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Funding for Tesla to Go Private Could Come From Saudis; Lawsuits and SEC Scrutiny Increase

posted by chromas on Monday August 13 2018, @09:21PM   Printer-friendly
from the $ dept.

takyon writes:

Musk Says 'Funding Secured' Claim Sparked by Saudi Meeting

Elon Musk said interest from Saudi Arabia's sovereign wealth fund gave him the confidence to drop the bombshell last week that he was considering taking Tesla Inc. private. The Saudi Kingdom's Public Investment Fund had approached Musk going back almost two years about taking Tesla off the market, he wrote in a blog post Monday, confirming that the fund recently bought an almost 5 percent stake. Musk described a July 31 meeting in which the Saudi fund's managing director expressed regret that Tesla hadn't moved forward with a go-private transaction.

[...] Several investors have since sued Musk and Tesla, claiming the company's share price had been manipulated. The Securities and Exchange Commission is said to be intensifying its scrutiny of the company and its chief executive officer after having started gathering general information about Tesla and Musk's earlier public pronouncements about manufacturing goals and sales targets.

One of Tesla's biggest critics, Vertical Group analyst Gordon Johnson, read Musk's blog post as a walk-back maneuver from his "funding secured" tweet last week. He cited Musk's statement Monday that the Saudi fund's support for taking Tesla private was "subject to financial and other due diligence and their internal review process for obtaining approvals." "He is specifically stating that funding is not secured, and I think that's a big deal," Johnson, whose $93 price target on Tesla shares is the lowest among Wall Street analysts, said on Bloomberg Television. "The question then becomes, what does the SEC do here, and do the shareholders stick with him?"

Also at CNBC.

Previously: Elon Musk Considers Taking Tesla Private

Original Submission

 
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  • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday August 14 2018, @03:46AM (2 children)

    by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday August 14 2018, @03:46AM (#721225)

    Maybe not, but he did hack our interwebby to fuck with our minds.

  • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday August 14 2018, @04:50AM (1 child)

    by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday August 14 2018, @04:50AM (#721244)
    Perhaps a payback for decades of VOA, BBC, Radio Svoboda (and others) shortwave broadcasts into USSR with explicit goal to mess with minds of the soviet people?

    • (Score: 4, Informative) by c0lo on Tuesday August 14 2018, @05:16AM

      by c0lo (156) Subscriber Badge on Tuesday August 14 2018, @05:16AM (#721247) Journal

      Don't need to go that far back. 1996 and the re-election of Yeltsin [latimes.com] would suffice.

      Although the Americans spoke no Russian and worked through translators, they began secretly laying out an American-style campaign to counter the public sentiment running against Yeltsin.

      When they started, Yeltsin's approval rating was about 6%, and, as they told Time magazine, Josef Stalin had a higher positive rating in their polls. Yet last week, Yeltsin defeated Communist candidate Gennady A. Zyuganov by more than 13 percentage points.

      One of the results? The raise of the Russian oligarchs [npr.org] which some of them are now subject of US travel ban.

      (not in my intention to pass a value judgement here, just pointing out that interventionism is not necessary a thing of the distant past)

      --
      https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aoFiw2jMy-0 https://soylentnews.org/~MichaelDavidCrawford