Late last week, Elon Musk, Tesla CEO, announced he had withdrawn plans to take the electric car maker private.
In a blog post on the company's website, the outspoken boss stated he spent the last few weeks talking to advisors Silver Lake, Goldman Sachs and Morgan Stanley, as well as investors large and small.
During his discussions with large investors, they told him they had "internal compliance issues that limit how much they can invest in a private company".
As many analysts and industry experts had predicted, Musk also discovered there is "no proven path for most retail investors to own shares if we were private".
Despite the overwhelming message being "'please don’t do this'", Musk insists there is "more than enough funding" to go private and a "majority of shareholders" would have stayed with the company.
Noting how these discussions and investigations were "more time-consuming and distracting than initially anticipated", Musk said the most important thing for Tesla was to concentrate on "ramping Model 3 [production] and becoming profitable", as the company "will not achieve our mission of advancing sustainable energy unless we are also financially sustainable".
The whole idea of taking Tesla off the sharemarket emerged on August 8 when Musk tweeted: "Am considering taking Tesla private at $420. Funding secured."
After the Securities and Exchange Commission began asking questions, and two class actions lawsuits were field, Musk revealed he had initially tweeted after having positive discussions with Saudi Arabia's sovereign wealth fund.
A later report suggested the oil-rich nation was instead considering investing in rival Lucid Motors.
