I've worked for some pretty bat-shit level bosses, but I suspect Elon is way worse.  You can have some fun looking around on glassdoor at Tesla reviews.  A surprisingly high number of people like it (68% of ~2500 reviews approve of Elon).  However, a ton of the reviews are from interns, which probably understandably are idealistic, don't give a shit about work hours, etc.  It would be interesting to know if Tesla has a higher than average proportion of engineering interns.

I don't think they would just disappear, unless their leader is stubborn enough to sink it. I think every major auto maker out there would love purchase them for the upcoming EV focused car trend.

They should try for a Chrysler style prepackaged bankruptcy. Several companies could try for it, no idea who would want to.  Most investor classes will be wiped out. Chrysler senior bond holders got 29 cents on the dollar, Tesla will probably be worse. Stock will be near 0, customer deposits are among the lowest of the low in bankruptcy seniority.  Tesla doesn't have the UAW so don't expect the generous gov't bailout Chrysler and GM got.

If Musk's ego prevents a sale I can see straight liquidation handled by the banks.

ETA: for a sense of scale FIAT paid around $11B all in for the nameplates, factories, inventory, dealership access, etc. The crown jewels were the Jeep and Ram names and the US dealerships.  The Tesla name is worth a few million but not hundreds, Superchargers have some nice real estate, but there's not much else. Panasonic has all the battery tech, their self driving is a completely different path than everyone else and probably a dead end. There's possibly a warranty cost bomb in the future I wouldn't want to touch. Lots of mechanics leins have been filed by suppliers which are pretty senior too.

I've been considering a Model 3 as a 2nd company car, but I would hate to get burned if the company completely fails and I'm left with a car with little or no support or repair parts available.

It's a shame.  I think they have developed a decent product line in the relatively new all-electric segment.  It seems that it has always been difficult for a new mass production auto company to succeed, but it sounds like Musk himself is a significant part of the problem.

I hope that the company isn't bought out just to shut it down.  Competition is good for innovation.

Can you imagine someone walking into a bank, showing them their business is not profitable, they have no real net worth, and they lost $700,000 last quarter.  
And they convince them to loan them $2,000,000 in cash. That's essentially what Musk did recently.

Eventually Tesla won't be able to borrow any more money.  And that will be the end.  I doubt anyone will buy the entire company because of the high debt level.

People don’t think fire sales be like it is... but it do.

Apple to the rescue?

I don't understand why they would do it.

First real job was going well. I started out of high school twice minimum wage and got a $2 raise in a month and another a monthe later. A year later the head woman in the office would gather up all the supplies and hand them out. Want a pencil? Bring me back the little old one first. LOL. Left the next day. They went down fast.

I didn't find out till 30 years later the company was propped up by the brother of the owner who was nearly a billionaire. Read it in his obituary. Had patents from Texas Instruments days and was a genius electrical engineer who wrote the book on field effect with transistors. He started a venture capital deal with a partner from wall street. They started the funding for Compaq computers back in the day and did $20m investment into an unknown company, electronic arts.

Bankers made huge fees.  They'll personally make a huge bonus for this quarter/year.  
They don't care if the loans are ever paid back - at that point it'll be someone else's problem.

Dayum, that’s an almost 87% downgrade!

Locally, in a small tourist town just about a hundred miles east of Seattle, Tesla built a charging station with more than ten, less than twenty stalls. I've never seen more than two or three cars charging there. Ever. Most days, it's empty, and there are other people parked there in cars that are obviously not electric.

Tesla leases the land, put in the power for the owner, paved everything, and built the chargers. The property owner? He gets paid no matter what; zero charging vehicles, he's paid. Stalls full? He's paid. And, not a trivial sum, either.

How. The. F**k. does that even begin to make financial sense? Seriously--This is up in the mountains, with horrendous weather in the winter. I stopped and talked to a guy charging his Tesla there, one day in January. He was insanely happy to have made it to the charger, because while he'd left Bellevue with a full charge on his car, by the time it hit here, he was down to zero. As he parked it, the car did whatever Tesla's do when the batteries are dead, and shut down. The charging was projected to take long enough that he was looking for a room to stay in that night...

I don't think electric is ready for prime-time, and I'm pretty sure from looking at the facts on the ground that the Tesla is going to be the Delorean of the mid-2000s...

Tesla planned to have more cars (millions?) on the road by now.  With more cars, those charging stations could have been busy/profitable.

Seems like normal corporate culture to me lulz

Why?
Iirc they having nothing proprietary and clearly can’t mass produce cars successfully

It depends entirely on the valuation of Tesla.  The number of companies worldwide that have the financial resources to acquire Tesla at a $50B valuation + ~$20B in debt is extremely small.  In the automotive world only VW and Toyota could even think about it and it would be a "bet the company" acquisition.  A $10B valuation + $20B in debt opens up more possibilities but it's still a big pill to swallow for any automotive company.  A bankruptcy sale would see multiple bidders but who knows how the assets would be broken up and what they would sell for.  Would a Chinese OEM want to bid on a factory in California?  Would a car company want to include the Supercharger network or would it get a higher price on it's own?  A Tesla bankruptcy would be a years long mess that would make the current media coverage of Tesla look muted.

How?

Seriously... How does what I described become profitable, at any level short of a market  penetration of at least 10-25% of the national auto fleet?

Right now, we're at about the point with electric that we were with internal combustion engines were when you had to buy your gasoline in glass carboys down at the local drugstore. Was Henry Ford out there building truck stops, in order to "build out infrastructure" so he could sell more Model T's?

This whole thing just doesn't make economic sense, at all. If electric were ever going to be effective and profitable, nobody would have to subsidize it, and it would be happening naturally.

Musk has managed to make the electric car a positional good; people aren't buying the things because they work better than ICE, they're buying them because of how they make themselves feel, all virtuous and green. The reality is, a Tesla is a friggin' vanity project that makes zero economic sense in 99% of the cases I've seen made for it.

I venture to predict that the future of the automobile is going to be ICE, only with synthetic fuels custom-built from hydrocarbon feedstock sourced from a variety of places, and that this whole "alternative energy" deal for transportation is going to be seen as a massive boondoggle in the coming years. Being able to store and transport your fuel in a liquid form is just too damn convenient, and the sunk costs in infrastructure make it almost entirely unlikely that anything will ever supplant it completely.

If Musk and his minions had really cared about the environment, rather than virtue-signalling, they'd have gone into creating a synthetic liquid fuel that cut down on pollution and was insertable into the carbon cycle such that it wouldn't contribute to adding to the load we're already putting out.

Flatly, you're never going to wean the buying public off of the ICE until you can match the ease and effectiveness of the current paradigm. Nobody who's tried running an electric in the northern US for a winter or two is ever going to risk driving one outside of a major metro area, or even within it. Not to mention the issues with battery pack lifespan--Where's the used market for a Tesla whose pack won't hold a charge, any more?

This whole electric thing is a product of really lousy thinking, and just like wind and all the other renewables, is going to be seen as a huge swindle in the coming decades. It actually reminds me of the underlying reasons for the whole CFC deal, which was more that Dupont's patents on R-12 were running out than anything else. I would wager that those plants they sold on to the Third World are still pumping  out as much refrigerant as they used to, only under less strict operating procedures. And, just like then, the key thing is for the big companies to keep on making money by selling "new and improved", because the old technology is out from under patent protection, and had the virtue of just plain working--Since all the bugs were worked out.

Barring several iterative quantum leaps in battery technology, I don't see the electric car ever working out, economically. Compare the energy density of gasoline or diesel to a battery pack, and consider that as you burn the liquid fuel in the car, the amount of load you're hauling around with your engine actually goes down. With electric, you're always stuck hauling the literal dead weight of that battery around, all the time--And, it's taking up a good quarter of the mass of your vehicle if you want any real range out of them. The numbers just don't add up--Compare the storage capacity per pound of battery to the amount of energy available in an equivalent mass of liquid fuel. Batteries simply can't compete, at anything near where technology is today.

No prob.  If they get the production optimized this week and start next Wednesday, that's only 1.9 per second they'd need to produce until next year.

Surely they can blow away those noobs at Ford who can only crank out around 1 F series trucks per minute per assembly line.

In all fairness, a shocking number of manufacturing/engineering companies seem to regard that as Standard Operating Procedure.

I wish I had saved the ad. Years ago when charging stations for Tesla were just coming out they had an ad "Drive coast to coast in your Tesla using charging stations". Yeah, they skipped the part on the map of the ad that required a 400-500 mile detour lol. I-10 east from CA, to San Antonio, up I-35 to Dallas, over to Jackson MS on I-20, then back down to the coast to rejoin I-10 to get to the coast in Florida. Apparently there were no charging stations in Houston heh.

For the tents?  

Interesting that Elon exercised stock options now. Tesla issued 175,000 new shares for him.  
https://www.marketwatch.com/story/elon-musk-exercises-tesla-options-for-175000-fresh-shares-2019-05-21

That's ugly.

His option price was only $31. He could sell them at market price and get ~$20M minus taxes. Not a bad way to shore up a margin call.

Nearly every asset Tesla has is leveraged against a debt as collateral.  In a bankruptcy liquidation the creditors would seize those assets, effectively destroying the company.

In a reorg, you might have an opportunity for another car company to step in and buy control of Tesla.  But you have to ask, why would they do that?

The cars are poorly designed, poorly built, poorly tested and unprofitable; no one would want to keep producing them.  The showrooms and dealerships were always a bad idea and huge money losers.  The service centers are run at -40% margins.

No one is dumb enough to take over factories in CA or NY.  And the Gigafactory in NV is full of Panasonic's property, and wont be worth it to anyone else to run without the subsidies Tesla gets there from NV tax payers.

Depending on the terms of the Supercharger property leases, they may be worth something once you put adaptors on them to plug into more BEVs, and add credit card readers.

The IP rights to the cars, for the purposes of producing spare parts to keep the current fleet running, might have value.  I don't know, maybe it would be worth it to someone to buy that.

When you break it down, asset by asset, it becomes hard to imagine why anyone would pay $38b for a company with $5b of book value, who loses $0.5b per quarter, isn't growing, and requires regular infusions of new cash to keep the lights on.  More and more I think bankruptcy is a foregone conclusion; it's just a matter of whether the company is dissolved or recapitalized with new management and new owners.

Building cars at scale is the bare knuckle MMA of manufacturing.  You can talk a good game but the manufacturing process separates the men from the boys.   Elon sucks at manufacturing.

The technology is still marginal. It's not good enough for consumer demand to drive the build out of the infrastructure.  Without robust infrastructure you saturate the market quickly. Then you don't have enough growth to drive the improvement in manufacturing or infrastructure. Viscious circle.

Elon has driven it into a corner with debt..I don't see it surviving as a stand alone company...maybe bought by an existing auto major...but I doubt it.

Unusual, but not impossible.  I've seen some situations like that 1st hand.  The key is being able to demonstrate a credible path forward where it's really easy to connect the dots for the lender regarding how you are going to be profitable and be able to pay that money back in the future.

Consumer Reports: Tesla's latest update to its autopilot function raises "serious safety concerns".  
The test of Tesla's Navigate on Autopilot feature performed worse than human drivers and even created new risks for them, the magazine said.
"The feature cut off cars without leaving enough space and even passed other cars in ways that violate state laws," the magazine wrote May 22. "As a result, the driver often had to prevent the system from making poor decisions."  
https://www.cnbc.com/2019/05/22/consumer-reports-says-teslas-autopilot-raises-serious-safety-concerns.html

So basically Telsa Auto Pilot is the human equivalent of an angry asshole with a run & coke or two in his system.

I'm not saying Tesla is going to go bankrupt or that it's even likely. But in the past until just recently if a car company was to go bankrupt your car still worked. You might be shit out of luck for parts. But it didn't require constant updates and having the manufacter turn on/off certain things like extended range during a hurricane and such. I don't know what else Tesla controls at various times.

Batteries don't do well in cold weather. Tesla's lose so much range

Tesla stock was down another 6% today.  A new 2 1/2 year low.

Two weeks ago, bankers like Morgan Stanley were advising investors to loan $2B to Tesla.  
This week, Morgan Stanley is advising investors that Tesla could be in trouble, and the stock could drop to $10/share.  
- This may come back to haunt those banks.

Just bought a model 3 it's flip phone to iphone difference. Gas cars are windows 95 compared to Tesla, this video sums up a solid response to haters

If the financial world doesn't want to lend money to Elon, Tesla is doomed, period.   The financial world will lend money to anything they think can turn a long term profit...do the math.

I wouldn't be a buyer of the stock or the cars at this point.  Tesla service on out of warranty cars is already terrible, your car might not have a company left to warranty it.

Hmm

https://www.dummies.com/personal-finance/investing/online-investing/how-to-sell-stock-short-2/

LOL. Elon is that you?

"IS TESLA DOOMED" 15 minute video that fails to explain why Tesla is not doomed.

For example, at 10:45 - says that Tesla raised $2.7B in loans will allow Tesla to develop "all the new models" coming out.  Wrong.  
- Based on the amount of cash left last quarter ($700M), that will allow Tesla to continue for about three more quarters.  
- Work on Tesla's new semi truck has been deferred to 2020+.  
- The only new plant planned is in China.  It's suppose to produce the current Model 3, not any "new models".

The S is ready for a major refresh and price drop... But no one has mentioned any plans for that. I'm not and have not touched their stock with a 20' pole. Too risky for my blood. Some people made money, some did not, such is life.

Hopefully
Actions should have consequences

It just keeps getting better, I hope we get to see Elon perpwalked after the Chapter 7. Layoffs inbound at Giga 1

\uD83D\uDEA8\uD83D\uDEA8\uD83D\uDEA8GIGASCOOP!!!\uD83D\uDEA8\uD83D\uDEA8\uD83D\uDEA8

Layoffs occurring at Gigafactory post Elon's message on cost savings. Large groups of associates and technicians gone every day dozens or people so far. Many told BS reasons for being cut i.e. safety violations etc... $TSLAQ

RustyBiggs  (@RustyBiggs1) May 22, 2019

So a "leaked" email from Elon hit the streets overnight claiming 900 vehicles a day are being produced and that 1000 a day is going to be the norm now.  The fanboi bulls are running wild with this.

It doesn’t bother you to know that your expensive purchase may soon become an obsolete curiosity?

Did you finance it, or pay cash?

LOL.

Funding secured.

Sounds like Tesla's cost cutting will include toilet paper.  I've also heard Musk is considering switching to domestic champagne for the Tesla corporate jet.  
https://electrek.co/2019/05/24/tesla-cost-cutting-effort-toilet-paper/

yeah, the single ply 80 grit will solve this problem.

Highest paid CEO of 2018: Tesla's Elon Musk.
https://www.nytimes.com/2019/05/24/business/highest-paid-ceos-2018.html

Tesla continues to print stock certificates and "award" them to insiders.  
Attached File

From Elon's leaked email:

I'm just going to go ahead and state that I think he's straight up lying about those production numbers.  In 1Q19 they were still not making 5k Model 3s per week.  I don't believe they've suddenly surged to sustainable 6300/week, nor will they attain 7000/week.  When we get Q2 production numbers at the end of June we'll see this was just more of Elon lying to try and juice the stock price.