The whole story:
Musk says he’s considering taking Tesla private. Musk decides not to after talking with investors. The End.
You can read the latest Tesla statement here. It sounds like the shareholder votes weren’t there. No point in holding a vote if it’s an obvious loser.
Dr. Strangelove do you believe those who perceive Musk’s recent behaviors as minimally erratic are being unfair?
I’ve heard some consider that he may be a bit bipolar which may or may not be going too far, but dang if he at least does not come off recently like someone in a manic phase ready to crash. That NYT interview in which they described how “Mr. Musk alternated between laughter and tears.” … If I was his friend I’d be concerned, and as a consumer I would be for other reasons.
So, just ignoring the SEC investigation that he triggered? That has no place in the “whole” story?
Or that a CEO with a board that is really nothing but a bunch of cheerleaders couldn’t be convinced of his idea?
Or that the story of how his “funding secured” claim appears increasingly incredible?
Yep, whole story. Suuuure.
you left out the part in the middle about materially affecting the share price based on false/misleading information.
So no, not “The End.”
I know geeks like you and Elon think boring stuff doesn’t matter, but I’m sorry to say it does.
Not at all. I’d agree (and have said inasmuch) that at the very least, the tweets were ill-advised. The motivations behind them were not erratic–Musk has been making the same basic argument for years–but Musk certainly could have stood to do things a bit more smoothly. I’ve also said that I wouldn’t mind at all if the SEC gave him a slap on the wrist. Just a little mental reminder before hitting send on the next tweet.
But ultimately, none of this changes the basic facts of the matter. Musk has a legitimate interest in taking Tesla private. One can disagree with the arguments here but they aren’t so ill-founded that they can be simply discarded. But the investors weren’t on board and so nothing is going to happen.
Musk was apparently convinced of one other major point: there was no real way to take ordinary retail investors on board. The strategy that worked with SpaceX employees apparently would not have worked with Tesla. I don’t know enough about securities to say whether this should have been obvious or not, but that’s why you talk with lawyers.
Based on a specific parsing on a single word in a single tweet, which was later followed up on in greater detail. Does anything *real *change if you imagine a universe where Musk said he had “tentative funding support” or the like?
Again: I would not be shocked at a SEC wrist slap (e.g., a small fine). I would be surprised at anything more. If it SEC finds that Musk deliberately manipulated the stock, I’ll eat crow. But what I think will happen is that he will effectively be given a note that says to please be more careful with your wording next time.
If people lost money because Musk ran his mouth then he is liable for the damage on top of any fines.
irrelevant, because we’re not in an imaginary universe where he said anything different. this isn’t a matter of “specific parsing.” There’s no nuance here. he said “Funding secured.” and gave a share price. Meaning, “I have the financing arranged to make this happen.” Which was false. And in your imaginary world, he didn’t even have tentative funding support.
Given the question you asked in your first paragraph, I don’t think you have much basis to make a declaration like this.
reminds me of how Apple fans said Intel CPU chips were garbage right up until Apple started using them. Because “Windoze” ran on Intel chips.
Funny you say that, because I was chuckling over Elon dismissing losing engineers to Apple as Tesla losing employees to the minor leagues or something. Then I thought, “What if Apple bought Tesla? Then it would be viewed as just part of a master plan to ease the integration of the two companies… and then we’d see a black hole result from the coming together of the two most massive forms of fanboyism known to the universe!”
Ah, the old “I refuse to even consider a hypothetical” gambit. For maximum class, you should have gone with “if my aunt had balls, she’d be my uncle.” Instant thread-winner.
Taken completely literally, the statement doesn’t even make sense–it’s impossible for a process to be secured when it is still under consideration. Therefore, it must have meant something else–something which does have nuance.
My opinion is based on interviews with securities lawyers, not any personal knowledge. But it’s not a declaration anyway, just a weak prediction.
As an aside…
I am now seeing paid advertisements on Reddit saying that so-and-so says Elon Musk should step down from Tesla.
Is this really the kind of behavior one sees from a group of completely neutral observers that just want the best for Tesla? Or is it just possible that Tesla has organized opposition spreading FUD about them?
I’d really like to know who is paying for these advertisements.
An interesting article from the WSJ.
It sounds as if the money was there (even if “secured” was a step too far). That Volkswagen AG was willing to put in significant bucks is really interesting. But too many strings, too much bad PR from having Saudi Arabia involved, the high likelihood of excluding retail investors… too much.
Only way to know is to try. But yes, next time maybe start with the lawyer-approved press release.
Why should I consider a hypothetical? What happened, happened. There is no alternate version of history. There is no “so what if Elon said this instead?l
Are you just that desperate to contort the argument into one you can win?
“Gambit” my ass.
In my memory, we were all kind of upset with Motorola and IBM for not investing in PPC, because it had lost its dominance to Intel. It was welcome when we moved to Intel. For a long time, though, yeah, Intel was garbage compared to PPC.
I’ll bite. Several pages ago, we had a disagreement on Elon’s statements. I said something to the effect that he has a reckless disregard for the truth, and people shouldn’t listen to him too much because so many of his statements end up being wrong (e.g., Model 3 ramp). You said something like that it’s pretty rare for forward-looking statements to be correct, so we should not think any worse of him.
Had Elon posted “tentative funding support,” in your hypothetical, as opposed to “funding secured,” in either case, that isn’t a forward looking statement. There’s no ambiguity: it’s a statement about the present. And given what has come out so far, one would have been correct, but the other was somewhere on the neighborhood of factual misrepresentation.
There’s no nuance in a bald-faced like. There’s no logical contradiction in, say, holding a check in one’s hands and debating whether to cash it or rip it up.
If he simply runs his company better, the critics will go away on their own. Focusing on the critics is straight out of the Trump-Putin-etc playbook: always make out like the good guy is under attack, and the attack is more important than anything else going on.
Ever notice how Toyota, which is like obscenely late to the whole idea of moving beyond hybrids to BEVs, doesn’t have problems with criticism from the Tesla fanboys, short positions by radical environmentalists, conference call and Twitter wars with Wall Street, etc? I would maintain because they are a well-run company, so these annoying things generally take care of themselves.
to be fair it was unreasonable to expect Motorola and IBM to stump up that kind of investment for Apple’s pitiable volumes.
Short sellers bad mouth high multiples companies all the time. Omigosh the usual is happening! Don’t make their task easier for them.
I’m not a short seller but Musk has been minimally erratic and is not giving the impression of someone whose long term plans are coming together within the ranges he was prepared for. He does not give the impression of a steady hand controlling a ship through choppy waters.
Consumers are spending $40K north for this product that will require ongoing and longterm software updates and support. The visionary CEO is fairly impulsively testing out major ideas for the company’s future by tweets and alternately laughing and crying during interviews.
Is it rational for potential consumers to not have concerns regarding whether the long term support will be there? I can be pretty sure that Volvo and Audi and even VW will be around to support their products … can I be that confident about Tesla when the CEO is behaving as Musk is behaving?
And others of us are upset that Apple didn’t move to Alpha when they had the chance, but that’s a different thread.
If you were in a court on manslaughter charges because someone died when you were applying CPR, would you perhaps like your lawyer to argue that the person would have died anyway if you weren’t there? (uh oh. now I’m two hypotheticals deep.)
Hypotheticals are one way to tease apart cause and effect. They aren’t perfect, since no one can predict the future, but they’re used all the time with reasonable extrapolation. There’s a reason just about every language (with one exception I know about) has explicit support for them. They’re useful.