Tesla CEO Elon Musk is unlikely to attend this year’s Burning Man festival as production and legal troubles continue to plague the embattled electric car company, according to reports.
The annual gathering held from August 25 to September 3 in Nevada’s Black Rock Desert will be the first Burning Man festival Musk will reportedly skip out on after attending the event nine years in a row, according to the Daily Mail. Musk’s decision not to join fellow members of the Silicon Valley elite at the festival comes after the SEC opened an inquiry into erratic billionaires tweet claiming to have secured funding to take Tesla private. On August 7, Musk declared Tesla had secured financing to take the electric car company private at $420 a share.
Not only would Musk later admit that funding had not been secured, but in a Friday blog post wrote that he and Tesla’s board of directors decided it was in the best interests of the Palo Alto-based to remain public. “I worked with Silver Lake, Goldman Sachs and Morgan Stanley, who have world-class expertise in these matters, to consider the many factors that would come into play in taking Tesla private, and to process all the incoming interest that we received from investors to fund a go-private transaction,” Musk wrote. “I also spent considerable time listening to current shareholders, large and small, to understand what they think would be in the best long-term interests of Tesla.”
Shares of the electric car company have plummeted nearly 16 percent since Musk’s tweet.
In a 2014 tweet, Musk described the Burning Man festival is glowing terms. “If you haven’t been, you just don’t get it. You could take the craziest LA party and multiply it by a thousand, and it doesn’t even get f – – king close,” he wrote.
In addition to holding the titles for being one of the world’s wildest parties, Burning Man is said to be one of the premier networking events for high-flying technology entrepreneurs. “Recent years have marked a shift for Burning Man: It’s become something of an ‘It’ networking event for Silicon Valley tech gurus and stifled Wall Streeters looking to blow off steam,” writes Christopher Cameron of the New York Post. “They’re not interested in totally roughing it — and that’s led to the creation of lavish camps known as ‘Billionaire’s Row’ with all the luxuries of the Ritz, including private chefs.”