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Elon Musk left traders scratching their heads last week after tweeting that he was thinking about taking Tesla private for $ 420 per share—and had “funding secured” to do so. Musk finally cleared up some of the confusion on Monday, publishing a blog post saying that Saudi Arabia’s sovereign wealth fund was the funder he had in mind when he posted his “funding secured” tweet.
But Musk’s Monday post mostly raised questions about whether he truly had the kind of commitment from the Saudis that would justify his tweet. Musk wrote that he came out of a July 31 meeting “with no question that a deal with the Saudi sovereign fund could be closed.” Experts who talked to Ars this week questioned whether that’s really sufficient for Musk to tweet that he had “funding secured” for a deal.
“That’s not what anyone in the financial markets thinks of when you say ‘funding secured,'” said Stephen Diamond, an expert on securities law at Santa Clara University. Ordinarily, he said, that kind of language would signal that Musk had a “term sheet, letter of intent, or some commitment from the other side of the table.”
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