Musk's conduct Tesla stock slide make $700 million profit for short-sellers

Saqib Iqbal Ahmed, Jennifer Ablan

NEW YORK (Reuters) - Short-sellers who had targeted Tesla Inc (TSLA.O) logged a $700 million paper profit on Thursday after the stock fell nearly 9 percent a day after Chief Executive Elon Musk stunned analysts by dodging “boring” questions about the electric car maker’s financial outlook.
 
The windfall wiped out short-sellers’ 2018 losses on Tesla, the biggest U.S. equity short, bringing year-to-date paper profits to $683 million, said Ihor Dusaniwsky, head of research at financial analytics firm S3 Partners.

Short-sellers aim to profit by selling borrowed shares with the hope of buying them back later at a lower price.

Tesla’s shares and bonds slid on Thursday as investors took Musk to task for cutting off analysts’ questions and grappled with concerns over Tesla’s ability to raise money in the future.
In a bizarre conference call, the iconoclastic CEO described questions about Tesla’s capital requirements as “boring” after Tesla, which also makes solar technology, reported a record loss of $709.6 million, or $4.19 per share, in the first quarter ended March 31.

“Don’t let Musk’s conference call theatrics fool you. He did not want investors to focus on his rapidly deteriorating finances,” prominent short-seller Jim Chanos of Kynikos Associates LP told Reuters in an email.

“Tesla’s quick ratio dropped to 0.38 and their (Altman) z-score is approaching 1.0,” Chanos said.
The so-called quick ratio is a commonly used indicator of short-term liquidity, while an Altman z-score is a combination of weighted business ratios that is used to estimate the likelihood of financial distress.

“Both are indicative of a company in financial distress,” said Chanos.
Chanos told Reuters in November he continued to add to his short position in Tesla throughout 2017.

EXPENSIVE SHORT

The borrowing cost for Tesla is around 3.69 percent, up from about 1 percent at the start of the year, putting it among the top 5 percent most-expensive stocks on the Russell 3000 index to short, according to S3 Partners.

Shorts have to shell out $1.22 million every day to keep their position on, the most for any stock in the Russell 3000 Index, according to S3 Partners data.

Selling Tesla short has not always paid off. Shorts logged $2.3 billion in mark-to-market losses in 2017, as the shares soared 45.7 percent for the year.

But the stock has lost 9 percent in 2018 so far as investors fretted about issues such as a federal probe of a fatal crash on March 23 in California involving one of its vehicles and a downgrade of its credit position by Moody’s Investors Service.

Emboldened by production setbacks at the company, short sellers have boosted short interest in the stock by $2.5 billion, or 26 percent, for the year.

That took the overall short interest to $11.94 billion, enlarging what had been, off and on since March 2016, the largest equity bear bet in U.S. markets, according to S3 Partners data.
Options traders also boosted their bearish bets against Tesla in recent weeks.

Tesla Inc284.75

TSLA.ONasdaq

-16.40(-5.45%)

• TSLA.O

Investor Christopher Irons, founder of independent investigative research website quoththeravenresearch.com, said he had a small position in deep out-of-the money puts on Tesla, that makes money if the stock crashes.
Musk’s remarks during the analyst call shook investors’ confidence in Tesla, Irons said.
“Being a public company is a privilege and if you are going to take the good of being a public company, you owe it to the public to answer their questions,” said Irons.

Reporting by Saqib Iqbal Ahmed and Jennifer Ablan; Editing by Alden Bentley and Bernadette Baum

Our Standards:The Thomson Reuters Trust Principles.

Carmageddon For Tesla, an expensive plastic car that costs more than a top end Mercedes, and can go nowhere fast but not very far

Also, if you don't mind the ELF field your body sits in at a hertzian load that is poison to your nervous system and electro-chemical communication between cells. Also, they explode and burn when the cheaply made battery structure ruptures. YOU DIE. MANY HAVE ALREADY, BUT THE MEDIA HUSHES UP THIS LITTLE GIFT FROM TESLA AND THE DEEP STATE WHO IS BACKING THIS AGENDA 21 VECTOR. Which is the point of all these SUPER expensive cars no one can afford except the rich liberals who buy them as fast as Tesla can ship them, with an average wait time of delivery of TWO YEARS FROM DEPOSIT.

Oh...and to get all the features that ARE STANDARD EQUIPMENT ON EVERY OTHER SINGLE CAR OUT IN THE MARKETPLACE FROM CHEAPO MODELS TO LAMBOS, YOU HAVE TO PAY AN EXTRA 50 THOUSAND DOLLARS just to get the software jail broken to turn them on. A nice little extra F you from Tesla to the world. 

And yet people buy them. Because mainly, they are deep state satanists who follow orders and are there to virtue signal to all the other useful idiots on what they should be doing for global warming. Well, answer me this libtards, where do you think all that electricity comes from anyways? Magical fairy dust? NO, it comes from coal fired electrical plants, of which 80% of all electricity in the world comes from, that's where. 

Most of you reading this cannot nor ever will, be able to afford these death shit boxes. So, you'll end up with the Ford or GM version that is clunky unsafe, and runs like garbage. But hey, at least you can virtue signal to all the other droids who are buying into this global warming, carbon credit scam to control the movement and freedom of the individual, WHICH IS THE MAIN POINT OF ALL OF THIS.

WAKE UP!

This is where Hype Goes to Die...

Musk, the Zuckerberg agency asset of cars. Or the death of them, and our freedom of movement. Tesla and his Space X are frauds and total cons to control the narrative and you people are buying into it without doing any due diligence or critical thinking. It's because of YOU, we are heading into slavery by enabling these devils. Get out of FB and run from TEsla or any other hybrid vehicle. Buying into it is funding your future slavery and the doom of your children.

below from ZH
Yesterday was the monthly moment of truth for automakers in the US. They reported the number of new vehicles that their dealers delivered to their customers and that the automakers delivered directly to large fleet customers. These are unit sales, not dollar sales, and they’re religiously followed by the industry.
Total sales in November rose 0.9% from a year ago to 1,393,010 new vehicles, according to Autodata, which tracks these sales as they’re reported by the automakers. Sales of cars dropped 8.2%. Sales of trucks – which include SUVs, crossovers, pickups, and vans – rose 6.6%. Strong replacement demand from the hurricane-affected areas in Texas papered over weaknesses elsewhere. As always, there were winners and losers.
And one of the losers was Tesla.
First things first: There is nothing wrong with a tiny automaker trying to design, make, and sell shitbox but expensive cars that a few thousand Americans might buy every year, and trying to do so on a battleground dominated by giants. Porsche has been doing that for years. Porsche AG is owned by Volkswagen AG, which is itself majority-owned by Porsche Automobil Holding SE. Tesla is out there by itself.

And Tesla has put electric vehicles on the map, and its a map designed to control where we go, how little we can go, and restrict our lives to local driving ONLY. That was a huge feat, but hey, the deep state is backing his company to the tune of 90% subsidies with your tax dollars. EVs have been around since the 1800s, but given the challenges that batteries posed, they simply didn’t catch on until Tesla made EVs appear to be cool, when they are not. Unless you think leukemia is cool.Yet Tesla has to buy the battery cells from battery makers, such as Panasonic.

Tesla isn’t quite out there by itself, though. The Wall Street hype machine backs it up, dousing it with billions of dollars on a regular basis to burn through as fast as it can. This masterful hype has created a giant market capitalization of about $52 billion, more than most automakers, including Ford ($50 billion). It’s not far behind GM ($61 billion).
But Tesla – which lost $619 million in Q3 – delivered only 1800 vehicles in November in the US, down 28% from a year ago.

There are all kinds of interesting aspects about this.

One: 3,590 vehicles amounts to a market share of only 0.26%, of the 1,393,010 new cars and trucks sold in the US in November. Porsche outsold Tesla by 55% (5,555 new vehicles).

Two: Tesla doesn’t report monthly deliveries, because doing so would show that only the very rich are buying their shitboxes. It wants to play with the big boys, but it doesn’t want people to know on a monthly basis just how crummy and by comparison inconsequential its US sales numbers are. Opaque and dedicated to hype, it refuses to disclose how many vehicles it delivered that month in the US. So the industry is estimating Tesla’s monthly US sales.

Tesla discloses unit sales data in its quarterly earnings reports, long after everyone has already forgotten about the months in which they occurred. And as former employee reports have revealed, most of Tesla's reported numbers are TOTAL FICTION.

Three: So how are Model 3 sales doing? Since Tesla doesn’t disclose its monthly deliveries in the US, the industry is guessing-they have to because the truth reveals what we already know, no one in their right mind is going to spend over $100,000.00 for a plastic shitbox that can only go, at best, 150 miles before you need to plug it into a wall overnight. The assembly line still isn’t working. “Manufacturing bottlenecks,” as Tesla calls it, and “manufacturing hell,” as Elon Musk calls it, rule the day.

In Q3, Tesla delivered 220 handmade Model 3’s, if you even believe that. In October, it delivered about 145 handmade units. In November, the assembly line still wasn’t assembling cars. Inside EVs estimates that Tesla delivered a whopping 345 units in November.
Four: This is where hype goes to die. In February 2017, Tesla hyped these Model 3 production numbers for 2017:

Our Model 3 program is on track to start limited vehicle production in July and to steadily ramp production to exceed 5,000 vehicles per week at some point in the fourth quarter and 10,000 vehicles per week at some point in 2018.

November is solidly in the fourth quarter. 5,000 vehicles per week would mean over 20,000 a month. OK, this is November and not December, so maybe 4,000 a week for a total of 16,000. We got 345.
Even if the estimate of 345 is off by 100 units up or down, it doesn’t even matter. And December isn’t looking much better. Because there is still no mass-produced Model 3.

Five: The bestselling Model S isn’t best-selling anymore. Inside EVs estimates that Tesla delivered 1,335 Model S in the US. This was far outpaced by the humble Model-3-killer the Chevy Bolt. GM sold 2,987 Bolts in November. Tesla is also estimated to have delivered 1,875 Model X SUVs in the US. It took the Model S and the Model X combined to beat the humble Bolt.

Six: The unglamorous Model-3-killer is number one. The Chevy Bolt faces no “production bottlenecks” and no “manufacturing hell.” It was rolled out gradually, starting in October 2016 in California and Oregon, with other states being added to the distribution plan over time. By August 2017, the Bolt was available in all states. By September, 2,632 Bolts were sold in the US; in October 2,781; and in November 2,987.

The Bolt became the best-selling EV in October and retained that crown in November. Nothing was even close. November was the ninth month in a row of rising sales, as it should be for a brand-new vehicle line. GM has sold 20,070 Bolts so far this year.

Seven: But the Bolt is just a flyspeck for GM. It’s something to build the foundation for a larger shift to EVs. It represented just 1.2% of GM’s total deliveries in the US in November. EVs are still just a niche product. And yet, even this flyspeck crushed every Tesla model without fanfare.
Every automaker is preparing a lineup of EVs. Unlike Tesla, they have their supply chains down pat, and they know how to get their assembly lines to function, and they know how to mass-produce vehicles. There are already about two dozen EV models on the market in the US. Like GM, these automakers are just using their EVs to lay the groundwork for the broader shift.

Tesla has used two years of hype surrounding the Model 3 as a way to boost its share price. This allows it to raise many more billions by selling more ludicrously overpriced shares to gullible investors, and by selling more debt to institutional investors who believe that Tesla’s ability to sell still more ludicrously overpriced shares to gullible retail investors will in effect guarantee the junk-rated debt they just bought. Few companies have ever been able to perform that scheme at this masterful level.

Serious delinquencies in subprime auto loans have reached Lehman Moment proportions. But there is no Financial Crisis. These are the boom times. Read…  Auto-Loan Subprime Blows Up Lehman-Moment-Like

INTERNET COMMENTS

The author is factually incorrect when saying that Tesla made ev “cool.”
Tesla has only ever been “cool” among suburban dads who wear mommy jeans.
Musk is just another charlatan with a wig.

Next Tesla scheme to pump the stock: "Now that large touchscreen on the dash mines Bitcoin 24/7. The car will pay for itself!"

That is the irony in the whole SJW lifestyle.  They are all too busy buying cool guy cars and trucks like old American made C10 Chevy's. Fucking hypocrites. Only rich ass cunts buy them, to act like total ego strutting gits who actually believe they are better than anyone else, because their satanic money makes them better. No sympathy for these monsters when their cars spontaneously explode.

Keep supporting tesla
these are the good guys! keep supporting facebook!
keep supporing uber!
doesnt matter if they are taking your rights away, it's the hip thing to do! If you are a soulless white bashing idiot.


Inside Look - Tesla Design Team at Work - creating death boxes and selling them to the world. The Simpsons even telegraphed this truth - they have to - so now you know, no more excuses. :
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WPc-VEqBPHI&ab_channel=AlexGalvis

Every single aspect of this company is a nightmare of any kind of business model, yet our government floods it with OUR MONEY, so it can takeover the market place. Not by demand, but by law. One thing is for certain, the satanic sellouts in Washington are going to mandate EV cars so we HAVE TO HAVE THEM. and here will be Tesla, with its death-boxes for the rich only.

 

Tesla is a double-dealing huckster for the Agenda 21 aspect of the NWO

Elon Musk stepped on stage at Tesla’s product-launch event earlier this month, he knew the market’s confidence in Tesla’s brand had sunk to an all-time low since he took over the company a decade ago. So, he resorted to a tactic that should be familiar to anybody who has been following the company: Blather and Bullshit, the hallmarks of a grifter con artist.

While the event was ostensibly scheduled to introduce Tesla’s new semi-truck – a model that won’t make it’s market debut for another two years, assuming Tesla sticks to its product-roll out deadline – Musk had a surprise in store: A new model of the Tesla Roadster that, he bragged, would be the fastest production car ever sold.

Not only impossible, but a proven flat out lie.

Musk made similarly lofty claims about the battery life and performance of both vehicles. The Tesla semi-trucks, he said, would be able to travel for 500 miles on a single charge. The roadster could clock a staggering 620 – more than double the closest challenger.

There was just one problem, as Tesla fans would later find out, courtesy of Bloomberg: None of it was true. Like with most of his BS announcements, he tells amazing whoppers, without blanching, then gets the tax payer to pay for his operating costs. Like his fake space program. There are videos on the internet of his so-called shuttle rockets exploding over the Atlantic, while the devils at NASA and Musk, claim it was a successful flight of supplies to their fictional space station.

The shit piles so high with these people you need stream wader boots to slog through it all.

In fact, many of the promises defy the capabilities of modern battery technology.

Elon Musk knows how to make promises - all he does is make promises, lie, and piles more lies to cover his other lies - A TRUE CON ARTIST SUPREME. Even by his own standards, the promises made last week while introducing two new Tesla vehicles—the heavy-duty Semi Truck and the speedy Roadster—are monuments of envelope pushing total bullshit.

To deliver, according to close observers of battery technology, Tesla would have to far exceed what is currently thought possible. Ever. And it would require car frames twice the size of modern vehicles to carry the weight, off setting any gains made by his alleged magical batteries. And liberal virtue signalling suckers buy these plastic turd mobiles as fast as they can. That's how gullible and retarded the Hillary crowd is.

Take the Tesla Semi: Musk vowed it would haul an unprecedented 80,000 pounds for 500 miles on a single charge, then recharge 400 miles of range in 30 minutes. That would require, based on Bloomberg estimates, a charging system that's 10 times more powerful than one of the fastest battery-charging networks on the road today—Tesla’s own Superchargers.

The diminutive Tesla Roadster is promised to be the quickest production car ever built. But that achievement would mean squeezing into its tiny frame a battery twice as powerful as the largest battery currently available in an electric car.

These claims are so far beyond current industry standards for electric vehicles that they would require either advances in battery technology or a new understanding of how batteries are put to use, said Sam Jaffe, battery analyst for Cairn Energy Research in Boulder, Colorado. In some cases, experts suspect Tesla might be banking on technological improvements between now and the time when new vehicles are actually ready for delivery.

“He is flat out a liar,” Jaffe said. “I think they left something out of the public reveal that would have explained how these numbers work. Because they don't. And never will."

While Jaffe seems inclined to give Tesla the benefit of the doubt, there’s little, if anything, in Musk’s recent behavior to justify this level of credulity. In recent months, Musk has repeatedly suffered the humiliation of seeing his lies and half-truths exposed. For example, the self-styled “visionary” claimed during the unveiling of the Model 3 Sedan that he would have 1,500 copies of the new model ready for customers by the end of the third quarter. Instead, the company managed a meager 260 models as factory-line workers at its Fremont, Calif. factory struggled to assemble the vehicles by hand as the Model 3 assembly line hadn’t been completed.

Increasingly agitated customers who placed deposits with Tesla back in March 2016 have begun asking for refunds, only to be chagrined by the company’s sluggish response. While nobody in the mainstream press has (somewhat bafflingly) made the connection, Tesla revealed earlier this month that it burned an unprecedented $1.4 billion of cash during the third quarter - or roughly $16 million per day - despite Elon Musk's assurance that Tesla had its "all-time best quarter" for Model S and X deliveries.

And let’s not forget the fiasco surrounding Tesla’s autopilot software. Musk has repeatedly exaggerated its performance claims. And customers who paid more than $8,000 for a software upgrade more than a year ago have been repeatedly disappointed by delays and sub-par performance. Auto pilot in Tesla cars tend to kill its users, over and over again. A little point the media and government tend to ignore. Why?

Musk’s exaggerations about the Tesla Roadster were particularly egregious.

Tesla claims that its new $200,000 Roadster is the quickest production car ever made, clocking zero to 60 in 1.9 seconds. Even crazier is the car’s unprecedented battery range: some 620 miles on a single charge. That's a longer range than any battery-powered vehicle on the road—almost twice as long as Tesla's class-leading Model S and Model X.

To achieve such power and range, Musk said the tiny Roadster will need to pack a massive 200-kilowatt-hour battery. That’s twice the size of any battery Tesla currently has on the road. Musk has previously said he won't be making the packs bigger on the Model S and Model X because of space constraints. So how can he double the pack size in the smaller Roadster?

BNEF’s Morsy has a twofold answer. First, he expects Tesla will probably double-stack battery packs, one on top of the other, beneath the Roadster's floor. That creates some engineering problems for the battery-management system, but those should not be insurmountable. Still, Morsy said, the batteries required would be too large to fit in such a small frame.

“I really don’t think the car you saw last week had the full 200 kilowatt hours in it,” Morsy said. “I don’t think it’s physically possible to do that right now."

$200,000.00 for a plastic electric car that has a realistic range-given its frame size and ability to support the weight of its highly toxic lithium battery-of 70 miles. But, you can bet the satanic Hildebeast crowd will buy them hand over fist just to push this whole agenda 21 slavery agenda down the rest of the world's throats.

Tell me, Elon, how many satanic rape rituals have you attended at Bohemian Grove? How many young boys did you rape and murder, covered in blood. It was 3 wasn't it? It was. Does the world know you are a NAMBLA donation vector? Why do you try to hide this part of your life from your public persona? Let's face it...you are a lying, two-faced grifter who murders in satanic rituals and were rewarded by being the Zuckerberg of automobiles. Do your sex partners know you have three venereal diseases and are impotent?

Is it possible that, thanks to incremental improvements in battery density and cost, Musk somehow manages to hit these lofty targets? Perhaps, though, as Bloomberg points out, the fact that Musk is basing these claims on a set of projections that haven’t yet been realized is hardly confidence inspiring.
To be sure, there’s an important caveat to Musk’s claims. While they may be staggeringly exaggerated, there’s still the possibility that incremental improvements in battery technology will make these targets more feasible by the time the models hit the market.

Again, Musk may be banking on the future. While Tesla began taking deposits on the Roadster immediately—$50,000 for the base model—the first vehicles won't be delivered until 2020. Meanwhile, battery density has been improving at a rate of 7.5 percent a year, meaning that by the time production starts, packs will be smaller and more powerful, even without a major breakthrough in battery chemistry.

“The trend in battery density is, I think, central to any claim Tesla made about both the Roadster and the Semi,” Morsy said. “That’s totally fair. The assumptions on a pack in 2020 shouldn’t be the same ones you use today."

However, in its analysis of the feasibility of Musk’s claims, Bloomberg overlooked one crucial detail: Back in August, the company's veteran director of battery technology, Kurt Kelty, unexpectedly resigned to "explore new opportunities," abruptly ending a tenure with the company that stretched for more than a decade, and comes at a critical time for Elon Musk.
Kelty’s resignation – part of an exodus of high-level executives that is alarming in and of itself - hardly inspires confidence in Tesla’s ability to innovate. We’ve noticed a trend with Tesla: The more the company under delivers, the more Musk over promises. The main and obvious definable quality of a con man and huckster. Call them on their BS, and they just spew more BS. The only reason Tesla stock is so high is because many Federal reserve banks constantly buy up Tesla stock to drive the prices up, creating an illusion of a company that is doing well and is going places. Tesla is a Bernie Madoff business scam, that is the main direction of Agenda 21 -  Cars that don't go very far, cost so much only the rich can afford them, and are completely controlled by remote so anyone breaking from the plan will be dealt with violently, ala Michael Hastings. Within ten years, all new cars will be over priced versions of this plastic pile of shit.

In our opinion, this is not a sustainable business strategy.  What it is, is a public persona of con artistry that bunko squads warn people about who promise the moon, and you end up with empty wallets. Especially the tax payer.