All in stock of a not-yet-profitable company who's stock price has been highly volatile in the past.
I don't mean to disparage Tesla, but rather to emphasize that there's a difference between receiving $325 million in cash, $325 million in blue-chip stock, and these $325 million.
THIS! it seems like everyone simply assumes that current stock value = cash value. if it was true, than the offer would be $325m in stock OR in cash. but not even Elon think that offered stocks are worth $325m
That's not true. I think Elon thinks that $325m cash is worth less because he thinks the stock is going to go up, however he needs any cash he can get to grow the company. As a growing company you need cash to grow and must give up stock to do so
If they wanted to guarantee cash, they could've bought a collar by selling calls and buying puts. It would have a very small cost, and the deal's investment bankers could set it up, no problem.
tl;dr: you're both extremely confident, ignorant, and wrong.
If it were that easy, Tesla could do the same. It is not that easy. While you or any other spiv can buy a collar on $10k or even $1m worth of stock for a super short period (1 month, 3 month), it is an entirely different thing to:
- But options for multi-year expiries (because that is how long the disposal will take, after the obligatory lockup)...
- ... in a stock that is 1000x less liquid that your usual AAPL or GOOG...
- ...on a short notice on $325 million worth of stock, i.e. a huge percentage of the free float of the stock, making it impossible to hedge for any bank that offers the collar.
tldr: You are a bit too cocky given your lack of knowledge.
FWIW, Tesla is a high volume stock and over a billion dollars worth of TSLA shares are traded daily. It's comparably liquid to GOOGL.
The full $325m would be about 1.5M shares which would be 15,000 options contracts. Quite a bit, but not too far from the current action in some December strikes (the 50 put has 11,883 open contracts).
tl;dr You could quite easily either divest of the stake outright or protect a large portion of it through options.
The average trade volume is as you say 4.45M shares. Selling an additional 1.4M raises the daily trade volume by 31.4%.
Economics is supply and demand. If you increase supply by a massive amount when not changing demand. The price tanks. Effectively you are killing your own price point and this sales strategy isn't in your favor.
I don't mean to disparage Tesla, but rather to emphasize that there's a difference between receiving $325 million in cash, $325 million in blue-chip stock, and these $325 million.
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