https://www.tesla.com/blog/taking-tesla-private https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2018-08-07/afternoon-of-terror-for-tesla-shorts-fomented-by-musk-s-tweet There were a million ways to do this. Plenty of them would have been better for shareholders. Most of them would have twisted fewer panties. But none of them would soak the Tesla short crowd quite as hard as an $800m Twitter bomb. There's 34 million shares of Tesla short out there. He cost each and every one of them about 40 bucks today. There's another $40 worth of pain to get to his buyback price. That's potentially $24b worth of soaking for a contingent that Elon Musk takes personally.
Ironically enough, the true villain in Aliens is Jack Welch's "shareholder value." By taking Tesla private Musk is theoretically working against that.