1) The 9% was surprising because everyone believed Musk had not taken any steps, because he was legally required to publicly declare when he acquired 5%.

Which he did not do until much later, in order to lower his acquisition price, and is now under an SEC investigation for it.

2) I'm not sure who was predicting a hostile takeover. His suggested price was high enough that most commentators said it would be fiscally irresponsible of the board to turn down the offer. Which is why the board accepted the offer the moment Musk showed any signs of raising funds.

3) No one believed that he wouldn't be able to raise funds. It was pretty obvious he could. The question was whether he was interested in, considering he had taken no steps to raise the funds and it was fairly obvious that it would require him to sell/pledge Tesla shares hurting the TSLA stock price, and it wasn't clear he would want to do that.