Neil
You're looking at the 16 year old tesla as a growth company. I agree that Tesla is facing a growing debt load, but:
Actually I was comparing a 16 year old company, a leader in its market and with a product well ahead of the competition, with 80 year old companies (at the time), which were incumbents who should have known better. But still ran themselves into bankruptcy.
Tesla is doing well for a company which is doing the impossible. Don't you think? After all, doing the impossible is not supposed to be profitable at all, yet they have managed to do that a few times.
I can't think of many things which would be more difficult than starting a new international car manufacturing company from the ground up, as a start up, then reaching nearly half a million cars sold per year. Granted they have not quite got there yet but it is likely for 2020.
Perhaps starting a completely new space launch system and making it the leading company for price, cadence and lift capacity. Now that would be a real achievement wouldn't it? After all it was only Governments that could do it wasn't it?
To go back to the top of this reply of mine, the biggest killer in the Auto business is oversupply. Where car companies spend billions making and shipping cars to dealers that people have not ordered and do not want. Then having to sell those cars at below manufacturing cost to get them off inventory and into positive cash flow. A problem Tesla does not have. Yet.
Tesla has the money to operate for the next two years at current profit rates. If profit increases, they will have even more.
To touch on another point about Tesla making money for shareholders. Tesla is making money for investors. Actually quite a lot of money. The lions share of the funds raised this year were convertible bonds. As Tesla goes at the moment, those bonds will be paid back, rather than converted, at quite a handsome profit. This has been going on for quite a while now and ensuring that investors will buy more if Tesla goes back to the markets again.
It is easy to ignore the fact that Tesla will have paid back more than $1.5bn in convertible bonds between the end of Q2 2018 and the end of Q4 2019. Being able to pay this kind of funding means that when the costs for Gigafactory3 come due it is quite likely that Tesla will have the money to pay it.
As for the "tax" situation, it would be interesting to see what they are talking about. If they are talking about the $600m in value added tax they would be paying on 150,000 vehicles sold, or the taxes paid for their workers or whether it is tax on profit for the year. As the specific tax is not clarified, it is hard to determine what Tesla is expected to pay.
At the moment Tesla has a profit margin on their vehicles above 0%. The fact that the vehicles are funding solar roof, servicing, supercharging and a whole host of other things like Semi development, Model Y development, computer development (don't even begin to think that is over, they are working on HW 4.0 right now), plus AP enhancements leading to FSD and the development of a ride hailing product, means that Tesla is not falling over. It means they are growing and expanding.
Tesla is hardly producing the next Edsel.