Musk says tweet on secured funding based on Saudi meeting

Tesla CEO Elon Musk says his “funding secured” tweet last week came after a meeting with Saudi Arabia’s sovereign wealth fund that left him certain a deal would be reached to take his electric-car company private.

“I left the July 31st meeting with no question that a deal with the Saudi sovereign fund could be closed, and that it was just a matter of getting the process moving. This is why I referred to ‘funding secured’ in the August 7th announcement,” Musk wrote Monday in a blog post.

The meeting came after the Saudi fund bought almost 5 percent of Tesla stock, wrote Musk, who added that most of the capital needed to go private would be funded by private equity rather than debt.

Investors who prefer not to stick with a private company would be paid $420 per share, said Musk, who added that he expects a third of shareholders to sell.

Shares of Tesla took a roller coaster ride after Musk revealed he was considering to take the company private. On Monday, Tesla rose 0.3 percent, or $1.03, to $356.52. 

A leveraged buyout of Tesla, which went public in 2010 and has a market capitalization of nearly $61 billion, would represent an abrupt change in financial strategy. If shareholders approved a deal, it would remove Tesla from Wall Street scrutiny, eliminating the need to publicly disclose its earnings and — for Musk — having to explain himself to shareholders.