Why Elon Musk’s bid to take Tesla private is a good bet
I don’t tweet often and, for the life of me, I don’t understand why serious people, in the most consequential positions, choose Twitter as their medium to communicate breaking news. But they do.
Probably it would be inappropriate for me to name names, but I think you know who I am talking about. The most important twitterer of all:
Elon Musk.
Musk’s recent Twitter musings about taking Tesla private may have been an expression of his particular sense of humor. They may have been the manifestation of his burning desire to wrong-foot the short interests in Tesla. Or they may just have been mischief aimed at the plodding bureaucrats at the SEC and the New York Stock Exchange to see how they would react to a market-moving tweet launched on a low-volume mid-August trading day. (Admittedly, this last explanation is most unlikely but for the fact that Elon didn’t even wait for the market to close before he hit the "send" button).
我希望不会，因为我觉得特斯拉私有化是一个伟大的想法（像我的朋友晏勃兰特，谁谢天谢地了麝香的Twitter宣告，他是保持他的开创性太阳能通讯之后宣布，SolarWakeup, private). If Musk has lined up $85 billion of private capital that is intelligent, patient and committed to Musk’s vision of a high-tech clean energy economy with Tesla as its most prominent and powerful corporate citizen, then I think he should do it, and do it now. (Note: This might be a good time for me to give one of those disclaimers that I do not own, nor have I ever owned, Tesla shares).
My reason for supporting a private Tesla is that, in my experience, there simply is no public market appetite for transformation and Elon has expressed a vision for Tesla that goes far beyond being the nascent mass-market alternative engine technology car company that it is today. That means he is leading Tesla on a trail-breaking course where no other publicly traded corporate has gone before.
If and when he gets there — wherever "there" might be — there will be no defined industry segment for institutional investors to group Tesla with. And if I learned one thing in my 13 years as a public company CEO, it is that a peer group comparable company analysis is the oxygen that mutual fund managers breathe.我的支持私人特斯拉的原因是，在我的经验，根本没有公开市场的胃口转变。
Plus, corporate history has taught us — and fund managers have learned this lesson — that corporate transformation is innately difficult and most such efforts fail. I always think of Westinghouse’s efforts to transform itself from a heavy industrial to a media company in the 1990s, but that is just anecdotal. Twenty-seven of the 30 companies that make up the Dow Jones Industrial Average have turned over since I entered the workforce (most recently GE, which got the boot, essentially, for failing to anticipate the impact of renewable energy on its power division). If their predecessors could have transformed themselves to capture current business opportunities, presumably they would have.
Different animal
Tesla, of course, is a different animal — not a status quo entrenched incumbent but an aggressive startup born to disrupt the mother of all static industries, the car industry. All the same, Tesla has stated its intention to be far more than a car company and that unnerves the public markets with questions of what, when and how.
对于个人麝香，特斯拉的CEO，私有化必须非常诱人。更何况，即使不是与公职相关的显著财务费用与基金经理和sell-和买方分析师无情地反复讨论浪费的管理时间。而那个时候的负担，我想象特斯拉的情况下，不成比例地落在麝香个人。我的意思是，如果你是拥有亿万投资特斯拉，谁，比麝香等，你能信任的代表公司的发言权威机构投资者？没有人。偶尔有启发性的CEO，但通常显得荒谬，投资者关系的职责必须驱动麝香疯狂。而大多数的成为上市公司的感知优点 - 较高的知名度，提升品牌知名度，资金更好的访问 - 并不适用于麝香和Tesla。他们有很多。
如果我是麝香，我就只有一个与私有化的关注：$ 85十亿是不会来了不附带任何条件。麝香，迄今为止已与自治对于一家上市公司的CEO独特的水平下运行，分裂他与其他商业投资的时间（SpaceX公司，镗公司），得到亲自参与个人感兴趣的项目（重建波多黎各，泰国洞穴救援）做交易，这使得没有任何经济意义（太阳城），推特上他觉得任何话题等。不过，我会怀疑他的私人资助者会像放纵他的现任董事会。
And from the prospective private investor perspective, I wonder how they’ll evaluate their part of the $85 billion investment. While Tesla undoubtedly has excellent executives and a cadre of top professional talent, it seems to me that these funders are making an extraordinarily large bet on one man and his ability to achieve his vision. The problem may be that Musk amply has demonstrated since he came into the public eye more than a decade ago that he is, in fact, a man of many visions, all of which he seems passionate about. How do the new investors ensure that he stays committed to the particular vision that they invested $85 billion in?
So having taken the time to write all of this, all I can say, Elon, is that I hope you are not joking.
