I tend to doubt either of these options. As noted by others, there is no possibility of liquidation - the brand is simply too valuable. It would more certainly be restructured and keep on operating independently. Or it would be sold.
As to the buyer, I would expect a German buyer. If you add Tesla's tech to Daimler's cachet and expertise in the luxury frippery and branding, you'd have one heck of a powerful company. A Chinese owner - especially with the current issues - isn't very likely I think. A Chinese owner would pull down the value of the brand - certainly in the West, but even in China, where luxury generally means German.
In either case, the existing cars will continue to be supported - probably better than Tesla does right now.
The Chinese definitely want to take over Tesla and other auto makers outside of China tend to have a "not invented here" attitude that would likely lead them to pass on picking up Tesla. The US government might be opposed to a Chinese sale, but if the Chinese were the only buyer, they might get it.
Fair question, given the number of Tesla/Musk haters out there.
Mostly it's what dethman says--now I care about what happens to Tesla.
It's also that Teslas are so different from other cars--even other electrics like the Bolt and Leaf. It's hard for me to imagine that random auto mechanics will be able to work on a lot of aspects of Teslas unless there is an infrastructure of parts suppliers and computer folks to support and guide them.
Thanks to everyone who has given ideas of why Tesla won't fail, and especially to those who have given ideas of why there will be buyers for the stuff that could keep Teslas running if it does fail.
As you can probably tell, I'm a bit of a risk averse guy, and one who sees the cloud forming around every silver fabric.
I'm fairly risk adverse myself. I waited until 2016 to buy to allow the early bugs in the Model S to get worked out. It's been a fantastic car. For the risk adverse I would recommend ordering a car somewhere in the middle of a quarter. From my anecdotal observations (and my one personal data point) cars built in the middle of quarters tend to be better quality than those built at the end when there is a mad rush. I ordered at the end of April, the car was built in late May, and I took delivery on June 6. All the problems have been minor (buzzing headlight problem from the early refresh cars, a speaker that distorted sometimes, and a few other things on that scale).
As far as working on Teslas go, there is a growing community of people putting salvaged cars back on the road and the consensus is that Teslas are one of the easiest cars to work on. If Tesla were to fail there would be a lot of Tesla engineers out on the street who know how all the electronics work and they would likely reverse engineer their own work and set up a company provided electronics to the existing fleet.
At this point it's all an unlikely scenario though. The term on this forum for the naysayers is FUD (fear, uncertainty, and doubt) and the FUDsters have made a big deal about Tesla's lack of positive cash flow over its history, but Amazon didn't make a profit until a couple of years ago for the same reason Tesla hasn't made a profit, they were plowing all the money they made back into expansion and R&D.
Tesla's profit margin on their cars is the largest in the automotive industry. If they just made cars and didn't do any R&D, they would be very profitable. Tesla is still very small for a car company and their R&D and expansion budget is a much larger percentage of the company's revenue than most other car companies.
Elon demonstrated that the company could be profitable a couple of quarters in a row if they pull in their horns and concentrate on making cars while slowing down some of the R&D. There are rumors there was going to be a refreshed Model S and X last fall, but due to the losses with the Model 3 launch problems they pushed it back a year.
If we do have a big economic downturn (at least a small one is inevitable soon), I think the other three US automakers will be in a lot more trouble than Tesla. All three sell a lot of trucks, but none are all that healthy economically and with the world electrifying their products are looking more and more stale by the day.
