https://imgur.com/a/LKdCzub

(http://www.autoadmit.com/thread.php?thread_id=4045792&forum_id=2#36586119)

U.S. regulators are asking Tesla Inc. whether Chief Executive Elon Musk was truthful when he tweeted that he had secured funding for what would be the largest-ever corporate buyout, people familiar with the matter said.

Officials at the Securities and Exchange Commission want to know whether Mr. Musk had a factual basis for tweeting Tuesday that the going-private transaction was all but certain, with only a shareholder vote needed to pull it off, the people said.

The SEC’s inquiries, which originated from the agency’s San Francisco office, suggest Tesla could come under an enforcement investigation if regulators suspect that Mr. Musk’s statement was misleading or false.

Yeah, look. I bet that all work at the SEC’s San Francisco office stopped yesterday as they conducted an office-wide arm-wrestling tournament to select the person who got to make that call. You work your whole life at the SEC just for the remote chance that one day you might get to be the one to call up Tesla, hold up a hand to quiet the hoots of your colleagues who are listening in, take a deep breath to suppress your own giggles, and say into the phone: “So … how’s that financing?” Of course the SEC is looking into this. I can’t think of a thing that the SEC would look into more. If Warren Buffett was giving insider tips about accounting fraud at the Fed to Lloyd Blankfein so that he could help Donald Trump and the pope insider trade against the Illuminati, the SEC team investigating that would be scheming to get transferred to the Elon Musk team. The Elon Musk team is already shopping for the commemorative flamethrowers they’ll get when they finish.

I don’t know. It would be utterly insane—like, federal prison insane!—for Musk to publicly announce that he had secured financing for an $80-plus billion buyout if he hadn’t secured the financing:

“To put that out unless he absolutely has financing secured and is ready to make the bid that could be market manipulation,” said Keith Higgins, a Ropes & Gray partner who formerly led the SEC’s corporation finance unit. “He could be in big trouble if that turns out not to have been true.”

But the other possibility, that he has locked down tens of billions of dollars of committed financing for this proposed deal, and that neither he nor the board nor the financing sources have breathed a word about who they are, is also … not completely sane, you know? That is a lot of financing to keep so secret. It feels like the solution to the puzzle is going to end up being something weird and tiresome, like Musk will tweet that when he said “funding secured” he meant that he has drafted the white paper for the PrivateTeslaCoin initial coin offering, or bought a lot of scratch-off lottery tickets, or minted a platinum coin with “$1 trillion” stamped on it, or that the real financing is the friends we made along the way. I guess we’ll find out! But you know who will find out first? The SEC! I cannot tell you how envious I am.

You know who I do not envy? The investment bankers who cover Tesla:

A day after Elon Musk declared that he might try to convert Tesla into a private company, Wall Street banks raced to figure out how such a transaction might work and how they might get a piece of the action. …

Some senior executives at top Wall Street banks, including JPMorgan Chase and Citigroup, did not hear about Mr. Musk’s idea until his tweet sent Tesla shares soaring shortly after noon on Tuesday, according to people close to the banks. Some bankers grumbled on Wednesday that they had not even been able to get Tesla executives to return their phone calls, much less explain the company’s plans.

Good lord. If you’re the coverage banker on Tesla, a lot of very senior people are calling you and asking you very basic questions—are we in this deal? what is this deal? are you talking to the decision-makers?—that, I suspect, you are very ill-equipped to answer. The correct answer to any question about this deal is to just sigh and shrug and say “I dunno it’s Elon Musk man”—that is the answer that I have tried to convey in my columns, certainly—but it is not, I suspect, an acceptable answer for Tesla coverage bankers. I cannot imagine what an acceptable answer would be. I guess if I were in their shoes I’d try something like “Our place in the deal is secured. Gotta go.” I mean, it works for Musk.

(http://www.autoadmit.com/thread.php?thread_id=4045792&forum_id=2#36587133)

SEC enforcement attorneys in the San Francisco office were already gathering general information about Tesla’s public pronouncements on manufacturing goals and sales targets, according to the people who asked not to be named because the review is private.

Now, attorneys from that office are also examining whether Musk’s tweet about having funding secured to buy out the company was meant to be factual, according to one of the people.

The SEC inquiry is preliminary and won’t necessarily lead to anything more formal. Tesla, which hasn’t been accused of wrongdoing, declined to comment. Judith Burns, an SEC spokeswoman, also declined to comment.

Tesla stock fell 4.8 percent to $352.45 in Thursday trading amid mounting doubts about Musk’s ability to buy out shareholders at $420, as he’d suggested in his Tuesday tweet. Declines over the past two days have erased the jump in the share price following his statement that he’d secured funding for taking the company private.

Musk has offered no evidence to back up the assertion, and there have been no public announcements that anyone is backing the plan.

“I don’t really understand the idea of what was suggested in the potential for them to go private,” Dick Weil, CEO of Janus Henderson Group, said in an interview with Bloomberg Television. “That’s obviously an incredibly large valuation to somehow take into the private market.”

(http://www.autoadmit.com/thread.php?thread_id=4045792&forum_id=2#36588150)

but perhaps the tesla 8k (coming anyday now) says differently

(http://www.autoadmit.com/thread.php?thread_id=4045792&forum_id=2#36588344)

and is it 10b-5 fraud to say you want to do an offer.

maybe have to file a 13D/A but if you said it in that filing, then same effect on the market.

is it just the lie about financing secured?

(http://www.autoadmit.com/thread.php?thread_id=4045792&forum_id=2#36589350)

Please stop filing liens. Tesla is definitely not going bankrupt.

(http://www.autoadmit.com/thread.php?thread_id=4045792&forum_id=2#36669380)