Tesla raised $738 million from a stock sale, which closed on Wednesday, according to a regulatory filing, far exceeding the electric carmaker’s original estimates.
The company originally was looking to raise closer to $500 million last week, and then boosted that number to about $650 million a day later by agreeing to sell more shares. The reason for the higher amount is that the underwriters of the secondary stock sale — which included Goldman Sachs, Morgan Stanley, JPMorgan Chase, Deutsche Bank, Bank of America and Wells Fargo — exercised their options to buy additional shares.
All in all, Tesla sold 2.69 million shares plus an additional 404,000 to the underwriters. Tesla’s billionaire CEO Elon Musk also planned to spend $20 million buying shares in the deal.
Tesla plans to use the proceeds of its stock sale to help pay for its massive spending spree as it attempts to grow into a big — and eventually profitable — business with multiple product lines. The company is planning to introduce its SUV Model X next month, it’s designing its Model 3 car, it’s building a huge battery factory near Reno, Nevada, and it’s scaling up its grid battery business, which will sell batteries to utilities, companies and homeowners to connect to the power grid.
As part of its expansion, Tesla (TSLA) is planning on spending $1.5 billion in capital expenses this year. It’s “a staggering” amount of money, as Musk put it in an earnings call earlier this year. But with the investment, Musk has said he thinks Tesla can eventually become a company that is as valuable as Apple (AAPL), which currently has a market capitalization of $643 billion.
Tesla has already raised billions of dollars in debt and equity in recent years. Even if all goes well, Tesla likely won’t be regularly profitable until 2020. In its most recent earnings call, Tesla lowered its annual car shipment guidance from 55,000 cars in 2015 to between 50,000 and 55,000 this year.
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