[bhauer]

Someone made a useful graphic breakdown of the revenue, costs, and profit numbers from Tesla's Q1 2021 earnings report:

https://pbs.twimg.com/media/E0ES_LuX0AED-eo?format=png&name=...

It's worth a review if you think the emission credits point is a substantial criticism of their business model. Also, bear in mind that they are a growth company, and are building two major factories concurrently (Austin, Berlin). If they didn't have emission credits as part of the revenue blend, they might slow down the growth a bit as a result. The point being that taking away emission credits would not necessarily mean they would elect to be not profitable.

[igorkraw]

To me this reads like minus credits and bitcoin, they'd have to scale down R&D in order to break event which would probably push back FSD and delivering on all of their pre-ordered promises again? Which I would assume increases the risk of people canceling and registering as negative revenue? How "normal" is their cost of revenue and sales/admin/overhead in the car industry?

[mft_]

Unless I'm reading that graphic incorrectly, isn't it only a $24m delta? i.e. credits + bitcoin profits are only $24m greater than their operating profit?

On the scale of Tesla, that feels like a tiny amount - for which they'd dip into their war-chest and not slow anything down at all?

[hwillis]

on the higher end: https://lga-consultants.com/seven-global-car-makers-kpis-par...

but nothing absurd. Note that trying to compare 2020 data will obviously be extremely wonky.

[hwillis]

seems a little goofy to put credits at the top and not in order of size like the rest of the chart, but that's my only criticism. It does a good job illustrating that the fact that profit ~= credits is largely coincidental