Car suppliers are mature, heavy industry (or whatever the term is) and they are not using equity options compensation to their own employees in general. Never said Tesla was in that category, I thought that was clear from my text. It is just not how business is done and most businesses have a fixed way of doing things hence the unlikeliness no matter what other logic you present.
The way to get car suppliers to play ball is by legal contracts, ordering large quantities with somewhat long lead times and follow up with communication. With X they did not buy large quantities. If you think the X ramp problems was because they did not offer equity compensation tied to Tesla stock to suppliers then I am not going to try to convince you otherwise.
I can see other reasons how Tesla want to get the SP down, or at-least don't mind if it went down. For example if they wanted to accelerate hiring and wanted to offer a lower base for equity compensation. A much more likely scenario I think is that they needed to commit to the 2018 goal right now and therefore for one reason or the other that we don't know choose to set it publicly and how the SP would react was secondary. I think this also points to lower part being equity raise as the SP does not matter as much if the raise is low. I think they will surprise most how far they are with manufacturing plans and also how they will get the funding and how much fudning is needed.
Let's leave this discussion as it is not important for the investment case.
It is important for the investing case.
Your insistence upon reasoning by analogy as a counterargument is indeed unhelpful, not just to your understanding but to others reading it. By the exactly same illogic you have presented here, the way cars are always made is by large companies installing engines. Not the side of a debate you want to be on when it comes to Tesla.
The critical path issue for Tesla now and the root of all execution risks are:
1. Lax and unmotivated suppliers.
2. Suppliers motivated to screw up Tesla's job for the benefit of one or more larger and more lucrative customer.
The whole ER screams to this exact point and your argument is - well business as usual dictates......
They cannot afford to risk business as usual (see Model X supplier debacle). They HAVE to rethink it.
Hence the threats to stand ready to pull anything in-house. How do you hire the trained staff to go with the emergency in-source? Not so tough when the entire crew is sitting on $30K of TSLA options per head that their employer is threatening to devalue to Nil by pulling them off Tesla's project for a few weeks here and there into a pointless side project on a back-hander from GM.
Can Tesla pay cash to achieve the same effect? No! Not by busting its non-GAAP Gross Margins and blowing up its $35K per car base price with margins in tact.
And Options incentives are effectively a one-time deal until Tesla is the dominant customer that no supplier messes with on behalf of GM or anyone else - and the underlying shares can be issued as a fundraiser potentially taking them off the GAAP non-Cash too and sticking them in Investing Activity - and they can do this tax effectively by issuing shares to themselves for such a scheme on paper (just increasing the float) not even to the markets so long as the market share price is nice and low. And issuing incentives like this when the SP is suppressed is how you make sure that these options gain value from the get go and have the intended motivational effect. It's enough to be worth tanking the stock for it.
This is not tangential. More likely it is absolutely central to comprehending TSLA right now.
If this is correct we should see an equities filing with the SEC in a matter of days - but a bond raiser likely at an entirely different date after some materially better newsflow.
