It's stories like this and the attitude that they're important which gets us very destructive behaviors like putting production quota ahead of quality. Production misses are news when they're for substantial cause. Like a 10% miss for an S or X might be news.
Edit: I am not trying to say that Tesla should be punished, but am specifically addressing that it is, in fact, news.
I wouldn't read too much into this myself. Scaling production is hard. Regardless, it's an important metric that speaks to Tesla's ability to deliver, at least short term.
Some investors will value on random noise, and some other investors will figure this out and capture the mispricing, if there's any.
There's a strong incentive for either side to overblow a piece of news that fits their agenda.
It's something like criticizing someone for running 75 feet instead of 400 in the first 45 seconds of their third marathon because they had to re-tie their shoes.
Why is Tesla missing it's Model 3 targets at the very beginning of the production run (hundreds of cars) more relevant than the Model S and X productions exceeding targets by "several thousand"?
Looking at the first two columns of WSJ tech page that lists that article ... articles are on (Apple, Tesla, Google, Facebook, Goldman Sachs/Bitcoin, Uber). Looking at that list of companies, would you guess that WSJ's editors are pushing the most relevant and important information, or the information their readers want the most? One is gossip, the other is news. People gravitating towards the news they want to see and news producing information tailored for their audience is the greatest force of evil in the 21st century. Popularity drives every news outlet to the bottom until you can't tell the difference between TMZ and WSJ.
Where do I go if I want to read actual news instead of the business gossip column?
Tesla is probably the only car company where the number of pre orders is deemed to be important. Car companies make money with sales and if they don't get production ramped up in time (before more alternatives become available), a lot of potential buyers will order somewhere else. Production capacity and consistent quality are the only important factors for Tesla, not how many people think about buying one at some point (in my opinion).