Tesla Board Confirms It Never Saw LBO "Financing Plan" From Musk

Three days into the Tesla "going private" saga, everyone continues to scramble for more information on the biggest wildcard in the entire equation: the "committed funding" as represented by Elon Musk: shareholders are asking where it is; bankers - i.e., those who should have arranged it - are asking where it is; even the SEC is asking where it is (and probing if Musk was being "truthful" with the alternative being stock manipulation which opens up Tesla to fraud lawsuits), and now Reuters reports that even the Tesla Board of Directors wants to know where it is.

According to Reuters, Tesla's board of directors is seeking more information from CEO Elon Musk about the finance for his plan to take the U.S. electric car maker private.

And here is the punchline: While Tesla's board has held multiple discussions about the proposal - as it documented in its statement on Wednesday - it has "not yet received a detailed financing plan from Musk and specific information on who will provide the funding."

As a reminder, in a statement on Wednesday, Tesla's board said its discussion with Musk "addressed the funding" for the deal, without offering more details. And now we know why: because it had none, and one increasingly wonders if the Board simply made up the fact that it had multiple discussions just to cover Musk's back.

But there is another big problem, if only from a timing/legal standpoint: if the board has no idea where the funding is coming from, there is no way it could have signed off on it, thereby "securing it", which means that all else equal, Musk's tweet that sent the stock price soaring was a fabrication.

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