I don't think it's been mentioned here, but Emmet Peppers went to the Tesla Semi event and he was prodding around trying to find information about the share buyback (youtube video listed below). It wasn't directly told to him, but he inferred from the answers (and non-answers) he received that Elon is 100% completely fine with the share buyback, as he has stated on Twitter. Thus, as Elon also stated on Twitter, the board is the one that is hesitant to green light the share buyback, but the most interesting thing Emmet inferred from what was said to him was that the reason for the board's hesitancy is
because institutional investors are telling the board not to do the share buyback.
If this is true, here are some points I'd like to make:
1. Contrary to the beliefs of many on social media, including here on TMC, the Tesla Board IS actively looking in the best interests of it's shareholders. It just so happens that institutional investors have a much stronger and persuasive voice than retail investors (most likely due to them owning more shares than retail I'm guessing?)
2. Why do institutional investors not want the buyback to happen? There are two possibilities I can think of. The first is that having less cash on hand could be an added risk to the company that institutional investors prefer not to take. The second is that it might be possible that institutional investors are interested in still being able to get shares on the cheap while they're able to.
Note that there are also some other takeaways from the rest of the youtube video related to Cybertruck that I thought were interesting as well, so it's probably worth listening to the whole video. It seems that the Cybertruck project is called 'Project Everest' and Tesla has told it's suppliers to delay 4 months for it's production. This causes Matt to believe that very few cybertrucks will be produced next year, and that Cybertruck production will most begin around Q4.