Leaked text messages from Elon Musk confirm what everyone knew about Tesla’s privatization deal
Amid a lawsuit between shareholders and Elon Musk over his ‘funding secured’ tweet, new text messages and emails between Musk and those involved have emerged.
The communications pretty much confirmed how most people saw the situation: Elon Musk met with the head of Saudi Arabia’s Public Investment Fund (PIF) and had preliminary talks about privatizing Tesla, which he considered it sufficient to say that the “funding was secure”.
The whole “secured funding” situation is coming back into the open because Musk is trying to buy Twitter to make it private, and the Tesla CEO is still embroiled in legal action over the situation. For those who don’t remember the situation, in 2018 Musk briefly considered trying to take Tesla private and leaked it to investors through a simple tweet.
The Security and Exchange Commission (SEC) ruled that Musk exaggerated and misled shareholders by saying the funding was “secure” in the tweet:
Musk waged a campaign against the SEC, calling them names and saying they worked for people bypassing the electric carmaker. But ultimately, Tesla and Musk ended up reaching an agreement with the SEC.
As part of the settlement, Musk agreed to step down as chairman of the board, and Tesla and Musk each had to pay $20 million in fines.
The CEO probably didn’t want Tesla to have to pay for his SEC issue. Although he couldn’t pay Tesla’s share of the fine directly, he decided to buy $20 million from Tesla. That way, he somehow indirectly ended up paying Tesla’s fine – although he also ended up with around 71,000 more Tesla shares in the process.
As we previously reported, Musk ended up making money from the settlement due to Tesla’s stock price surge.
Another part of the settlement was that Musk and Tesla had to agree to the former having its tweets reviewed by the latter’s legal department if they are material to the company.
Earlier this month, Musk addressed the whole situation in a TED interview and insisted he hadn’t lied about getting funding and was forced to settle with the SEC to save You’re here.
However, the CEO never went into the details of this funding. There were always rumors that Saudi Arabia’s Public Investment Fund (PIF) was interested in investing and privatizing Tesla.
The common sense explanation that most people agreed on is that Musk met with PIF, and they showed a keen interest in taking Tesla private, and Musk took the meeting seriously enough to say funding was secured. .
The SEC clearly disagreed with the level of engagement.
Now, new text messages between Musk, Musk’s associates, and Yasir bin Othman Al-Rumayyan – the head of the PIF – and his own associates, show behind the scenes of this common sense explanation.
Here, Musk complains that PIF told the media that he hadn’t committed funds to take Tesla private, and PIF responds that they need to see financial information and have a “pick-up call” with their team :
Musk was really “upset” that PIF didn’t confirm his interpretation of their meeting:
In a post, Musk asked PIF to confirm they were in talks with Tesla and threatened to “never talk again” if they didn’t:
This is a major problem. It is extremely important that you confirm that you are in discussions with me regarding the privatization transaction. Noting that more needs to be said. If this is not said, we will never speak again. Never.
When things fell apart with Saudi Arabia, text messages even show Musk reaching out to Larry Page to invest in the deal. A recurring problem with Musk making any deal actually work seems to be how he misjudged Tesla’s ability to retain small investors in a deal to be taken private.
Electrek’s Grasp
From the new text testimonials and their release, it’s pretty clear that it’s as simple as Musk meeting PIF, them showing keen interest in helping him take Tesla private, but nothing more is of it. got out. They never went into specifics, even according to Musk’s testimony, and PIF seemed to be waiting for more information.
That’s pretty much how everyone saw the situation.
The SEC, which clearly already had a problem with Musk sharing material information about a public company, Tesla, via Twitter, took offense and investigated. They determined that was not enough to claim “secured funding.”
Musk obviously knows the difference, as he took a different route for the Twitter deal, in which he indeed just secured funding.
Personally, I don’t think it’s that bad. He should have only tweeted that he was exploring the possibility of taking Tesla private and discussing financing with certain parties, not that “funding is secured.”
I understand Musk was frustrated with how the SEC deal went, but in the end, it turned out great for him. He paid Tesla’s fine with stock and made hundreds of millions.
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