Tesla burns cash, loses more than $4,000 for every car sold

This is actually true, but guess how many investors in VWAG actually cared? Not as many as you think. The Veyron was Ferdinand Piech's moonshot. It was the automotive Concorde. The physics involved are sort of nuts[1], especially when you consider it was developed in the late 90s and went into production over a decade ago. The R&D costs were ludicrous. They nearly burnt down the engine design building because the immense heat the engine spewed out on the test rig... yet still had to find ways to dissipate that much heat in actual use. It was considered an engineering and research exercise that could defray some of its costs.

This isn't much different. New automotive production line and models costing serious money up front? I'm going to die from a lack of surprise.

[1] Consider a valve stem cap. They're aluminum, and weigh ~1g. However at near 400kph, because of the centripetal force of the wheel, they effectively weigh 7.5kg at those speeds. They also had to redesign the schrader valves so they wouldn't deflate at those speeds. They also had to create new TPMS sensors because even Porsche's -- which were rated for around 350kph -- damn near disintegrated past 375kph.

If they stopped expansion (stores, service centers, superchargers, equipment, etc) and investment into growth (new hires, new models, etc), then they could be profitable since that would lower their expenses and they could use their gross margin per car to fully cover expenses. However, since they see a huge market, they are foregoing current profit and investing all of that and more into expansion and growth. This is only to be expected of a high-growth company in its early stages of growth.

It's like a non-programmer looking at Twitter or even Google. How can this be hard? Isn't it doing the same job as Spotlight on your local computer? It's not! It's a much harder problem, primarily because of scaling, fighting with SEO, etc. We do understand this for software. The car business is more complicated than it looks.

So by GAAP they are losing $14.7K/car. If I had money to speculate with I'd be shorting them, except this;

"Musk has steered Tesla out of tight corners before. In September 2012, the company faced a cash crunch, but raised money by selling shares and renegotiating the terms of a federal loan."

Tells me where the next round of "capital" is coming from when they get into trouble. Don't let anyone tell you we live under Capitalism.

I would not rush to sell tesla shares on this headline, and at least they seem to know where the car market is going.