“Nobody, when they’re looking at a privatization, dangles this way and does this sort of teasing dance of choreography. Somebody only does this when they are trying to distract us with a shiny new thing…There’s a lot of problems here. He can’t afford to build the new factory that he says he wants to build. This is a distracting strategy like attacking the press” – Jeffery Sonnenfeld, Yale School of Management on CNBC

Elon Musk has turned the U.S. capital markets into a complete farce. He’s made of mockery of the fact that the regulators no longer enforce rule of law. The idea that any financial institution on earth would fund the largest leveraged buyout in history at a level that values Tesla on par with Volkswagen – the world’s larges car manufacturer – is beyond absurd.

We should hope and pray that some truth-seeking entity will hold Musk accountable for what is likely a highly fraudulent claim. Or, then again, perhaps Musk took one of his flying automobiles and went to Mars on Monday to “secure funding” from his Martian financiers.

A careful dissection of Tesla’s latest 10-Q reveals a Company with negative working capital and an unmanageable level of debt and other fixed commitments headed for eventual insolvency.

Beyond ranting about the obvious here, I’m posting an insightful, if not poignant, comment from a friend and colleague:

I am pretty amazed/disgusted that we haven’t come to terms (as a society) with social media. It is in this grey area where leaders of Government and corporations can walk a tight rope of truth/fiction without any consequence or regard for the affect of the immorality and illegality.  Narcissistic psychopaths like Musk utilize cult of personality to harness the power of the hopelessly ignorant looking for a guru; looking for a reason to justify their worst impulses and implausible fantasies. From a social science standpoint: it is interesting. From a person of the society: it is mindblowingly frightening.