Time to Revive TTAC's Tesla Deathwatch? Tesla Could Run Out of Cash This Year

Ronnie Schreiber
by Ronnie Schreiber

Tesla Motors is 15 years old and it is still not profitable. Hyperbolic stock values have encouraged investors to keep showering Elon Musk and his crew with billions of dollars to keep the EV company afloat and develop new products, but now the Bloomberg news agency says that Tesla’s cash burn is severe enough to make the company insolvent this year if they don’t raise new capital, something made more difficult by a recent 24% decline in that stock’s value.

Reporters Dana Hull and Hannah Recht did a deep dive into Teslas finances, both where their money has come from and where it’s been going. They came up with some interesting data. The company is going through cash at the rate of about $6,500 a minute, a bit more than $9 million a day. Free cash flow has been in the red for over a year. That’s how much money a firm generates after subtracting capital expenses.

The company’s cash situation is closely related to employment levels. In just three years, from 2014 until last year, Tesla went from about 13,000 employees to more than three times that number and they are still looking to hire thousands more as they try to ramp up production on their Model 3. The Model 3 is unarguably vital to the company’s success.

As the payroll increased, and with sales relatively flat before the Model 3 finally started shipping, revenue per worker dropped. Musk has often spoken of showing Detroit how to do things, but GM and Ford each take in more than twice as much revenue per employee as Tesla does. In the 4th quarter of 2017, Tesla paid out as much in interest on its debt as General Motors did, with Tesla earning one tenth of the revenue of GM. The revenue per employee problem is exacerbated by what Musk himself called a “Russian nesting doll” of contractors and subcontractors at the California assembly and Nevada battery plants.

At the start of 2018, Tesla had $9.4 billion in debt and $3.4 billion in cash. Moody’s says that $1.2 billion of that debt has to be repaid next year and over and above that, to stay operating it will need another $2 billion this year.

Tesla claims that it won’t require additional financing this year, save for existing credit lines, but that’s contingent on the positive cash flow that would result in the company actually hitting 5,000 units per week production level on the Model 3, something it hasn’t yet proven it can do.

Jeff Osborne of Cowen & Co. doesn’t believe Tesla’s claims, since Musk has made similar statements in the past and then gone out to raise more cash. Osborne thinks Tesla is going to try to raise $3 billion with a stock sale late this year, and another $2 billion late next year, to cover cash burn and debt retirement while still keeping more than $1 billion in cash reserves. I don’t believe that figure would include the $854 million in (mostly Model 3) deposits, but it likely includes the substantial interest earned on what amounts to interest free loans to the company.

If Tesla does collapse, those deposit holders would not be the biggest losers. That would be Musk himself. He’s Tesla’s single biggest stockholder and if his current compensation package vests, he’ll own more than a 1/4 of the company.

TTAC founder Robert Farago was highly skeptical of Tesla’s chances for success and the Tesla Deathwatch series was a staple here before Robert retired it a decade ago, after readers asked him to lighten up on the negativity. In light of Bloomberg’s report, our editor emeritus’ final post in that series sounds a bit prescient.

I still believe Tesla doesn’t have a hope in Hell of staying in business. But it will take a while for that to play out.

I don’t think it’s time just yet to revive the Tesla Deathwatch, but maybe we should dust it off to have it ready just in case.

[Image: Bloomberg]

Ronnie Schreiber
Ronnie Schreiber

Ronnie Schreiber edits Cars In Depth, the original 3D car site.

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  • Eliyahu Eliyahu on May 05, 2018

    The probability of success, as I see it, comes down to production capacity and the dealer (or service) network. At the moment, the Tesla is a higher-end fad car. This in no diminishes the positive attributes of the vehicle. But fads come and go. High end pickups have replaced Mercedes and BMWs. Tesla replaced Prius for status. Prius and Camry hybrids might not have status, but lets compare dealer networks, production capacity, and actual sales. The winner might not be the company with the car in orbit.

  • Speedlaw Speedlaw on May 07, 2018

    I drive 30k per year, so that is a lot of gas. I've considered Tesla, but the problem is twofold. Most places I go do not have any charging, unless you count running a 110v cord to the wall and borrowing power (this is how I'll know EV are mainstream...when all the outlets outside public buildings have locks on them). I also don't go the same places or route consistently. The price of the Tesla is still E class, so the benefits of "no gas" are outweighed by the "70k" price point. Much like diesel, the extra costs up front have a long payback time....if at all, as I learned the hard way. Any new enterprise requires a great persuader, who can also be seen as a con man, according to your worldview. His arrogance prevented him from learning from the established automakers, who while unglamorous did know something about making cars. I don't own any Tesla. The EV will have a niche. It won't replace a majority of ICE cars, but I'm guessing 10 years out it may have 10% of the market.

  • CanadaCraig You can just imagine how quickly the tires are going to wear out on a 5,800 lbs AWD 2024 Dodge Charger.
  • Luke42 I tried FSD for a month in December 2022 on my Model Y and wasn’t impressed.The building-blocks were amazing but sum of the all of those amazing parts was about as useful as Honda Sensing in terms of reducing the driver’s workload.I have a list of fixes I need to see in Autopilot before I blow another $200 renting FSD. But I will try it for free for a month.I would love it if FSD v12 lived up to the hype and my mind were changed. But I have no reason to believe I might be wrong at this point, based on the reviews I’ve read so far. [shrug]. I’m sure I’ll have more to say about it once I get to test it.
  • FormerFF We bought three new and one used car last year, so we won't be visiting any showrooms this year unless a meteor hits one of them. Sorry to hear that Mini has terminated the manual transmission, a Mini could be a fun car to drive with a stick.It appears that 2025 is going to see a significant decrease in the number of models that can be had with a stick. The used car we bought is a Mk 7 GTI with a six speed manual, and my younger daughter and I are enjoying it quite a lot. We'll be hanging on to it for many years.
  • Oberkanone Where is the value here? Magna is assembling the vehicles. The IP is not novel. Just buy the IP at bankruptcy stage for next to nothing.
  • Jalop1991 what, no Turbo trim?
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