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Musk to employees: Tesla could show a profit in Q3 if we buckle down

Tesla Model S (C) ChargedEVs

Tesla has been driving on a rough road lately – a thoroughfare called Wall Street. The company’s future depends on being able to ramp up Model 3 production in a timely manner, and recent news items about the SolarCity deal, the new master plan and the new P100D battery pack make some folks think that Tesla is failing to focus on the task at hand. The recent revelation that the company will need to raise additional cash soon has stoked fears that Elon Musk’s bold enterprise could explode on the launch pad, with fiery footage in everyone’s living rooms.

Improved batteries may impress EV techies, and hundreds of thousands of advance orders certainly got the attention of auto industry execs, but grey-suited Wall Street types are obsessed with things like cash flow and quarterly profits. If Tesla could show a profit in its upcoming third quarter report, that would surely silence the naysayers (for now), and put TSLA stock back on an upward trajectory.

Believe it or not, this goal is within reach, as Elon Musk said in a recent e-mail to employees (via Bloomberg) that urged them to maximize deliveries and minimize costs.

“We will be in a far better position to convince potential investors to bet on us if the headline is not ‘Tesla Loses Money Again,’ but rather ‘Tesla Defies All Expectations and Achieves Profitability,’” Musk wrote.

“We are on the razor’s edge of achieving a good Q3, but it requires building and delivering every car we possibly can, while simultaneously trimming any cost that isn’t critical, at least for the next 4.5 weeks. Right now, we are tracking to be a few percentage points negative on cash flow and GAAP profitability, but this is a small number, so I’m confident that we can rally hard and push the results into positive territory. It would be awesome to throw a pie in the face of all the naysayers on Wall Street who keep insisting that Tesla will always be a money-loser!”

 

Source: Bloomberg, Electrek

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