I didn’t write about this on my blog that I recall, but I did talk with my partner about it several times and muttered about “Dumb motherfuckers who don’t know how companies operate” etc. (which she can confirm).
Tesla operates like how all extremely capital-intensive businesses work, and that is they borrow a whole lot of money for their production needs and then stop borrowing after that is ramped up. Tesla clearly had the business to support this. That was the whole point of pre-ordering, etc! In this case, Tesla’s revenue stream was more assured than GM, Ford, etc., because they usually don’t do pre-orders to any great degree. From this perspective, Tesla was a safer bet than other car companies because they had a fairly assured future revenue stream while GM et al. do not.
I hate that so much of the business press and general reporting of companies is by people who have not the first fucking clue how a company operates, what distinguishes different business enterprises, how to analyze a balance sheet or any of that. Most business reporting you read is utterly worthless. Truly.
Never owned any Tesla stock. Don’t plan to. I can’t predict anything about it and Musk is a loose cannon. But it was clear most of the financial critics of Tesla had no clue about anything.