If Everything’s Fine With Tesla, Why Isn’t It Doing a Secondary Stock Offering?

Anton Wahlman asserts that something is wrong with Tesla because they are not “Doing a Secondary Stock Offering”. If this assumption is false, then all the FUD along with it is absurd.

Of all the countries in the world, which country is giving Tesla the most grief through adversaries such as short sellers, SEC, imposed dealership legislation, etc. etc.? The United States. What countries on Earth would love to have a Gigafactory? All of them.

So, why would Tesla raise capital with a Stock offering when they could instead get a loan from Chinese banks to build a Gigafactory in China?

Sorry Anton, USD isn’t the only useful currency and Stock Offering is not the only way to raise capital.

FUD (11 points)

fear points (3)

• a war that cost America nearly four years of bloodshed
• Tesla still wasn't profitable for 2018 as a whole
• ...something very bad is going on.

uncertainty points (7)

• one wonders why Tesla hasn't raised capital in the past 18 months
• wouldn't that be preferable to having layoffs and announcing plans to close many of its retail locations
• If TSLA could have raised perhaps $500 million through a plain-vanilla secondary equity offering, that would have been preferable to letting the company bleed over the past nine months, right?
• So if it's not a Wells notice that's holding Tesla back from doing a secondary, it seems to me that something must be doing so. (Full disclosure: I'm shorting TSLA stock.)
• ...but the agency still might have questions for the company that it feels aren't being answered
• Maybe Tesla's previous underwriters (Morgan Stanley and Goldman Sachs (GS - Get Report) ) have questions that Tesla isn't answering in a satisfactory manner.
• I firmly believe that there's some sort of obstacle to a secondary offering here ... but that the company just isn't being forthcoming about what it is.

doubt points (1)

• ...we could foresee that Morgan and Goldman don't want the legal risk of underwriting a Tesla secondary offering without clearing such issues up first.

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jsturgis