Odd Lots - Matt Levine Dissects Elon Musk's Controversial Tweet

Episode Date: September 4, 2018

There's been an intense debate about what Tesla CEO Elon Musk meant when he tweeted in early August that he was taking the company private and that funding was "secured.” Bloomberg Opinion writer Matt Levine discusses how securities regulators might view such a comment.See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

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Saturdays and Sundays starting at 7 a.m. Eastern. Make us part of your weekend routine on Bloomberg television, radio, and wherever you get your podcasts. Hello and welcome to another episode of the Oddlots podcast. I'm Joe Wisenthal. And I'm Tracy Allaway. Tracy, you know what story has made this summer really fun? I do actually. It has to be Tesla, right?

Yeah. So the last few weeks have just been this incredible saga of Tesla, starting with early August when its CEO Elon Musk, said he was going to take the firm private at a price of $420 a share. And then he said in the same tweet that he had funding secured. And ever since then, there's just been this mad scramble on the part of everyone to figure out what that tweet meant, whether it was legal, what the story behind it was and everything. And I just found it to be incredibly fun and amusing the whole thing.

Oh, yeah. I mean, we thought that people dissected Donald Trump's tweets quite a bit. But the way they've been examining Elon Musk's tweets is definitely even more intense than that. And I got to say, when he first tweeted it, I don't know about you, but I was really scratching my head at the 420 reference. A lot of people thought that could potentially be a joke because 420 is, well, code for marijuana, right? Yeah, I have to say, I was on vacation during the week when it happened. but of course, even when I'm on vacation, I'm like still checking Twitter every 10 minutes. And as soon as I saw that tweet, I was like, there's just no way this is real.

Like I didn't for a second actually believe this could possibly be a real thing. And of course, Tesla hasn't gone private at $420 a share. But of course, this raises all kinds of questions about the legality of just tweeting something like that and what funding secured means and what CEOs can tweet. And, you know, Elon's already unusual. And I think our guest today to help us understand this is probably the very best person to talk about it because as soon as this happened, the entire internet was like, we have to hear from this columnist his take because it's definitely going to be the best take. Yeah. I would broadly agree with that. And, you know, talking about U.S. disclosure rules is always fun, but this particular person makes it even more so.

And on that note, I would like to bring in this week's guest, Matt Levine. He's an opinion columnist here at Bloomberg. And like I said, honestly, I think within a few minutes, everybody was like, we got to get Matt Levine's take on this. And then over the next several weeks, all of Matt's columns on Tesla became must-reads. So here to sort of help us understand everything that happened is Matt. Thank you very much for joining us. Hey, guys. Thanks for having me.

Matt, where were you when you saw the tweet? I forget where I was exactly, but my column, I've been not writing my column regularly for the last couple of weeks, and I was planning to not do it. And then Elon came along, and I've been writing mostly about him for a couple of weeks. So when you saw the first tweet, the infamous funding secured $420 a share tweet, what did you think about it? I didn't think it was a joke, per se, but my first reaction was kind of, he's got a little farther than he thinks he has here. You know, I've written about a lot of people who have, you know, launching fake takeover offers is a thing that happens. And the SEC and the regulators and prosecutors take that seriously.

And people have recently gone to prison for launching fake tender offers. So I think that Elon Musk has this fondness for sort of making bold claims that he can't necessarily always back up on Twitter. And I think he was kind of going along with that without really kind of considering the, this is a bit of a more serious area. The gravity of what he had just said. You know, if he's like, I'm going to make a car that flies, everyone would be like, Ah, Elon, right? But he was like, I'm going to take the company private at 420.

It's a little more serious. It just occurred to me that we should back up a second because, like I said, this sort of intersection of finance and law is kind of your specialty, which is why so many people want to get your take. You are a lawyer by training, right? I was an M&A lawyer briefly. nothing I say is ever legal advice. And then I was an investment banker and I've been a columnist.

So I've worked at two of the firms that are that were advising Musk on his going private transaction. So I have some exposure to this world. Okay. Well, you were a lawyer. So legal technicalities, what exactly are the sort of disclosure requirements? And did Musk potentially get in trouble because he said something on Twitter or Or is it because he said something on Twitter that isn't true?

Much more the latter. You know, people think that there are like these real sort of formality rules around. You have to, you know, you can't announce a going private transaction without, you know, filing a proxy and everything. That's not true at all. Like, this is how it normally happens is, you know, the CEO of a company will go to the board and we'll say, I would like to take the company private. I'll say that before filing a proxy statement.

It won't be all done. It'll be a sort of the opening of a conversation. That usually doesn't happen publicly, but it's not like out of the question that it might at some point become public. And the CEO might say I'm looking into, I'm exploring a transaction. They don't normally do it on Twitter, not because Twitter is illegal. And in fact, the SEC has said, you know, if you sort of follow a few formalities and you make it clear you're going to do this, you can announce material events on Twitter. The problem, you know, first of all is that turned out not to be true. But even beyond that, the problem with doing this on Twitter, if you're Elon Musk, is that no one seems to have vetted it.

He didn't run it by the board or any lawyers. And so the stuff he said was kind of careless. You know, normally, whether you put it out in a tweet or a blog post or an 8K or a press release or whatever, you would say, I'm thinking about taking the company public. Nothing is assured. You know, things might still go wrong. All these sort of lawyery language that at least kind of gives you. cover if it doesn't work out. With Elon Musk, it was kind of the opposite. He said, I'm considering right? So he didn't actually say, I'm definitely going to do it. And then like two tweets later,

he's like, this is only contingent on a shareholder vote. It's definitely going to, like, everything became just sort of more confident because that's kind of the way he uses Twitter, which is not the way you want to announce a potential but not button down transaction. Something about the way he used Twitter. I had this thought, which is that within maybe a day or two after the funding secured tweet, it was kind of obvious that funding was not secure, even arguably within hours. But then, but whatever. There were like a couple of days of like fund speculation about who it might be, but yeah. But then I noticed like a couple weeks later that some of these like analysts who cover the

stuff and they're like, it appears that funding is not secured and we're downgrading. And I downgrading the stock. And I wonder, you know, you're on Twitter and you also had your background in the investment banking world, whether those of us who are sort of versed in Twitter sort of saw it's like, oh, this is sort of, you know, this is a guy tweeting, whereas that if you're not sort of familiar with that world, the thought that you would ever flippantly say funding secured is almost unimaginable. Yeah, it's a weird intersection.

I mean, like, like, you know, as an M&A, as a former MNAler, like, the fact that you would do that is still unimaginable, even though, you know, I joke around on Twitter all the time. Like, it's, it's, you're not, it's a mixing of the world that just didn't really. really work. Right. And I doubt SEC rules have been updated to take into account trolling or saying outrageous things in order to provoke a reaction. Yeah. I mean, he's done, he's made jokes on Twitter. He's joked about Tesla going bankrupt. He's, he joked about introducing a new model, like a watch. I think he's joked about a Tesla watch. And I think at one point, I think the stock

moved on the Tesla watch tweet. And I think the SEC was like, you know, like they just sort of didn't really there's some awareness that things can be a joke and like the Tesla watch it was like an April Fool's joke it was just very clear it was a joke

and if you bought stock on that like it's your problem so I think the SEC has has just they're not going to pick that fight but this is not a joke you know and this like did move the stock a lot and this is a little more serious

something we know about Elon is he really doesn't like short sellers and one of the things people were talking about is whether he tweeted this on purpose to sort of burn the short sellers. And I'm curious if there is a distinction between Elon driving to the airport and thinking, you know, I think my conversations with the Saudis or whatever, but more or less me and I have the funding secured, I'm just going to tweet that versus I'm going to tweet this to really mess with the short sellers and whether intent matters here.

Yeah, it really does. I mean, it's a little weird. I think if a company puts out misleading information about something material to the company, that's bad. The company is going to get in trouble for that. But Elon, when he was doing this, was not acting as the company. He was acting as a potential buyer for the company. So I wasn't doing it in his capacity as CEO.

And if your person puts out, you know, if I just, like, say random lies about Tesla, that's probably not securities, right? Not legal advice, but it's probably fine. The reason people get in trouble for doing this stuff is that they have some, manipulate the stock. They want to, they have some manipulative purpose. And usually what that means when like just random people put out fake takeover offers, usually what it means they bought some stock, they put out the fake takeover offer. The stock goes up and they sell their stock. It's like a very simple like fraud, like a scam. With Elon, it seems very unlikely he was

selling, right? No indication he was selling. So it's not that. So that's not the thing he's going to get in trouble for. And so the question is, did he have some other manipulative intent? And I think the obvious one that people are looking at is he's gone on and on about burning the short sellers. He's said, you know, in a few weeks, they're going to face the, you know, they're going to have a terrible, they're going to get burned, basically. And, you know, having made it so clear that he wants to burn the shorts, that he wants to squeeze the shorts, it suggests that one possible explanation here is that that's what he was doing. There's another facet about, you know, whether or not he intended to commit some sort of stock manipulation, which is this notion that maybe he was on

either drugs or, you know, sleeping pills or Valium or something like that at the time when he tweeted. If his emotional state was, I don't know, let's say, like, I don't know, if his emotional state was fragile at the time, would that help him in the eyes of the SEC? Would he get a little bit of leeway because of that? I'm not sure there's any precedent for like saying I committed securities fraud because I was on drug. I mean, there is, right? I mean, there are insider traders who, you know, were addicted to things and they sort of say that at their sentencing.

And it gets them a little leniency maybe. Here, I mean, like, if it were a joke, if it were like a drug trip, then he would have backed away from it, right? I mean, the fact that he spent two weeks, you know, putting out blog posts the next day and the next week saying, this is why I said funding was secure, it suggests that he was a little. more serious than that and that he wasn't just, you know, he didn't back away from him immediately. One of the columns you wrote, and this goes back to your experience as a lawyer, was essentially like, okay, the tweet is out there. Now, how can a law firm and Elon sort of back in to making the tweet true?

Yeah. Like, so obviously, I mean. That's clearly like they scrambled to be like, can we like make an excuse for this so that it looks kind of real? Right, because lawyers are going to take on any task and they'll try it. So what was, in your view, the most plausible approach to sort of make, make a, you know, if you were, if you were Elon's lawyer, what would be the most plausible structure to back up the tweet? So they basically did it, which is they raised money from people who wanted to invest. I mean, there's commitments, right?

I mean, they went out and canvassed, you know, one reason that you might want to go public with this, with this notion before having it all locked down is that way everyone knows about it. And if there is someone sitting around being like, I'd love to put $10 billion into Tesla, then they'll call you up. And that kind of seems to have happened. You know, when he announced on Friday that he's calling the deal off, he said, you know, we got a lot of inbound interest. So they did find people who were willing to explore putting money into it. The journal reported that they raised about $30 billion, which is not enough to take Tesla private.

But, you know, it's not nothing. It's a lot of money. And, you know, and it combines with the notion all along was that a lot of the public shareholders would roll into the new private Tesla. That's not clear they were ever interested in that. You know, some were but had, you know, some of the big public mutual funds like Tesla, but have regulatory restrictions or have charter restrictions on how much private stock they can own. So, you know, like what they seem to have cobbled together is $30 billion of money

and then some number of shareholders who would roll. You can sort of like look at it and it kind of looks like you could almost get to a going private transaction. And that's kind of what they presented to the board. And then Elon said, never mind. So there is a real, I mean, like the structure that you do is that is offering some combination of new cash from new investors plus rolling over big current investors in Tesla. You try to get those two numbers to add to about $70 billion, which is the, you know, 420 times the number of shares. So like the other fun problem that I'm sure that Musk's advisors are working on is that When he initially announced this, one thing he said was that every shareholder was going to get an opportunity to roll over into the new private Tesla, which is one of the weirdest things about it, the idea that you can take all of your public shareholders, all these like mom and pop shareholders who have 10 shares and roll them into a private company.

It's not normally how you think of private companies. So I'm sure that people were trying to find some way to make that true. And I know I read a lot of articles analyzing, well, you could do stub equity, you could do this or that. it never seemed all that realistic to me. And in his latest announcement, Musk conceded that there was not really a practical path to do it. So in terms of damage control, I mean, you briefly mentioned this just then, but the 420 number, like how much more complicated would that have made attempts to contain the damage? And also the 420 number, where do you think he got that from? Do you think it was based on reality or is it something he just sort of like pulled out of the air?

I'll defend that. The 420 number is like a 20% premium. I think what he said is that he wanted to offer a 20% premium to the trading prices around 350. And so he did that math, like multiplying by 1.2, and he got like $419. And he decided that 420 sounded like a nicer rounder number. And everyone kind of scoffed at this explanation, but it's totally reasonable. That's how every growing private deal is done.

Like, there's no, you know, there's no, he's not doing a discounted cash flow analysis. There's no cash flow. It's a, it's the way that you do a going private transaction is you offer like a sort of reasonable premium to the current trading price and then you go to the board and you see what the board says and you negotiate from there. So I think like offering a round number that's 20% up from the trading price, it's fine. The discounted cash flow analysis, that's typically like backed into, right? They come up with a number and then someone's job is to sort of put together.

or a spreadsheet that explains it? At some point, if you were really going to buy the company, he would have to come up with a sense of how many dollars the company was worth. And the board would have to come up with a sense of how many dollars the company was worth. And they'd have to be not too far apart so that they could negotiate a price. One way to do that traditionally is a discounted cash flow analysis where you discount the present value of the future cash sales of the company. I think it's very hard to predict that.

And I think there's a kind of wide bit ask on what that number is. I'm Francine Lacquhar, an award-winning journalist. And I've got a new podcast, leaders with Francine Lacqua from Bloomberg Podcasts. I've interviewed everyone from Heads of State to fashion icons about the news of the moment. But I've always been curious, who are these people as leaders? I don't think there's one right way to be a leader. Make decisions. A poor decision is always better than no decision.

Listen to new episodes every other Monday. Follow leaders with Francine Lacquois wherever you get your podcasts. What do you think about CEOs who are obsessed with shorts? Because both CEOs don't seem to care that much. But every once in a while, the CEO comes along that really gets worked up about them. There's this belief that the shorts can do something to you that I think is mostly wrong. Sometimes it's right. So like companies that need a lot of finance, particularly like in the financial crisis,

banks were really worried about shorts because if they couldn't roll their finance, every day. They couldn't stay in business. When Herbalife was in a fight with Bill Ackman, when Bill Ackman was really trying to get regulators to shut them down, they had a real belief that Bill Ackman was doing things to them. Most of the time, though, shorts just short the stock and they think the company is bad or the stock is overvalued. And their tools to do something bad to the company are fairly limited. Tesla, you know, Musk talks a lot about how the shorts are pushing a narrative that will destroy Tesla. And it's very hard for me to understand what that could mean.

Tesla sells cars. And I don't think short sellers are going to potential car buyers and trying to talk them out of buying Tesla. I mean, they are a little bit. They're putting out, you know, they would put out little claims that the cars are badly made. But like, there's not a lot they can do. And I think the focus on short sellers is more of a like psychological,

like aversion to having anyone criticize you, than like a real, like, rational analysis of what the company needs. I think most public company CEOs recognize that the company needs their attention on the business rather than they're like ego-driven tweeting about how evil short-sellers are. Isn't Tesla burning through cash quite rapidly, though, like, i.e., don't they need pretty decent access to financing in order to basically stay in existence for a time to come? And Wouldn't that be a vulnerability that the shorts could target by sort of interrupting that flow of financing? Yeah. I mean, look, they do.

I mean, like, you know, the fact is that, like, the marginal buyer of Tesla stock can buy it from a short seller rather than from Tesla. That narrative is complicated by the fact that, you know, Musk is not fond of saying that they need financing, right? And if you're a company that needs billions of dollars of financing from the equity markets, it's weird to say, you know what, we're going to be. to buy all of our stock back. We don't need any public shareholders. We're going to buy it back. It's like, I tend to agree with you that Tesla does require access to the public markets and that short sellers, not by like pushing a narrative or anything, but just by the fact that they are like a supply of shares, short sellers tend to reduce their access to cheap financing. Not that much, right? I mean, it's still a $60 billion company, right? They still have plenty

of access to public markets. Short sellers do at the margin reduce that, but like that's not the narrative that Tesla says. Yeah, this whole story has sort of come amid a very weird time where there's this other big thing people are talking about, and that is the supposed short-sightedness of public markets and whether investors demand companies hit a number every quarter. And Tesla seems like a company that more than anything hasn't been forced to adhere by the demands of the market because they never get punished for failing to hit some number. And there doesn't seem to be any particular expectation that if they don't nail an EPS figure that Wall Street has put out there, that they're going to lose their access to the market.

It's never an EPS figure because they don't make money. Now, they do sort of announce short-term production targets, and then when they fail to meet them, people say, ah, you failed to meet them. And I think that there's like a psychological thing where, like, I think Musk feels like he is subject to the short-term pressures of the stock market. But objectively, there's this enormous valuation on a company that doesn't make money, And that valuation is driven purely by a belief that in the long term, it's going to be an enormous success. As you said, it's like, it's exactly the sort of counter-narrative to this idea that public markets are so short-sighted.

Public markets are funding very cheaply, you know, at very high valuations, this total long-shot, long-term company. And nonetheless, Musk is like, ah, public markets are so short-term, we have to get out of here. Sorry, just to take a step back then, do we have any indication? Or do we have a guess even about why Elon Musk would have found going private desirable, especially if he's talking about going private in a way that still brings along the existing public shareholders? Yeah, I mean, I don't think he had a fully baked sense of like exactly what it would mean. But I think that basically, I don't think he wanted to go private. I think he wanted to be private.

I think he looked at like the comp being like Uber where you don't announce quarter. results and have to do a conference call and get questions about how you miss production targets. You don't have short sellers. Those are the two big things. And your stock doesn't move around day to day and you don't like sort of have whatever demoralizing or moralizing effect that has on your staff when the stock goes down. So I think he looks at like big private companies and thinks those companies are fine. They have the sort of like public face and the ability to access capital that like public companies have always had. And they, they They don't have the share price moves and the quarterly earnings reports and the short sellers.

And he thought that would be more attractive. That's not a reason to, like, do a going private transaction and go out to Saudi Arabia and raise money to, like, buy out your shareholders. But if you could flip a switch and go from being a public company to a private company, I think you would have liked to do that. That reminds me, actually. So there were a couple reports recently that the Saudis weren't very impressed by Elon Musk, basically talking about conversations that they'd had.

Does Elon have any sort of obligations to the Saudis when it comes to like what he was able to reveal and not reveal? Not that I know of. I mean, I think that normally when things like this happen, you know, you sign agreements. And those agreements might include a confidentiality agreement. But they more importantly, they just include some sort of like coordination on how you'd approach the company and how you'd approach publicity. and you'd agree on how you'd announce the deal on all these things. That doesn't seem to have happened here. Maybe he violated a confidentiality agreement, but I doubt it.

I think what more likely is he just had casual, relatively casual conversations with them that didn't lead to any sort of formal agreement, and they feel burned by his representing it as a formal agreement. Let's talk about what's next. So obviously, Elon announced. late on a Friday. I think it was 11 p.m. like actually is over. We're not going to go private back to business as usual. But the whole affair has a perhaps damaged Elon's reputation among some in Wall Street. Though I don't know how much that'll actually matter. But more importantly,

there's now an investigation and we've and others have reported that the SEC has sent subpoenas to Tesla. So in your view, what are some of the ways that this could go? I think from like the company's perspective, I think they're on board with Elon, right? Like, the board is, like, sort of his buddies. And, like, frankly, the company sort of makes the most sense with this, like, visionary weird leader, right? So I think it's very important for them. And I have to say, it looks like this has happened. It's very important for them to be like, stop doing this, right? Like, pay more attention to, like, following the rules and not misleading shareholders and not, like, creating enormous painful distractions for the company that reverberate for months just because, like,

you were in a car on the way to the airport and you had a whim. So I think when the company's perspective, they're not going to fire him, you know, but they really should read him the riot act and tell him to stop doing this. And it seems like that's happened. Now, from the SEC's perspective, I really don't know. I mean, I don't think it's like an open and shut case that he like committed the crime or the violation of manipulating the stock because I do think that in his mind he was sort of just sort of giving a window into his thought process and maybe also trying to

burn the shorts. So I think they have a bit of a tough case. If I were the SEC, I would really, really, really want to bring an enforcement action here because it looks really bad for a big famous public company CEO to announce a big material transaction when it's not true. But I also, like, it's not such a sort of like, it doesn't have so much bad intent that I'd want to like ban him from being the same. CEO. I'd like want to get some money, yell at him, and move on.

You mentioned in one of your columns and everyone found it really amusing this idea that, like, if you were an SEC staffer, you would really want to be on this case. Like, this would be like one of the juiciest cases of your career. Well, what I said was that it would be hilarious to be the person who called Tesla to be like, so, where is that funding? Because everyone else was like, where is this funding? Is this real? Is this possible?

And the SEC could just call up and be like, so, really? I think that like the initial stages of this investigation would be just hilarious because like this like very sort of rickety fake seeming transaction. Like you could go and be like, is this real or not? And like they have every like they have to tell you because you're the regulator and you have a prima facie case that something bad has gone on here. I think at this point I'm less envious of those people because at this point they kind of like we feel it feels like we know all the facts. Like they probably know all the facts and they have to decide what to do with it. And it's not like there's an open and shut like either walk away or like. throw the book at them.

Like there's some... So the facts are clear, but what you do with them is less clear. Yeah, I think it's, you know, like the idea that, like, you can't just let him get away with it because, like, it just doesn't... The stock moved a lot on information that seemed not to be true. At the same time, you can't be like he can never be a public company director anymore because, like, he's doing a good job for shareholders in many respects. Yeah, it feels like you'd have to sort of get inside Musk's mind a little bit as well.

And I wonder what those conversations would be like. Yeah, I don't really think you do that. I think you do to bring a like a case in court. And I don't think that's what anyone wants. I think what you have to do is there's like probably some broad middle ground where it's like they pay a fine. He promises not to do it again. The SEC yells in him a lot and everyone kind of moves on with their lives. You don't really need to talk about exactly what his intent was.

You need to be like, this wasn't true. So let's announce that. Let's keep public market, you know, do something for the integrity of public markets by going after Musk in some way for tweeting this stuff. Well, on that note, Matt, that gives us something to look forward to down the line. And it was great to talk to. Appreciate you coming up. Thanks for having me. Joe, I really like that conversation.

I always love having Matt on. But I think you were right. He's sort of the perfect person to talk about this. Yeah. And that last point, which is sort of this idea that everybody now kinds of knows the facts. Like that was really fun in the immediate days after the tweet because it did not seem very ambiguous. It seemed like either he had funding secured or he didn't have funding secured. And while all of us on Twitter or sort of is this real, it always seemed like pretty straightforward for the SEC to just ask the question and find out.

Now what you do with that information, though, it'll be interesting. but maybe not quite as juicy. Yeah, I also wonder still about the long-term reputational damage to Tesla and to Elon Musk in particular. Like, if you think that this is a guy who basically made his reputation and his career by coming up with sort of out-of-this-world ideas and then figuring out how to do them, it kind of feels like in this instance he came up with a sort of crazy financial idea, but had no actual discernible way of knowing how to follow through with it. So maybe you can be a visionary when it comes to electric cars and not financial markets, or maybe people think you should be a visionary in all things.

I don't know. I do wonder whether this really will have any long-term ramifications on Tesla's ability to borrow money or tap the capital markets. People say that it will. And like you see analysts talking about how this sort of reduces his, credibility, but you have to wonder whether it actually will matter. Also, outside of financial markets, there's also the whole issue of Tesla suppliers and whether they supply parts in exchange for payments down the road. So there are some areas where he does need to maintain trust,

but, you know, I don't know which way I'll go. I could certainly see this all blowing over. Yeah, and there is a sort of ultimate irony in here that a company that seems to hate public market so much has actually kind of gotten away with ignoring certain norms of public markets for so long. And the irony that ostensibly of one reason to go private is to avoid distraction, and this is probably as big of a distraction as they come. Right. Okay. This has been the ultimate tale of Tesla irony then. Shall we leave it there? Let's do it. All right. This has been another episode of the Odd Thoughts podcast. I'm Tracy Alloway. You can follow me. on Twitter at Tracy Alloway.

And I'm Jill Wisenthall. You can follow me on Twitter at The Stalwart. And you should follow our guest, Matt Levine, on Twitter at Matt underscore Levine. And you should follow our producer, Tofer Forges at Forges T, as well as the Bloomberg head of podcast, Francesca Levy, at Francesca today. Thanks for listening. You can get the news whenever you want it with Bloomberg News Now. I'm Amy Morris. And I'm Karen Moscow here to tell you about our new online.

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