[gizmo]

Tesla is neither at scale nor profitable. They're selling barely 15,000 cars per quarter, compared to Toyota's 2.5 million. They're growing by taking on debt, diluting shareholders, subsidies, and other creative tricks (Model 3 preorders). They've been "profitable" for a single quarter by selling Teslas at a steep discount. Last quarter's report has been widely derided for the financial engineering therein. We'll have to wait and see what the sales numbers will be this quarter, but I'm pretty pessimistic.

Seeking Alpha is a mixed bag, but the authors are no more biased than the average wall street analyst. People who comment here also have their own agendas. Bias should be expected everywhere. As for your claim that anybody can write an article on there, that's not strictly true. They have a real name policy and failing to disclose properly can and will get you in trouble with the SEC.

By the way, having a short position and writing about why you are short (or the inverse) isn't a conflict of interest by any stretch of the imagination. The seeking alpha model is adversarial (like the justice system). People at opposing sides make their case and clearly state on which side their financial interest resides. Poor arguments get pilloried in the comments section. I think this model works remarkably well in practice. In order to figure out what's really going on forensic investigation is necessary, and that goes way beyond the plain GAAP figures.

[NickM]

> Tesla is neither at scale nor profitable. They're selling barely 15,000 cars per quarter, compared to Toyota's 2.5 million.

Tesla's sales last quarter were 24.5k cars, hardly "barely 15,000". Q4 is expected to meet or exceed that, despite being a shorter quarter.

If you pick the biggest car manufacturer in the world to compare them to, then of course they're going to look small. There are plenty of well-established, profitable car manufacturers that build far fewer cars than Toyota.

I don't want to argue semantics, so I'll leave it open for debate as to whether or not they're "at scale", but comparing them to a startup that hasn't figured out how to turn a profit yet seems highly disingenuous.

> They've been "profitable" for a single quarter by selling Tesla's at a deep discount.

If they can sell cars at a deep discount and still be profitable, then clearly the margins must be pretty good.

[gizmo]

It's funny how you call me disingenuous when you selectively engage with my arguments and repeatedly assert that Tesla is profitable when it hasn't been profitable for a single year in the entire company's existence.

Tesla has 1/6th the market cap of Toyota but produces a tiny fraction of the cars. Tesla is exactly like other silicon valley startups in that they could have been profitable if they had chosen a different business model, but now they need to grow massively or they'll become insolvent. That's what I mean when I say they haven't hit scale yet.

Will Tesla actually deliver 100,000 Model 3 cars in 2017 as promised? I'm skeptical to say the least, but if anybody can do it it's Musk.