Tesla's board might not know where Elon's 'secure' funding is coming from
Does anyone other than Elon know where this buyout money is?
When Elon Musk took to Twitter earlier this week and said he was considering taking the company private again, and that he had "secured" funding, that sounded pretty ironclad. But a new report suggests that the question of funding might still be that -- a question.
Tesla's board has allegedly not yet received comprehensive information regarding the finances required to take the company private, Reuters reports, citing sources familiar with the matter. The board is said to be interested in that information, obviously, since funding must be secure if Elon's buyout, which could cost $70 billion, is to happen.
Elon and Tesla could end up in some serious trouble if the buyout financing wasn't actually secure.
Tesla declined to comment to both Reuters and Roadshow.
All Musk said in his Tuesday tweet about taking the company private was that the financing for the deal was "secured." That ignited a great deal of controversy around the internet, as nobody was quite sure who would pony up the dough. Jalopnik published a roundup of all the attempts to find the source of this financing -- Bloomberg called more than 12 firms, all of which denied knowledge, and The New York Times couldn't get answers from some of Tesla's biggest current investors.
The question-vultures circling overhead Musk's assertion of secure financing apparently managed to get some attention from the feds, as well. Earlier this week, it was reported that the US Securities and Exchange Commission was investigating this whole situation, including the financing claims. Musk could end up in some very hot legal water if he promised the funding was secure when it actually wasn't.
With the exception of tweeting out a chart about Tesla's hardware, a single retweet and a couple replies that have nothing to do with Tesla, Elon Musk's Twitter account has been awfully silence since the SEC investigation report surfaced. Where will this story go next? At this point, I don't think anyone has an answer to that.
