They certainly aren't losing on being a money making enterprise, before or after this change.
Or did you mean w.r.t. having autonomous cars? I don't see how adding more work will buy runway...
What I see, from decades of being an engineer, is a company making a bad decision probably to cut costs. Why would Tesla need to cut costs? Something isn't working out correctly.
The result is that Tesla has insane amounts of cash on hand and record-breaking profits, despite rapidly constructing/expanding three factories on three continents.