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Comment by green-eclipse | Hacker News Reader

Tesla seems to have the advantage that investors are willing to supply it with endless amounts of cash to fuel it's unprofitable operations year after year. In its 16 year history, it has never turned an annual profit. It has lost billions and billions of dollars. Tesla just received another $2 billion lifeline infusion earlier this year.

Other automakers have to play by more sane financial rules.

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That's exactly what the same people also said about Amazon.

My understanding is that amazon was basically cash flow positive, but ran GAAP losses and never really "struggled" financially.

Whereas Tesla does indeed have some systemic financial issues.

In other words Amazon could have been "profitable" on a GAAP accounting basis fairly early on, but Tesla would struggle to do that.

Tesla makes a profit on every car that they sell[0].

There are more people wanting to buy Tesla's than they can currently produce[1].

Telsa needs to spend more money to increase production. They make money on each car sold and they can sell a lot more than they currently do. Tesla being in the red in order to increase production is the same scenario that Amazon was in.

[0] https://www.fool.com/investing/2019/07/26/tesla-management-t...

[1] https://electrek.co/2018/07/03/tesla-model-3-long-backlog-re...

Specifically, Amazon was cash-flow positive but deliberately chose to reinvest all their profits into the company instead of paying out dividends, so that appears on the books as a loss but it really isn't.

That's a nice story, but the numbers don't support the narrative. Tesla's been reporting revenue for 13 years (that I can find). So I took the first 13 years of both Tesla and Amazon financials. Amazon was breakeven by year 7. Telsa is just losing more money as time goes on. (Apologies for bad HN formatting). Here's the data:

Tesla annual net income, in millions:

Year 1: -$78

Year 2: -$82

Year 3: -$56

Year 4: -$154

Year 5: -$254

Year 6: -$396

Year 7: -$74

Year 8: -$294

Year 9: -$889

Year 10: -$675

Year 11: -$1,961

Year 12: -$976

Q1+Q2 Year 13: -$1110

Amazon annual net income, in millions (rounded):

Year 1: $0

Year 2: -$100

Year 3: -$700

Year 4: -$1400

Year 5: -$600

Year 6: -$100

Year 7: $0

Year 8: $600

Year 9: $400

Year 10: $200

Year 11: $500

Year 12: $600

Year 13: $900

yes and being able to run at a loss for decades was also an advantage for Amazon.

Amazon was breakeven by year 7 of its existence (2003). They never went "decades" losing money.

> In its 16 year history, it has never turned an annual profit.

I don’t think that’s something that could be said about Amazon.

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