Yup! Knowing Elon, he still has several tricks/ideas up his sleeves, and when the Wall Street shackles are finally off, he'll be unstoppable.
if Tesla goes private what will happen with the shares if I want to keep them? I'm having them in my TFSA account (I'm in Canada)
Well, according to Elon (and everyone else), we will have the option to hold our shares in the new private company.
This is going to be another "P100D loaners for all!" promise that doesn't materialize. SEC rules say if you have more than 500 non accredited investors, or 2,000 investors overall, you must perform some reporting under the Exchange Act. Something I am assuming he would want to avoid..... Maybe I am wrong, but i think that red tape is going to cause him to reverse course and force a buyout.
Definitions are the issue. A special purpose fund can comply as a single investor in some cases. How Fidelity's Ownership in SpaceX Could Be a Model for Tesla There are technical requirements that investors in such funds must qualify as 'sophisticated' investors but are not limited in number. As the Bloomberg piece points out there are a number of those. I am invested in one such fund, in the specific case it is only securities of a single private firm, but there are multiple security types. This arena is quite complex and regulatory compliance is tricky. Fidelity has done this for some time. FWIW, these investments are often rather illiquid. For my part I view them as buy-and-hold. Fidelity is not making these funds as an eleemosynary activity either. OTOH, private companies are cheaper to run than are public ones.
I think you need to check with your custodian. It has been my experience over the years that the traditional custodians like banks, brokers, and mutual funds do not mess around with assets other than cash, publicly-traded stocks, bonds, mutual funds and the like. I do know that there are specialty custodians out there who will allow unencumbered real estate and other non-traditional investments like partnership interests to be owned by the pension/IRA. Compliance is trickier, and sometimes requires the need to file income tax returns for UBTI. Illiquid securities like a putative non-public Tesla likely would be something for one of these specialty custodians to consider. But no UBTI at least!