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