[dragontamer]

> The possibility of financial collapse is very real, they start losing the ability to keep the lights on at that fancy plant in Nevada this year.

I disagree. They have a $230 million bond payment due this year but that seems survivable to me.

The $920 million payment due March2019 is the difficult one.

Even if the company were to collapse, I wouldn't expect it to collapse until 2019 at the earliest.

[adventured]

That order of things isn't correct. They'll slash spending big time before they get near that.

They can raise $2 billion tomorrow morning in an equity dilution. They're not going to collapse in 2019 either.

The $230 million is trivial. They have ~$2.8-$3 billion in cash as of end of Q1.

The issue isn't the next year or two. They still have a lot of market cap available to abuse if they absolutely have to. You can chop their market cap in half right now and they could still raise $2 billion just the same via equity.

The big question is whether the Model 3 gets up to a scale in the next year that pushes their burn rate down toward something a lot more manageable. If not, then investors will probably pummel their valuation and their debt costs will continue to climb, forcing very difficult spending decisions to substantially cut their quarterly losses.

[dragontamer]

> The $230 million is trivial. They have ~$2.8-$3 billion in cash as of end of Q1.

And they're losing $408 million per quarter, on the average. (a loss of 1,632,086 thousands of dollars in 2017, according to their 10K)

At the current rate, Tesla is going to be forced to raise more capital within the next year.

Tesla definitely can survive till 2019 by my math. They can probably survive longer than that if they cut costs. But once Tesla cuts costs, they stop R&D and other "luxury" projects. Cutting costs implies cutting growth.

Tesla is still very much in the growth stage for some reason. They can't afford to cut costs yet.

[AstralStorm]

The worse problem is that manufacturing is capital intensive. They do not have the billions of dollars to even come close to challenging established players there.

Steady growth could work by that's make the company a boring "luxury car maker"... at the time scales investors look into.

[daxorid]

> I wouldn't expect it to collapse until 2019 at the earliest.

Part of the function of financial cash markets (options are another matter) is to discount future profits into present prices. An expectation of a 2019 collapse is nearly as good, in terms of present asset price discovery information, as an expectation of a 2018 collapse.

These solvency expectations feed forward to the present, driving prices lower, which makes raising money to avert the expected collapse anywhere from expensive to impossible. It's a . . . "fun" cycle to be caught in.