Silly Days -- May 18, 2016; Tesla To Sell About 10 Million New Shares; Raise $2 Billion In Cash

This is so cool. We just talked about it the other day. Tesla would offer more shares to raise badly needed cash. MuskMelon did that today. The only question: how much dilution? Let's see. The original talk was 11%. I said 10% was typical. So, let's see: $2 billion. But how many shares? The sources don't say. But at $211/share today, and $2 billion, that equates to about 10 million shares in round numbers. Outstanding: 135 million in round numbers. 10/135 = 7%.

Back on May 13, 2016, this was posted:

Analyst Brian Johnson of Barclays projected a $3 billion equity raise sometime in the second quarter. At current stock prices, a transaction of that size would be about 14.5 million shares, an increase of 11 percent to the number of shares outstanding.

So 7%. Way less than the typical 10%, and way less than projected by at least one analyst. This is a no-brainer for raising cash.

But what a snake salesman. To make this a bit more palatable, MuskMelson says 1.2 million shares will be donated to charity. Whom is he trying to kid?

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Silly Days

The market was up nicely today, and then finished down slightly, almost flat.

Oil was up nicely today, and then finished down slightly, almost flat.

What accounted for the positive move to slightly negative, almost flat? There was talk that the Fed might possibly, but not very likely, but could, if the stars aligned right, could possibly raise the Fed rate from ... oh, about zero ... to about ... oh, about one-quarter point.

And that takes up from a nice upside to slightly negative. Great buying opportunities, eh?

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Venezuela -- Tick, Tick, Tick

Unrest continues to grip Venezuela as president threatens to make opposition-controlled legislature 'disappear' -- Los Angeles Times. I assume President Obama wishes he had had similar powers.

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Bullet Train

Lifeline for the bullet train. President Obama extends federal funding deadline for California's bullet train by four years.

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Perspective

From her perspective, all those visitors and no one was paying attention to the brochures. She figured that if she spread them out for folks to see, they might take more interest.


And, yes, we replaced all the brochures after we finished filming.