ZEENAT MOORAD: How Elon Musk went feral
As the CEO of a publicly traded company, you can’t just tweet about key strategy changes and pooh-pooh public-market disclosure
It started with a tweet. "Am considering taking Tesla private at $420. Funding secured." The chain of events that followed included more tweets, a blog post, a regulatory probe, shareholder lawsuits and a blindsided board. Now, everyone’s kind of wondering if Elon Musk has gone feral. The episode — and it can only be described as an episode — has caused Tesla’s stock to swing wildly since last Tuesday, when the founder of the electric carmaker first took to social media to disseminate what was essentially market-moving information. This Monday’s blog post caused a dramatic jump in Tesla shares and a halt in trading. "Going back almost two years, the Saudi Arabian sovereign wealth fund has approached me multiple times about taking Tesla private," Musk says in the post. "Recently, after the Saudi fund bought almost 5% of Tesla stock through the public markets, they reached out to ask for another meeting. That meeting took place on July 31 … I left the July 31 meeting with no question ...
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