Musk wants to take Tesla private

Tesla CEO Elon Musk said Tuesday he wants to buy up company stock and remove it from public trading. Musk got the ball rolling after the stock market had been open more than three hours with a tweet announcing he had secured funding to buy all of Tesla’s stock at $420 per share. At that price, the company would cost nearly $72 billion, though Musk owns roughly 20 percent of the Palo Alto, Calif., electric car maker. The confusion caused by Musk’s announcement prompted regulators of the Nasdaq stock market to temporarily suspend trading in Tesla’s stock.

By taking Tesla private, Musk believes the company can sharpen its long-term focus on revolutionizing the automobile industry without having to cater to investors’ fixation on the bottom line from one quarter to the next. Musk has a reputation for acting strange on Twitter. He joked that Tesla was going bankrupt in an April Fool’s Day tweet, and his stability was called into question last month after he called a British diver who helped rescue children from a Thai cave a pedophile. That baseless tweet was quickly deleted, and Musk apologized to the diver.