Liam Denning, Columnist

Tesla's Lucky Fans Can Still Stand By Their Man

Elon Musk ends Tesla's takeover saga as strangely as he began it.

August 25, 2018 at 5:13 PM UTC

Liam Denning is a Bloomberg Opinion columnist covering energy. A former banker, he edited the Wall Street Journal’s Heard on the Street column and wrote the Financial Times’s Lex column.

That was quick.
Photographer: Joshua Lott/Getty Images North America

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I feel like I’ve had illnesses that lasted longer than Tesla Inc.’s completely serious process of considering a buyout. Or maybe it just reminded me of being ill: the disorientation, the fever dreams, the sense that, surely, it must all end soon.

And end it did, in the most apt way possible: a blog post saying that, after all of 17 days, there wouldn’t be a $420-a-share deal after all. Having begun the saga with an off-hand tweet on Aug. 7 making a mockery of disclosure, Elon Musk put it to rest with a Friday-night news dump that was less than an hour from being an early-Saturday one (on the East Coast anyway).