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Comment by mrkmcknz | Hacker News Reader

Didn't Tesla repay this loan back with another loan:

http://www.reuters.com/article/2013/05/15/us-tesla-stock-idU...

I'm not a market economics kind of guy but I don't see how this is any kind of special achievement. Surely any other car manufacturer could have done precisely this?

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The story is that they paid it back via the private market, meaning that the financial community believes in the company enough that they no longer need public support.

Incidentally, they did issue corporate debt (a form of a loan, sure), but also issued more equity as well.

I guess it probably made sense financially in that the private market believed in Tesla enough to provide a better rate than the original loan.

No, they paid back the government loan with stock.

The difference between a 'convertible note' and a 'loan' is that in a convertible note turns into its conversion when 'due.' Basically it turns into stock at the value of the amount borrowed plus interest.

There is a fascinating Convertible Note generator that you can run on the Wilson Sonsini web site [1] which I recommend doing if you are at all interested and read all the text about why or why not you might want choose one set of terms over the other.

[1] http://www.wsgr.com/WSGR/Display.aspx?SectionName=practice/t...

Not if the rate was 10%, 20%, etc. It's just a form of bootstrapping. The government stepped in and bootstrapped it so now the private sector can finance it normally.

It's raising money. For most car companies that is not a special achievement. For Tesla, who has not yet proven that they can make money, it's something of a milestone - at least a smallish signal of market confidence. All the chest beating is just Musk being Musk.

Seems that not all electric car companies getting loans from the US gov't are repaying their loans.

Maybe it isn't a special achievement if you're suggesting GM could pull this off.

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