Comment by hylaride
9 hours ago
IIRC, he borrowed against them for a lot of stuff, including the Twitter acquisition. It's probably why he's freaking out a bit and returning to it. It's also not the first time he's had liquidity problems. Tesla literally did come weeks away from bankruptcy on a few occasions in the 2010s as he often put the cart before the horse. The infamous "refundable deposit" for the car back then that ended up being almost twice as much as promised was essentially an unsecured loan. People were almost out all their money.
Bethany McLean (a journalist that was among the first to start questioning Enron's numbers and wrote the book "the smartest men in the room" on it that also became a documentary) has been following Elon Musk for well over a decade.
She once said "Whenever Elon is lashing out is when he's under enormous stress". Also, he has a large cult of true believers who believe a man who's taken credit for others work as his own all his life. Watch this documentary called "the cult of the dead stock" https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=C5Bd6YxifCo ; it's like that x100.
> Tesla literally did come weeks away from bankruptcy on a few occasions in the 2010s as he often put the cart before the horse.
Yet another thing Tesla should have faced sanctions on - you'd never have known this by listening to any earnings call or looking at any financial filings from Tesla at that time (and at one point I think the number was <10 days).
I really do wonder if outright financial fraud was occurring. There was a period of time where they were going through CFOs like water over Niagara Falls (whom I assume were refusing to sign off on the books?).