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Comment by 4pkjai | Hacker News Reader

> Tesla got lifetime cashflow positive after burning $6B in accumulated losses, and has now paid all of those back prompting investors to ask for stock buybacks.

Sorry to be dumb, but can you explain this sentence a bit further? What do you mean by "burning $6B in accumulated losses"?

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Tesla lost a total of $6B until it finally started making money. The tables turned in mid-2019 and every quarter since has been profitable.

Are they not still dependent on selling credit (which the government requires people to buy to offset environmental impact)?

Not really. Last quarter for example, they had $14.6 billion in automotive revenues of which $344 million was regulatory credits or a little more than 2%. They had $4.1 billion in automotive gross profits so regulatory credits made up about 8% of their profits.

Meh. Amazon ran for 20 years before posting a profit.

Elon talks about it in the 2022 investor update [1] below.

It means that they burned $6B in total before becoming profitable and eventually paying it all back. So they are now lifetime profitable on a cash basis.

[1]: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pnXy8c0GOpE

>lifetime profitable

Is this like an accounting term? Because the ordinary interpretation of that does not make sense, for obvious reasons.

Also, putting in 6B to (maybe) get back 6B 10 or so years later sounds like a shitty investment to me. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

> Also, putting in 6B to get back 6B 10 or so years later sounds like a shitty investment to me

Note that the investment wasn't to get back $6b ten years later, it was for all future profits.

This was one of the very best investments in decades.

Its only a bad investment if it has zero value at the end of those 10 years, or stops producing cash flow then. OTOH, if its producing enough cash flow to have a market value of many times more than the 6B initial investment, it might look like a bargain.

TSLA market cap is currently greater than 600B and it produced 6B in positive cashflow in 2021 alone.

Does 5.46B Gross Profit in Q1 alone sound like a shitty investment to you? ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

If the bottom line is red, I wouldn't care much if that was a trillion. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

Did you even check the website, btw?

Debt-to-equity ratios: GM: 1.14 F: 1.92 HMC: 0.74 TM: 1.06 TSLA: 0.08

Not OP but I assume that’s what you get if you add up every quarterly loss from their financial disclosures.

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