[dragontamer]

Ask yourself: how much does a $5 Billion factory affect net-income.

Answer: a $5 Billion factory costs $0 in terms of profit. Its a capital-expenditure, affecting Cash Flow (not profits). Depreciation is how factories "wear out" in the income statement.

Tesla is not selling enough cars to make up for its $5 Billion investment in the Gigafactory. After many years, Tesla will only have made ~$4 Billion from a $5 Billion factory, by the time it has to replace all the equipment and pay $5 Billion again. (Made up numbers to roughly estimate what is going on here).

Tesla needs to make more cars out of the factory it has already built if they want to be able to rebuild the factory by the time all the parts wear out.

[llsf]

The Chinese Gigafactory cost $5B and should eventually produce 500,000 cars (less than 10,000 a week like its counterpart in US). If it takes 5 years to wear out, then Tesla would have to make ~$2k per car produced to pay the factory. I am curious to see how this Chinese factory would perform in the next 6 months. Clearly the plan has been to produce more per factory, and it did not happen yet. But I have faith in automation to eventually improve the factory's output.

[dragontamer]

> But I have faith in automation to eventually improve the factory's output.

Tesla's CapEx has been disappointingly low. Any kind of improved automation will require new equipment. Unless Tesla can scrape together more cash to improve their CapEx figures, its basically impossible for them to get "Better equipment".

IMO, Musk is spending too much money on unnecessary projects (ex: Cuphead ported to Tesla. Full-self driving custom designed chip. Etc. etc.) and not enough money on simple & boring stuff like better factory equipment.

[llsf]

Yes, I agree Tesla might have spent money on non essential (more video games), or at least non-trivial return (self driving custom designed chip). But Tesla did acquire Grohmann (automation), which is kind of boring stuff like better factory equipment. On a side note, I have been bullish on automation for a couple years, and it did not pan out, both Fanuc and KUKA had a rough past year... so no revolution on the automation/robot so far.