“The beef packers have a lot of control,” said Neva Hassanein, a University of Montana professor who studies sustainable food systems. “They tend to influence a tremendous amount throughout the supply chain.” For the nation’s ranchers, whose profits have shrunk over time, she said, “It’s kind of a trap.”

Cole Mannix is trying to escape that trap.

Mr. Mannix, 40, has a tendency to wax philosophical. (He once thought about becoming a Jesuit priest.) Like members of his family have since 1882, he grew up ranching: baling hay, helping to birth calves, guiding cattle into the high country on horseback. He wants to make sure the next generation, the sixth, has the same opportunity.

So, in 2021, Mr. Mannix co-founded Old Salt Co-op, a company that aims to upend the way people buy meat.

While many Montana ranchers sell their calves into the multibillion-dollar industrial machine when they’re less than a year old, never to see or profit from them again, Old Salt’s livestock never leave the company’s hands. The cattle are raised by Old Salt’s four member ranches, slaughtered and processed at its meatpacking facility, and sold through its ranch-to-table restaurants, community events and website. The ranchers, who have ownership in the company, profit at every stage.

The technical term for this approach — in which a company controls various elements of its supply chain — is vertical integration. It’s not something many small meat businesses try, as it requires a huge amount of upfront capital.

“It’s a scary time,” Mr. Mannix said, referring to the company’s sizable debt. “We’re really trying to invent something new.”

But, he added, “No matter how risky it is to start a business like Old Salt, the status quo is riskier.”

It would have been much simpler for Old Salt to open just a meat processing facility, as some ranchers have, and not bother with restaurants and events. (In fact, that’s where much of the national attention has focused: The White House recently committed $1 billion to independent meat processors, citing the major meatpackers’ lack of competition.)

But Mr. Mannix said that would not have addressed the other issue that ranchers face: difficulty accessing distributors and customers. “It doesn’t matter if you have a nice processing facility if you can’t sell the product,” he said. “You can’t rebuild the food system by just throwing a bunch of money at one component of that food system.”

Old Salt is his attempt to rebuild the whole darn thing.

And people are taking notice. “Old Salt is a beacon,” said Robin Kelson, executive director of Abundant Montana, a nonprofit organization promoting local food. “They are showing the rest of us that by stacking enterprises, by collaborating in creative ways, it is possible to make the system work.”

On a recent Saturday, downtown Helena’s newest restaurant, the Union, was buzzing. A wood-fired grill sizzled as diners ate steaks and short ribs; up front, a butcher case gleamed with bacon and breakfast sausages. All of it came from Old Salt’s member ranches.

This restaurant-slash-butchery is Old Salt’s latest venture. It joins the Outpost, a burger stand inside a 117-year-old bar, and the Old Salt Festival, a food- and music-filled celebration of sustainable agriculture at the Mannix ranch in late June, now in its second year. That’s in addition to the company’s meat processing facility and subscription meat program.

Andrew Mace, Old Salt’s co-founder and culinary director, probably wouldn’t recommend starting five businesses in three years. But he said this was all part of the company’s “very ambitious plan to reimagine the local meat economy.”

While Mr. Mace wants all of Old Salt’s outfits to turn a profit, their greater purpose is serving as marketing vehicles for the meat subscription service: for diners to fall in love with the Union’s rib-eye, and then sign up to get the company’s “steak and chop bundle” delivered every month.

In the next five years, Old Salt’s goal is to sell meat to 10,000 families around the country each year, up from around 800 now. It won’t be easy: Americans are used to purchasing ground chuck from the grocery store, not from a website.

“It just takes a lot to pry into people’s spending habits,” Mr. Mace said, “and get them to understand that you’re not just buying meat, you’re investing in local landscapes.”

That matters to Mr. Mannix. He handpicked Old Salt’s members from more than 9,000 ranches across the state because they share his dedication to regenerative ranching, a set of principles that seeks to replenish soils and lessen cattle’s environmental impact.

His overarching goal is putting more money into these ranchers’ hands so they can put more time and money into stewarding their lands. (Altogether, Old Salt’s ranches manage more than 200,000 acres, a parcel larger than Shenandoah National Park.)

That’s why Old Salt’s ranchers own the majority of the company and share in the profits. “We didn’t want to be a meat company that buys livestock from ranchers and, ultimately, as it grows, has an incentive to pay as little as it can for those livestock,” Mr. Mannix said. “That leaves less money to pay for the time that it takes to really care for ecosystems.”

Uniting four ranches under one brand has also allowed the members to pool their products and marketing resources, rather than compete against one another.

“It takes some boldness to do what they are doing, but we need people out front like that to show the way,” said Dr. Hassanein, the University of Montana professor. Though it may seem ironic, given that beef production accounts for nearly 9 percent of global greenhouse gas emissions, she said she supported these ranches precisely because she cares about wildlife and the environment.

“These are well-known ranches; many of them are award-winning conservationists,” Dr. Hassanein said. “If they can’t survive economically, then we really have to ask ourselves what’s going to come in their place.”

That’s a question many of Old Salt’s ranchers, who are navigating both economic and environmental pressures, have been asking too. As Cooper Hibbard, a fifth-generation rancher and president of Old Salt’s board, put it, “It’s clear from all angles that we can’t keep doing what we’ve been doing, otherwise we won’t have a ranch to pass off to the next generation.”

“We’re trying to chart a new model,” he said. “We’re really swinging for the fences.”

The vote was a setback for investors who had hoped it would send a message about the accountability of chief executives and the limits of executive pay.

“It’s a higher pay package than we have seen in the United States and I don’t think it sets a good precedent,” said Kristin Hull, founder and chief investment officer of Nia Impact Capital, which has pushed Tesla to improve working conditions at its factories.

The compensation plan requires Mr. Musk to hold on to the shares for at least five years before selling them, and the value of the package will continue to fluctuate before he can do so. At Friday’s closing price, the shares were worth about $47 billion.

Addressing shareholders after the vote, Mr. Musk vowed that he was committed to Tesla. The pay package, he said, “is not actually cash, and I can’t cut and run, nor would I want to.”

Tesla’s stock fell more than 2 percent on Friday, reversing some of gains made the day before, when Mr. Musk said the pay vote was set to be approved before the official results were announced. His legions of supporters online celebrated the vote, and analysts revised their reports on Tesla’s prospects.

Vanguard, whose 7 percent stake in Tesla makes it the company’s second-largest shareholder after Mr. Musk, voted in favor of the pay award despite voting against it in 2018. In a note explaining its reversal, Vanguard said that while it had been concerned about the size of the package, “the unique circumstance of evaluating the plan retroactively eliminated our concerns.”

The outcome served as a “vote of confidence in Elon,” analysts at Bernstein wrote in a note after the result. “While there remains some uncertainty around the legal process and next steps, by that standard the vote was a clear pass, mitigating concerns that Elon might leave the company or direct more of his energy elsewhere.”

The clear mandate was a disappointment to investors who hoped that the vote might put pressure on Mr. Musk to address slumping car sales or to spend less time on X, the social media platform he owns.

“I don’t think he’s learned any lessons,” said Ross Gerber, chief executive of the investment firm Gerber Kawasaki, an early investor in Tesla that has been reducing its holdings lately. “He’s going to look at this as a victory: ‘I’m going to keep doing what I’ve been doing.’”

Tesla’s board hoped that a second confirmation of the pay award could persuade the Delaware court to reverse its ruling. The judge in the case said the award was excessive and had been dictated by Mr. Musk to a board with personal ties to him.

“We believe that the ratification vote that Elon demanded and coerced is deeply flawed as a matter of law, legally ineffective and does not impact our case,” Greg Varallo, a lawyer for the disenchanted Tesla shareholders who challenged Mr. Musk’s pay in court, said in a statement.

With the pay package, Mr. Musk would own 20.5 percent of Tesla, up from about 13 percent. He has said he would like a 25 percent stake, noting in January that it would be “enough to be influential, but not so much that I can’t be overturned.” If he didn’t get a stake that large, he said, he would “prefer to build products outside of Tesla.”

Even after the rise this week, Tesla’s stock is down 28 percent this year, versus a 14 percent gain in the broader stock market. The company remains the most valuable car company by some distance, with a stock market value of $568 billion, but fears of stiffer competition and flagging demand for its models have weighed on the stock.

At the shareholder meeting on Thursday, Mr. Musk was characteristically bullish on Tesla’s self-driving technology, including a promised fleet of robotaxis, and said the company’s humanoid robot, Optimus, would grow into a multitrillion-dollar business of its own.

Market analysts are split on where Tesla goes from here, with about 40 percent rating the stock a “buy,” 20 percent a “sell” and the rest a “hold,” according to FactSet. The range of price forecasts is wide, and averages out to roughly where the stock is trading now.

Bernstein’s price target implies a 30 percent decline, and the analysts rate the stock as “underperform.” Others are more upbeat: Analysts at Wedbush think the stock could rise 50 percent from here, rating it an “outperform. The result of the vote on pay was a “pop the champagne moment,” they wrote. “Tesla is Musk and Musk is Tesla.”

Peter Eavis and Michael J. de la Merced contributed reporting.

The revelation comes at a moment of intense scrutiny of Boeing and the broader aviation industry, which is reeling from a series of mishaps and safety issues. In January, a door panel blew off a Boeing 737 Max 9 jet while it was in flight, prompting several federal investigations. In April, Boeing told the F.A.A. about a separate episode involving potentially falsified inspection records related to the wings of 787 Dreamliner planes. Boeing reported to the F.A.A. that it might have skipped required inspections involving the jet’s wings and that it would need to reinspect some of the Dreamliners still in production.

On May 30, Boeing submitted a plan to the F.A.A. outlining safety improvements it planned to make and committed to weekly meetings with the agency. Dave Calhoun, the Boeing chief executive, is set to testify on Tuesday before a Senate panel on the company’s safety issues.

The use of potentially fake titanium, which has not been previously reported, threatens to extend the industry’s problems beyond Boeing to Airbus, its European competitor. The planes that included components made with the material were built between 2019 and 2023, among them some Boeing 737 Max and 787 Dreamliner airliners as well as Airbus A220 jets, according to three people familiar with the matter who spoke on the condition of anonymity because they were not authorized to speak publicly. It is not clear how many of those planes are in service or which airlines own them.

Spirit is trying to determine where the titanium came from, whether it meets proper standards despite its phony documentation, and whether the parts made from the material are structurally sound enough to hold up through the projected life spans of the jets, company officials said. Spirit said it was trying to determine the most efficient way to remove and replace the affected parts if that ended up being necessary.

“This is about documents that have been falsified, forged and counterfeited,” said Joe Buccino, a Spirit spokesman. “Once we realized the counterfeit titanium made its way into the supply chain, we immediately contained all suspected parts to determine the scope of the issues.”

The titanium in question has been used in a variety of aircraft parts, according to Spirit officials. For the 787 Dreamliner, that includes the passenger entry door, cargo doors and a component that connects the engines to the plane’s airframe. For the 737 Max and the A220, the affected parts include a heat shield that protects a component, which connects a jet’s engine to the frame, from extreme heat.

Boeing and Airbus both said their tests of affected materials so far had shown no signs of problems.

Boeing said it directly purchased most of the titanium used in its plane production, so most of its supply was unaffected.

“This industrywide issue affects some shipments of titanium received by a limited set of suppliers, and tests performed to date have indicated that the correct titanium alloy was used,” Boeing said in a statement. “To ensure compliance, we are removing any affected parts on airplanes prior to delivery. Our analysis shows the in-service fleet can continue to fly safely.”

Airbus likewise maintained that “the A220’s airworthiness remains intact.”

“Numerous tests have been performed on parts coming from the same source of supply,” an Airbus spokeswoman said in a statement, adding, “The safety and quality of our aircraft are our most important priorities, and we are working in close collaboration with our supplier.”

The European Union Aviation Safety Agency said in a statement that they opened an investigation into the material after learning of the traceability issues from their counterparts in Italy. An agency spokesperson said the investigation is ongoing and has yet to turn up evidence of an immediate safety issue.

“However, the agency will investigate further the root cause of the document traceability issue and continues to monitor closely any new developments that could lead to a potential unsafe condition in the fleet,” the statement said.

Spirit has suffered from quality issues and financial troubles in recent years, and it came under new scrutiny this year after the episode in January involving the door panel of the 737 Max, whose fuselage it makes.

The problem illustrates the complex global supply chain used in producing modern jetliners, and the story of what appears to have gone wrong involves companies in China, Italy, Turkey and the United States.

The issue appears to date to 2019 when a Turkish material supplier, Turkish Aerospace Industries, purchased a batch of titanium from a supplier in China, according to the people familiar with the issue. The Turkish company then sold that titanium to several companies that make aircraft parts, and those parts made their way to Spirit, which used them in Boeing and Airbus planes.

In December 2023, an Italian company that bought the titanium from Turkish Aerospace Industries noticed that the material looked different from what the company typically received. The company, Titanium International Group, also found that the certificates that came with the titanium seemed inauthentic.

Turkish Aerospace Industries did not respond to a request for a comment.

Spirit began investigating the matter, and the company notified Boeing and Airbus in January that it could not verify the source of the titanium used to make certain parts. Titanium International Group told Spirit that when it bought the material in 2019, it had no clue that the paperwork had been forged, according to Spirit officials.

Francesca Conti, a general manager for Titanium International Group, said that the episode was under investigation and that she could not provide additional details. “We are cooperating with relevant authorities to address any issue eventually identified,” she said in an email.

The documents in question are known as certificates of conformity. They serve somewhat as a birth certificate for the titanium, detailing its quality, how it was made and where it came from, Spirit officials said.

People familiar with the situation said it appeared that an employee at the Chinese company that sold the titanium had forged the details on the certificates, writing that the material came from another Chinese company, Baoji Titanium Industry, a firm that often supplies verified titanium. Baoji Titanium later confirmed that it had not supplied the titanium. The origin of the titanium remains unclear.

“Baoji Titanium doesn’t know about the company and has no business dealing with this company,” the firm said in a statement to The New York Times.

Without knowing where the material came from or how it was handled, it is impossible to verify the airworthiness of the parts, said Gregg Brown, the senior vice president for global quality at Spirit.

“Our quality management process relies on the traceability of the raw materials all the way from the mills,” Mr. Brown said. “There has been a loss of traceability in that process and a documentation challenge.”

Spirit officials said they had started testing titanium parts to make sure aviation-grade material was used. The company is testing components that are still in stock and that are on undelivered fuselages.

So far, Spirit’s testing has confirmed that the titanium is the appropriate grade for airplane manufacturers. But the company has been unable to confirm that the titanium was treated through the approved airplane manufacturing process. The material passed some of the materials testing performed on it but failed others.

Mr. Buccino, the Spirit spokesman, said the company was working with customers to identify the affected planes. Aircraft that are already in service will be monitored by airlines and removed from service earlier than normal if warranted, he said. More likely, he said, the affected parts will be removed during routine maintenance checks regardless of whether the titanium checks out.

Olivia Wang contributed reporting from Hong Kong. Kitty Bennett contributed research.

In addition to park admission, the Dream Key pass, which has since been discontinued, offered up to 15 percent off “select dining” and up to 20 percent off “select merchandise.”

The plaintiff, Jenale Nielsen, paid $1,399 for the pass, the lawsuit said. She will receive a $5,000 payment, according to the agreement. Her lawyer did not comment on the settlement.

The two parties agreed to settle the lawsuit in July 2023 to avoid a trial. Walt Disney Parks and Resorts denied any wrongdoing or liability in agreeing to the settlement. Disney and Disneyland Resort did not immediately respond to requests for comment.

Settlement administrators will automatically send checks to the last known mailing addresses for members of the class. Some pass holders may have elected to receive payment digitally; the process to elect payment type closed in January.