Elon Musk superfans didn’t swarm the Delaware courthouse where the Tesla Inc. chief executive has been on the witness stand for the past two days, but they were there.
Arlington, Virginia, resident Karl Golovin was in the courtroom both Monday and Tuesday to see Musk testify in a shareholder lawsuit accusing the CEO of improperly pushing Tesla’s US$2 billion acquisition of SolarCity in 2016. Identifying himself as a Tesla shareholder with a Cybertruck on order, Golovin, 64, said he came for the “rare opportunity” to see Musk in person and hear him speak live.
The fierce loyalty Tesla and its CEO inspires in customers and retail investors has helped fuel the company’s extraordinary growth in recent years, giving it a market capitalization of US$644 billion and making its founder the world’s second-richest man with a fortune of nearly US$190 billion.
That loyalty was on display in Delaware, where a curly-haired man in an “Occupy Mars” T-shirt declined to speak to a reporter because of what he said was Bloomberg’s negative coverage of Tesla. Golovin likewise said he thought Musk was being unfairly targeted.
“Elon has a bullseye on him” he said.
Golovin said he thought the shareholders’ case seemed weak and that he supported the SolarCity acquisition. He said he’s considered moving to Texas and buying one of the solar-powered homes that Tesla is planning to build there.
“Tesla’s integration of electricity storage and solar as facilitated by the SolarCity acquisition makes perfect sense,” Golovin said, disputing the suit’s contention that Musk engineered the deal to bail out the struggling solar company, which he also controlled.
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