Tesla’s finances for the past 5 years have been probably the most intensely examined/questioned in market history over such a timeframe.

It would be a very very bad look.

Yeah, you are right I guess. Just look what happened to Arthur Anderson after Enron!

Oh....

I guess they should be hoping its a fraud, seems like it’s good for business!

In all seriousness, anyone can miss a fraud. It’s a lot worse when so many big names have been shorting tsla for 5 years at great loss and tsla has continued to raise money in the face of those insolvency concerns.

I’m waiting for your link to the 5 year history of ENE-Q to make it apples to apples.

There's no risk at all. PWC was the auditor for Valeant recently enough, which was exposed as a major fraud and lost 90% of its value under PWC's auditing. The audit caught no red flags. And it wasn't even creative fraud; the auditors were just incompetent, and as far as I can see, PWC took little blame. The auditors aren't calling up suppliers and customers to validate claimed orders/deliveries, aren't chasing money trails of channel stuffing through friendly corporations, auditing networks of friendly corporations. It starts and ends at Tesla's incoming and outgoing. Tesla is especially hard to catch as they wrote their own inventory and accounting software, a bizarre choice.

There are so many ways to commit major fraud that auditors aren't designed to catch and don't want to try and catch (because they won't take blame and it will upset the client and his huge fees). Valeant ran up 10x to $100 billion and was the darling of Wall Street while committing massive fraud right under the nose and with the blessing of PWC.

“We only work hard enough to say ok”

An auditor exposing a fraud at one of their clients would be self-destruction of their business.

It’s not that the auditors are complicit in the fraud - it is just that the system with its conflict of interest shapes the behaviors.

Crooked or straight executive team... they aren’t hiring the auditors to find fraud. They are hiring them to check a box which they are forced to check.

Fair enough - thanks. At least makes me feel a little better about my bearish position in TSLA.

fremont open, company wide email says furlough ended yesterday, workers can take unpaid leave but may lose jobless benefits

daddy's big stand

I dont understand why the BOD couldnt get D&O insurance

They could, the premiums were just super high. So Musk probably said "what if I underwrite the insurance and use last years premiums to save us money"

Am I a conspiracy theorist if I think they need to produce to keep up the fraud, Q2 gets a pass from a financial perspective, and we all know Musk isn't doing this because he thinks it's a constitutional right.

sorry for all the posts but it just keeps getting more and more nutso

I dont think you even need to bring "fraud" into it.

Hes always run things on a razor thin margin and being closed is clearly a problem. Now, will it be a longterm disastrous problem, we will find out.

if that's true, then they didn't have $8m of mostly unencumbered cash as the 10-Q stated, which would be fraud

Also I bought some puts today and I'm immediately regretting it. Funnily, I'm now even more convinced that the puts are good value, but trading based on Twitter battles and an insane ceo is not really that fun. Much better to leave that to observation, unless it is your thing.

most ppl speculated they released the 10-q so early (monday morning after earnings afaik) in order to do a quick capital raise, which has not yet happened and it's been a week. can someone smarter or at least more knowledgeable than me speak to this? is there a reason why they wouldn't or couldn't?

This is why I have a permanent equity short and sell short term covered puts in exchange for LEAPS and occasionally calls. I can wait as long as it takes and just sit back and watch with popcorn.

And now I have a giant pile of free LEAPS.

Read some speculation that they couldn't raise with uncertainty surrounding the factory shutdown. Doesn't make a whole lot of sense to me--why would buyers in a convert or ATM offering care since they just arb it out anyways?--but that would explain the desperation to get it reopened.

It is also possible that the capital markets are very tight unless you have a pristine balance sheet like SHOP, if the recent NCLH, DAL, F, and other bond issues are any indication.

If TSLA can only issue a convert at 11% interest at a frighteningly low strike, then it will scream of a company that is close to BK and cause equity to flee.

Not sure if Trump derangement syndrome is a personality disorder or just a mental disorder, but surely we don't need him brought into every conversation. We already get TDS 24/7. And stating the obvious, that famous public figures are narcissists, is a pretty pointless thing to say. Nobody thinks they are self loathing introverts.
Peace out.

California plant reopening. "If anyone is arrested I ask that it only be me" musk said

https://www.cnn.com/2020/05/11/cars/...eet/index.html

Hes obviously just trying to avoid the most difficult period of being a new parent. Figures he can go to jail and sleep.

Wall Street is basically on hold in terms of new deals. You wouldn’t try to force a new round through unless you’re desperate. The fund raises that’s come through in the past month or two have way more flat and down rounds than usual. This is not an environment you want to raise funds in.

Tesla has more than enough cash to survive rest of the year, especially with China backing its expansion near Shanghai. Like I said before many times, the sweet heart package of loans Musk got in China essentially 100% finances Musk’s expansion near Shanghai. The Chinese got more at stake (in terms of downside risk) in Tesla’s success in China than Musk. Tesla and Musk got pretty much all the upside in the Shanghai plant (since it’s debt financed at very low rates) and none of the downside (they put virtually no money down).

It’s actually amazing how good Musk is at extracting value out of government officials. My guess is the Chinese government is on some level actually awestruck by Musk. But more importantly, they are also hoping to steal some technology that improves their chances to lead the EV market even by a little. To the CCP, just a couple tenths of a percentage point increase in the probability of China dominating global EV market 10 or 20 years down the line is probably worth more than many times the amount of money Musk is getting for Shanghai factory.

CCP and local governments fund all kinds of ventures. You don't need Musk to get a deal there.
Also, there is no proprietary tech they could steal from Tesla.

Hence the insane desperation to open early.

Then why the insane desperation and meltdowns and risk to reopen a mere week early, if their claimed balance sheet is real?