Elon Musk Makes $82B Gambit to Silence Tesla Critics

As a fellow shareholder, I’m curious what your plan is from there. Just take the $420 and call it a day? Probably the route I’ll go, and then take the money and look for other opportunities.

Basically Musk is tired of short sellers writing story after story in the financial rags about how Tesla is on the verge of total collapse any day now. He figures if he goes private they'll be forced to pick a new target (or just write even more articles about Uber).

> I have no idea why anybody would believe that

Just look at the last 10Q and the rising debt.

Here's a scenario: Musk doesn't have to buy every share at $420 (interesting choice of price points, that); in theory, he could sell a lot of shares privately at say, $250/share, then use some of the proceeds to buy out a respectable number of public shareholders to maintain appearances, and swap the rest of them into a fund. The remainder of the money from the private sale, he can use to fund growth. Tesla's public share price soars, giving Musk symbolic public vindication, and once the deal is done, there's no public visibility on the private share value. Basically, a way of doing an effective down-round. Obviously, this all depends on convincing enough existing holders to swap into the fund, and that in turn depends on maintaining the Musk reality-distortion field. Any slip, or acknowledgment of what's really going on, and those shareholders may spook.