Tesla Board Weights Elon Musk's $72 Billion Share Buyback Bid
SAN FRANCISCO (CBSNewYork/AP) -- Insiders at Tesla confirm CEO Elon Musk does, in fact, want to take the company private again.
Six of the automaker's board members say Musk laid out his plans last week.
The eccentric Musk announced the bombshell move Tuesday on Twitter, writing that he had secured funding to buy Tesla Inc.'s shares at $420 each.
Am considering taking Tesla private at $420. Funding secured.
— Elon Musk (@elonmusk) August 7, 2018
The Securities and Exchange Commission is now asking whether Musk's nine-word tweet on the subject was factual, according to a Wednesday report in The Wall Street Journal. The newspaper cited unidentified people familiar with the matter
Shares rose 11 percent Tuesday but fell more than 2 percent Wednesday to close at $370.34.
At $420 apiece, buying all of Tesla's shares would cost about $72 billion, but Morgan Stanley analyst Adam Jonas wrote in a note to investors Wednesday that he expects about $50 billion in additional net debt. Musk owns about 20 percent of the Palo Alto, California, company's stock, so that likely would reduce the cost of the buyout.
Musk also said he intends to give Tesla's existing shareholders the option of retaining a stake in the company through a special fund, if they want.
Jonas wrote that he understands Musk's desire to avoid the pressures of quarterly earnings as a public company. But he thinks that those benefits could be outweighed "by the risks of added financial leverage, which can be even more strategically limiting."
There still are near-term execution risks around ramping up Model 3 production and the ability to generate cash, Jonas believes. "Adding as much as $50 billion of net debt to the capital structure would clearly intensify the outcomes of such an action," he wrote.
Musk, his brother Kimbal and director Steve Jurvetson were not included in the statement from members Brad Buss, Robyn Denholm, Ira Ehrenpreis, Antonio Gracias, Linda Johnson Rice, and James Murdoch.
By taking Tesla private, Musk believes that the company will be able to sharpen its long-term focus of revolutionizing an automobile industry dominated by fuel-combustion vehicles without having to cater to investors' fixation on how the business is faring from one quarter to the next.
Making money has proven elusive for Tesla while it has been investing in electric car technology and ramping up production of its vehicles, including a sedan with a starting price of $35,000 to appeal to a broader audience.
The company has only posted a quarterly profit twice in its history and has never made money during an entire calendar year, something that Musk has been trying to change by cutting costs, including recent mass layoffs that trimmed Tesla's workforce by 9 percent. Tesla lost another $717.5 million in its most recent quarter.
Musk has promised a sustained net profit starting in the third quarter.
Markets overall were flat on Wednesday, with the DOW losing 45 points and the S&P down fractionally. The NASDAQ was up roughly 4 points.
(© Copyright 2018 CBS Broadcasting Inc. All Rights Reserved. The Associated Press contributed to this report.)