To me this reads like minus credits and bitcoin, they'd have to scale down R&D in order to break event which would probably push back FSD and delivering on all of their pre-ordered promises again? Which I would assume increases the risk of people canceling and registering as negative revenue? How "normal" is their cost of revenue and sales/admin/overhead in the car industry?

seems a little goofy to put credits at the top and not in order of size like the rest of the chart, but that's my only criticism. It does a good job illustrating that the fact that profit ~= credits is largely coincidental

Tesla had a 24% gross margin in Q1. They made a massive amount of money selling cars. They also had a massive amount of R&D and capital expenditures. The emissions credits required R&D and capital expenditures in prior years so you can't say that the R&D and capital expenditures should only be charged against vehicle sales and not emissions credits.

They also spent $1,491 million on R&D. "Much" is more correct than "almost all", which implies that profit is just the leftovers once expenses are subtracted.

Profit and expenses are choices; the fact that a firm puts all its revenue into SSG&A and R&D does not mean that they can't be profitable. If Tesla's revenue decreased by $533 million, they would probably still target $300-400 million in profit by adjusting their spending. They would do that because even at a lower revenue it still benefits them to report profit, and that benefit is still there even if they spend less on other things.

If a $533 million decrease would not lead to $0 profit, then it doesn't make sense to say that their profit comes from credits. It only makes sense to say that 7% of their revenue comes from credits, and that a significant (but not all, and probably less than half) part of their profit comes from credits.

Only an issue if you're an investor. The expectation is eventually that revenue stream will dry up. The question is if Tesla will be able to build it's other revenue streams up to replace it.

I believe most of the credits so far are california credits.

Other countries round the world are designing different CO2 reduction strategies, often without the ability to trade credits.