Folks here are my latest thoughts on tesla. After hearing elon musk and spending some some more time going through the statements. Oh boy folks all right so bottom line cash flow. Okay yeah we have cash.

Flow we have an operating cash. Flow a tesla of 2351 billion dollars. Yes. We have free cash flow of 621 billion dollars.

That's when we take the actual operating cash. Flow and we subtract out their investments of about 173. Into things like their factor that number is still positive. But what we really don't have is a positive change in net cash.

If we take out the bitcoin position. This is in my opinion a little bit of an issue because if you look at the current assets. That tesla has and you subtract off their current liabilities and i have just i've adjusted this slightly for not only rounding purposes to make this simpler. But also because there are things like deferred revenue.

Which you expect is going to turn into cash blah blah blah. Point is if you take their current assets. Which is like their big old cash position. Which they have a lot of cash.

Okay people like to. Say oh tesla has a lot of. Cash. Yeah they got 183.

Billion. In cash. Okay i got it i got it. But if you take the current cash and marketable securities and accounts.

Receivable and then you ignore the deferred revenues in the liability section. You still end up getting current assets minus current liabilities of about zero that means that if tesla needs any additional money to fund potential quarter to quarter losses or wanting to build a new factory. What's tesla going to have to do they'll have to do a bond raise or they'll have to sell or issue and sell new stock and those are things that dilute existing shareholders. We don't like hearing that last time this happened in september of 2021 and we did a five billion dollar bond sale uh what happened well the stock this basically started the drop of the stock in the amount of about 35.

Now that september was a little bit of a rough month other tech stocks fell as well. But it was definitely the turning point uh for tesla. At least in the short term uh and so you know anytime you get cash that is close to being negative at any point on statements people don't like it and the reality is the following tesla sold at a 106 billion dollar loss bitcoin. They said in the earnings call they lost 106 billion dollars.

If you take the 936 billion dollars of change in cash and you subtract that by the end change in cash. That tesla had the net change in cash cash. Tesla had of 847 million. You would have gotten that is if you did not sell if you did not sell this bitcoin you would have been at negative and this should be reversed.

But whatever you would have been at negative 89 million dollars as a change in cash and i think that would have spooked some folks uh now that would just be a short term thing. Probably a short term buying opportunity if you're a big tesla bull. But it is something that we were pretty dang close to having a negative number on and the bitcoin sale by elon musk. Where elon musk decided to sell 75 of tesla's bitcoin is something that ultimately kept that number positive had it not been for that net change in cash would have been a big fat negative.

So we've got that clarity out of the way. Now. Why did elon do this. Well elon says.

He did this because they were uncertain about shanghai and let's be clear about shanghai shanghai props the margins a lot because without shanghai we ended up with margins excluding regulatory credits of 262 percent. Which is some of the which is actually the lowest level that we've seen since the second quarter of 2021 when we were just about at a 20 uh just a little bit over. 25 a point. Uh.

25 and a half 258. Percent somewhere around. There the point is it's the lowest. Level we have seen since then.

Yeah. 258 was was the prior low last q2 and again that's 258. So we still beat that but in my opinion. We mostly beat that because we saw model s and x deliveries up substantially of a nine percent quarter.

Over quarter. That's a pretty good boost of model s and x deliveries. In fact. If you go all the way back to the last time we had margins this.

Low we only delivered. 23. 000 model s's and x's now we delivered 164. Uh thousand model s's and x's which is still nine percent greater than the last quarter.

So it goes to show you like the s's and x's were the only thing that kept this margin together. If we didn't have the s's and x's and shanghai were closed. Oh. We would have had a terrible margin mesh and unfortunately.

This was one of the scenarios that i said hey how inefficient is tesla without shanghai uh unfortunately. It's still pretty inefficient without shanghai now hopefully that once uh berlin and austin ramp. We end up getting some substantial efficiency right that's what we want to see and we then start growing like shanghai. But look the dollar cost of labor in shanghai.

Is obviously a lot cheaper than what it could be in berlin or in texas. So you're always going to have this large advantage from shanghai. But it just shows you that china is a pretty big piece of the puzzle for tesla. And remember international sales make up about 55 percent of sales for tesla.

We did have a nice bump in solar deployed especially. Uh a storage deployment at 11 or 11. Uh gigawatts. Which is really really nice.

And that is a nice that's a decline from q2 of last year. But it's definitely a nice increase from last quarter where we had 846 megawatts deployed now we're at 1133. But some of the other things that we really have to talk about uh are not only what we talked about regarding the sort of cash flow and net change in cash not only what we talked about in margin. But also what about the consumer.

So elon musk did first pull at tim cook. He first dodged a question about the consumer and just basically talked about how the big problem for tesla is production. Not the consumer that uh you know if people order a hamburger. They want to they want it right away.

They don't want to wait three hours and the same should be true of a car people actually don't want to wait we don't want an order backlog yeah. Sure maybe you don't want an order back log elon. But i want an order backlog because i don't want to see tesla doing 14. Million vehicles per year and having no order backlog.

I want to see an order backlog until we get to like 5 to 10 million vehicles produced and if we get to 10 million a year and then it's like yeah you could go to the lot and pick up a tesla. Just like you could pick up a toyota prius that's fine. But until that point i want to see a backlog because i want to be able to i want to grow into the ramp phase. Why you buy tesla like i said on the live stream is because of the ramp of these factories.

The factory is the product here folks if we can copy and paste the factory. We win unfortunately we got no mention of the new factory no mention of insurance a brief mention that the cyber truck might come out for deliveries in the second half of 2023 so we're kicking the can down the road again all right also not a surprise. But when we're finally drilled about the consumer again first their cfo says no we're not seeing an impact. Then says well maybe a little elon musk is heard chiming in going some maybe elon musk continues by saying that orders or meglo.

You know or i should say manic depressive. That it seems like orders really move the way either markets or the consumer sentiment moves and so in my opinion. If you have like a really big green day. You know you've got like three million retail.

Shareholders for tesla. And i think only you know one and a half million retail owners of tesla's so you get like a really really green day. More people are ordering teslas so not a surprise that you're seeing uh. You know people's sentiment match their spending at all but elon mentions that they don't really see this as much of a predictor for the consumer that uh they're they're good now there were some discussions about chips and batteries and ai.

Day ai day they're very excited about they think it'll be better than what people expect they think next year. They'll really get to using the 4680s that right now they have enough 2170s to get through the year and they don't really have to worry about 4680. So they started producing those in one of their new giga factories. Which is great and we expect at some point to be at roughly a production of 1 000.

46 80s per week which is quite impressive elon again talking about inflation potentially trending down and then tesla lowering prices over time he thinks that prices are embarrassingly high however uh the cfo and elon. Think that we're going to see inflation mostly due to commodities decline in the third quarter versus. The second quarter again. They lost about 106 million dollars on their btc impairment and elon musk.

Mentioned that they'd be open to buying more btc in the future. So now bottom line on everything for this earnings. Call. And this earnings report could it have been better for this hellish quarter.

Absolutely margin could have been stable. It wasn't it fell uh cash flow was there yes. But net change in cash was propped up by btc. Which is kind of lame.

Because it means elon had to go to the piggy bank. Because he was that worried about tesla and tesla. Shanghai. Which just again reiterates.

How much power china has over tesla. Not sure how much we love that in the days. After ukraine is what it is it's a red flag. Though and again we need gigafactory announcements to really grow into wall street's expectations otherwise we've got another red flag regarding the consumer fine demand is still there more than production right now great but i don't even want to spend time so much talking about the consumer.

I want to know more about the ramp let's get berlin and austin figured out let's get that coupon code before it expires on the 28th and make some money.