Elon Musk Drops Plan To Privatize Tesla

According to CNN, Elon Musk announced on Friday that he has decided to drop his plan to take Tesla private after two weeks of consideration.

Musk first introduced his plan to privatize Tesla earlier in the month, tweeting that he had already secured funding for the move, which shocked many of his loyal investors.

While Tesla’s stock price initially spiked after this announcement, the stock dropped significantly after an emotional interview with the New York Times, in which Musk claimed that he worked up to 120 hours per week.

Following Musk’s tweet claiming that he had “funding secured,” the Securities and Exchange Commission reportedly subpoenaed Tesla to look into exactly what that meant. U.S. regulators are investigating whether or not investors were, perhaps, misled.

After a board meeting on Thursday, Musk decided that it would be more beneficial for his company to remain public and announced the cancellation of his former tentative plan.

In a statement on the company’s website, Musk wrote, “I met with Tesla’s board of directors yesterday and let them know that I believe the better path is for Tesla to remain public. The board indicated that they agree.”

“Although the majority of shareholders I spoke to said they would remain with Tesla if we went private,” he continued, “the sentiment, in a nutshell, was ‘please don’t do this.'”

“I knew the process of going private would be challenging,” Musk explained, “but it’s clear that it would be even more time-consuming and distracting than initially anticipated. This is a problem because we absolutely must stay focused on ramping Model 3 and becoming profitable.”

Within the last year, Tesla has reportedly failed to meet production goals for the Model 3 car mentioned above, leaving many to express their doubt that the company will able to grow more profitable as time goes on.

In talking to our public investors, most were supportive of optimizing for long-term value creation over quarterly earnings. This was also a factor in remaining public.

— Elon Musk (@elonmusk) August 25, 2018

Musk’s own personal behavior, which has recently becoming increasingly erratic, has certainly not helped the company’s image and profitability. Tesla urged Musk to limit his use of Twitter after he called one of the Thai cave rescue divers a pedophile in early July. Due to this recent behavior, Tesla is also allegedly looking to hire Musk a second-in-command.

“Moving forward,” Musk stated, “we will continue to focus on what matters most: building products that people love and that make a difference to the shared future of life on Earth. We’ve shown that we can make great sustainable energy products, and we now need to show that we can be sustainably profitable.”