Originally Posted by
tdracer
The other side of that is Tesla lost over a billion dollars in the process (~$700 million 1st quarter, ~$400 million 2nd quarter). More worrisome is that, while they delivered more cars in the 2nd than the first, income was down by a billion dollars. In short, Tesla is having to cut prices to maintain demand, when they are all ready selling for less than their costs of production. Not even Musk can keep that up indefinitely...
Q1 revenue was 4.5 billion and Q2 was 6.4 billion, I don't know were you are taking that billion dollars down. More crucially, free cash flow was positive 614 million in Q2 versus negative 920 million in Q1.
Tesla is making money with a pretty decent gross margin of around 20%. And it was capable of sustaining that margin in Q2 in spite of mostly selling the lower priced Model 3 now.
The main reason it loses money overall is because it is financing a growth rate of more than 50% (average of last 5 years), more typical a tech company like Amazon or Google and nothing like any other car company. The long term financial outlook of Tesla is excellent, being the undisputed market leader of the fastest growing automotive market segment (73% growth globally in 2018) . As an investor in the company, I prefer to see them grow relentlessly rather than pull accounting stunts like they did with their highly profitable Q3 and Q4 quarters last year.
There is an amazing amount of Tesla bashing in the media because electric cars are jeopardising some well entrenched interests with deep pockets. I find rather unfortunate that a lot of the false narrative about electric cars is spilling over to electric aviation, and especially in the PPRuNe threads on electric powered aircraft.
To be honest, the fact that most (not all !) of the electric aircraft startups we hear about nowadays are total fantasy from a physics standpoint is not very helpful either.