CapOp, I appreciate your taking the time to write up your analysis and recollections.
Deferrals may have been putting more pressure on Tesla in the Spring of 2013 than I realized (fwiw, I'm not sure I understand what tipped this off to you from those links you shared, but I'm not sure it's necessary to go back into).
My BS flag is still way up on this author, as,
1) if there were a deferral situation, I find it unlikely the company was in a "death spiral," as he put it.
2) he attributed deferrals to the visor and door handle issues, without any mention of the Broder article (which was about shoddy journalism, not a Tesla misstep). I find his whole characterization of the early reception of the car very skewed.
3) he claims Tesla fired "senior executives" in this timeframe ("and promoted hungry junior employees"), I don't recall even one such firing in that time period. This is likely false, and just a way to suggest a desperate "death spiral" situation that never was.
4) I'm quite suspicious that the "the word of mouth on the car sucked" line he attributes to Musk, if Musk actually said this, was taken so grossly out of context as to completely change it's meaning. Word of mouth was certainly very strong on TMC.
Does any of this actually matter?
I think so. Today, already, Cory Johnson had the author on Bloomberg, and Cory was trying to portray this excerpt as revealing that Musk emphatically lies and hides the most critical information from investors. Bears will be buying this book and trying to do more of the same from a bookfull of stories. I think it's worth making it clear the extent the author's account is fiction.
Yeah, I had a very negative view of much of what was written. I started off wanting to call BS to everything he wrote, and I knew I was intensively tracking sales at the time, so I figured I'd do a debunking. Once I reminded myself of my concerns about April and my earlier concerns about deferrals (which was already becoming apparent in December) though I decided there was probably some kernals of truth.
My view is that he talked to a source with limited info (probably on the sales side) and a low degree of intestinal fortitude. And between them they puffed this up to a level that wasn't warranted. There were real issues, sales probably did tank for a couple of months after Broder, the factory did close at the beginning of April (for whatever reason) and April deliveries were very week. If you extrapolated that trend forward indefinitely you could end up with a grim outlook, so I could see Elon knocking heads to put things back on course.
But any rational view of the period should have seen it as a blip. It had such a minor effect on deliveries (literally we are talking about a few hundred deliveries that I was expecting didn't take place) that I was able to interpret it in a positive light in real time.
As to the negative media, I felt it was such a weak phenomenon that I personally decided I could change the narrative, and did so. Tesla had access to all of the data and was in a much stronger position to change it over any given weekend with a fact based tweet by Elon.
The fundamentals were still that Tesla was in possession of one of the best reviewed cars in history, and it only got better when Consumer Reports weighed in.
I believe it highly likely that Elon explored takeover possibilities. Folks here were cheering him on at times, and there were several credible rumors that have popped up.
But I think talk of any near term impending bankruptcy at any time in 2013 is just nonsense. There might've been contingency discussions in 2012 when the issue was much more in doubt, but by March 2013 all of the pieces were in place for a stellar Q1 announcement, and there was a clear path to success even in the face of negative press and reduced orders.
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CapOp, I appreciate your taking the time to write up your analysis and recollections.
Deferrals may have been putting more pressure on Tesla in the Spring of 2013 than I realized (fwiw, I'm not sure I understand what tipped this off to you from those links you shared, but I'm not sure it's necessary to go back into).
Those concerns began at the end of December 2012 when Tesla forced everyone to configure.
Going off memory I want to say either everyone on the list was forced, or was it just the first 5k initially?
Either way, my recollection is that in context it seemed odd that people with such high reservation numbers were being forced to commit, in many cases with relatively near term delivery dates. The alternative reasons besides possible deferrals and cancellations was the batching process, but I'm wanting to say that by February that was no longer credible.
By May it could no longer be denied that Tesla had ordered configurations on most of the 20k (ish?) reservations, maybe 10k cars had been delivered and there was no real waiting list of any type left in the U.S. (paint was the last one, which was done in April/May). Walk up customers were getting like 1-2 month turn arounds.
The only question seemed to be whether it was cancellations or deferrals, but the shareholder disclosures for the amount of deposit money that Tesla was holding pointed strongly to deferrals, and did for at least the rest of the year that I was trying to nail down what happened to those reservations.
(all of this going from memory, so take treat the numbers with some skepticism)