[dragontamer]

> It's not harder when you have $25B in cash to spend on fancy marketing, advertising, promotion etc. Do you not understand how massive of an advantage that is?

Come on. Its Mr. Musk's decision to make a company take advantage of debt markets instead of waiting for a few years for the Roadster or Model S to make some profits. Tesla's current financial situation is 100% the decision of Musk.

Musk chose debt and stock offerings because he wanted to take advantage of bull market conditions. He's received something on the order of ~$10 Billion from investors, either from the debt market or the stock market (IPOs or Secondary offerings).

If Tesla were to try its strategy of "IPO to get a ton of money each year, every year" during any other time in US history, it would have literally come across a recession and run out of money.

The Gigafactory was literally built on top of debt and stock offerings. Tesla never had that money to begin with.