syndrome, lol. What a bunch of ****ups.
Translation: We cut prices too much and orders have boomed and we have some cash again, so we're reversing our horrible decision and putting prices back up a bit. Also, when Musk came down from his drug binge the board informed him that closing all stores was probably a bad idea, and we managed to convince him that even if one of the salesmen posted something bad about him online, it was not a good reason to fire the entire retail staff. Also, Elon learned that you can't just suddenly terminate retail leases and that we had to keep paying for the stores anyway, so there was that. Our bad! At Tesla we strive for 100% secure jobs and we promise to our retail staff there will be no further mass layoffs until the next drug binge.

I mean seriously, what are the odds that the grandiose narcissist got in a rage about demand dying and blamed the "worthless" sales staff and fired them all? >50%? Closing the stores never made any sense on a business level, particularly when you count severance and retail leases. Musk's history in business is one of an absolutely incompetent loser who gets into petty rages and fires people.

I think from the small price rises we can reasonably infer that demand is temporarily improved with these massive price cuts, which take them to deep unprofitability even with the rise. But that's a separate issue. The "unlimited demand" narrative has been saved - for now.

I legitimately think this is it. Musk just went crazy but it simply wasn’t a viable plan given the severance, leasing issues etc as you say. The whole narrative was that storefronts are obsolete and worthless and that’s why they were all being closed - now there’s been a total reversal.

The price raise is even on a week delay to try and juice orders even more. Lol.

i lold so hard at the "raising prices' (so act nowwww). Complete clown show.

I was reading an article saying that Tesla's accidents are while less frequent than average, still more dangerous because the accidents are catastrophic and fatal with frequency. does anyone know it?

Yeah. The worse possibility is that Musk and the board weren't in a rage and did this after calm deliberation. Musk is a big-thinking narcissist who can't see details. His thought process probably went like this:

Board: How can we save money?
Elon: 75% of our sales are online
Elon: Man we sure pay a lot of money for sales staff. They don't even pay for themselves in terms of what they bring in.
Elon: Let's get rid of them. We don't need them. It's also a good excuse to cut prices...we can talk about our "savings"
All hat and no brain brother, Musk's cousins, absentee "Chairman" who's in Australia working for another company, 34 year old CFO: Great idea Elon! We're disrupting the auto industry! Let's sell cars like software!

Days later:

Wow everyone is pissed and we have to pay severance and we can't get out of retail leases and this is hurting sales. My bad. Let's backtrack and use it as an excuse to raise prices a bit since we cut them too much?


If this is the level of sober cuckshow at Tesla - and it probably is, look at their early attempts to fully robotize the lines in the face of all experience and common sense - how do they have a future? Companies are their culture. Bulls should be hoping Musk went into a drug-induced Hitler rage, it's a more bullish outcome for them.

Everything is going to be okay. They bought some car carriers.

How he was allowed to control this company will be a case study one day.

i don't know why they don't just give him some imaginary title like chief money raiser and bring in someone capable to run the company.
he's so bad, there has to be an infinite amount of car company managers in detroit or germany who are better by an order of magnitude.

This is likely true. But its possible that the 35k and across the board cuts didn't get the response they were hoping for and Tesla believes there are still potential customers sitting on the sidelines waiting. And Tesla hopes to spur them into buying with what is effectively a limited time only sale.

I wouldn’t be surprised if they extended the “sale” a week or two extra to try and juice the Q1 numbers even more. They used a similar strategy in Q4, setting fake deadlines about when you could order your car by to get delivery before the tax credit expired. They are shooting from the hip here so no reason to thing the week “sale” window is set in stone.

It's been obvious for a long time they need a Tim Cook like guy to get **** done.

The logic of the price changes and stores closing and how the % changes are related is some of the dumbest communication language I have seen from a company at any level

Raising capital to buy a trucking company doesn't seem to fit with the bear thesis.

A 50b company with supposedly 4b cash on hand at end of 2018 issues 15m in stock to buy trucks instead of cash.....how doesn’t that fit with bear thesis?

Raising capital?

If I understand,Tesla bought trucks and trailers. Gonna operate them online, no need for drivers.

If they were smart they would stealth-raise by paying for everything with stock. Deposit Refunds? Cultists will take stock. Suppliers? hey, take more stock and don't sweat the 90 days. Employees? Oh, wait they already pay senior employees mostly stock.

Save the cash, pay for everything possible with stock and Elon gets to save face by not doing a formal SEC-approved capital raise.

Two different finance VPs out today after the Engineering VP quit on Friday with no job in hand one week from Model Y reveal.

I thought a big piece of it was them not being able to raise capital by issuing stock?

Also, just why the heck put the cash towards that? There's no way that's a legit ROI.

1. This isn't a public offering. The MXWL acquisition, if it goes through, would be much more of a test of the can't raise theory since MXWL is a public company.
2. Even if there is no legal mechanism preventing Tesla from issuing shares there is the issue of how much of a discount from current market price Tesla would have to provide to raise any significant amount of equity. Remember that the stock price is Tesla's core product and it may ruin the story if they raise at $250/share.

The time to raise was during Q4 when the cracks in the facade had not yet appeared. Whether it was hubris or incompetence or regulators that prevented that from happening doesn't really matter at this point.

The legal fees for issuing stock are no nominal

I'm going with the "no one will underwrite" theory. It's not trivial to get billions in capital from the market - in fact it's rare. To give you an idea (source here):

- Tencent had to underwrite their big 2017 raise
- Five of the biggest Wall Street banks had to underwrite their 2016 raise

The retail market just can't sustain billions in equity raises and you need large underwriters. The evidence that the banks think Musk is toxic is pretty clear:

- A $750 million SpaceX raise was dumped by Goldman - near unheard of as far as I understand - and they ended up with far less
- The big banks refuse to give personal loans against his SpaceX shares. Which is bizarre for someone worth $20 billion on paper, collateralized at 1:4 on his other loans. What the hell are they afraid of that they won't accept free money?
- Musk misappropriated money from SpaceX rather than spend his own, despite his billion dollars in loans over the years.
- Musk recently had to mortgage his LA homes, all five of them, for a mere $61 million, to get more funds.

Judge grants SEC motion to reply to ridiculous response by Tesla regarding contempt charges

I’m too lazy to link

Customary. Don't know why SEC even had to ask permission.