Tesla Motors wants to raise roughly $500 million through a new public sale of its stock, the company said in a regulatory filing.
All told, Tesla intends to offer at least 2.1 million shares for sale, and might sell up to 2.42 million shares if the underwriters for the sale of stock exercise options to buy their full allotment of stock, according to the new filing with the Securities and Exchange Commission.
The net proceeds that Tesla would harvest from the stock sale would be $492.6 million, or up to $566.5 million if the underwriters buy their full allotment of shares, the maker of electric vehicles said in the filing.
We intend to use the net proceeds from this offering to accelerate the growth of our business in the U.S. and internationally, Tesla said in the SEC filing.
Those expansion efforts include the growth of Tesla s stores, service centers, Supercharger network and the Tesla Energy business.
Palo Alto-based Tesla also intends to use some of the proceeds for development and production of the company,s Model 3, the development of the Tesla Gigafactory, as well as for other general corporate purposes.
Tesla had hinted during a conference call recently that it might consider a capital raise.
The estimate of the net proceeds is based based on a presumed public offering price of $238.17 per share. That was the closing price on Aug. 12.
Elon Musk, Tesla s chief executive officer and founder, intends take a stake in the stock offering. Musk intends to buy up to 83,974 shares, a transaction that would provide Tesla with proceeds of about $20 million.
In the prospectus for the stock sale, Tesla warned investors of an array of risk factors, many of them boilerplate items. Tesla did take note of its ongoing quarterly financial losses.
The volatility of our stock may be exacerbated by our history of losses, Tesla stated in the prospectus. We have had net losses in each quarter since our inception, except for the first quarter of 2013, and as of June 30, 2015 our accumulated deficit was approximately $1.8 billion.
Tesla co-founder and CEO Elon Musk makes an appearance at the Tesla factory in Fremont. Photo by Jim Gensheimer Bay Area News Group
