Maybe other companies need that to be cost competitive, but we're not invested in those companies are we?
Maybe you missed it, but Tesla has been planning to massively expand domestic battery production for years. Every decision Tesla makes is oriented toward accelerating the transition to sustainable energy, which includes the subgoal of minimizing cost to earn more money for expansion and to ensure that the long-term affordability goals can be met. So this must mean Tesla believed domestic battery production in the USA and N America was going to be the minimum-cost solution
before the 2020 elections that enabled this shift in American tax policy to be implemented.
Oh...would you look at that...Tesla explicitly said domestic battery production would be cheaper two years ago on Battery Day:
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I looked this up and saw that Tesla has been issuing such bonds since 2018. Therefore, if anything, canceling the bond sale in March indicates a
reduction in Tesla's appetite for debt relative to earlier years. Per the Bloomberg report (
source), "Tesla
started its ABS program in early 2018 and has issued seven transactions."
Debt has been declining for a while now. Note that the non-recourse debt for vehicle and energy product financing has been shrinking even as the fleet of vehicles and energy products has been growing explosively, so when viewed as a fraction of the whole the debt has really been falling fast.
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Furthermore, why has Tesla been able to pay down all this debt so quickly? Hmmm...oh I remember, it's because of the firehose of free cash flow that has been growing and will continue to do so, making debt even more unnecessary in the future.
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A business with such high capital requirements??????????? Are you looking at the same financial statements as the rest of us?
Tesla has only spent $12.7B in CapEx
in total in the last 9 reported quarters, while building Berlin and Austin from the ground up in that time period
and doing everything else. Tesla factories are cheap. Tesla R&D is cheap. Pretty much all Tesla capital investments are cheap these days. This must be true unless that $12.7B number is fraudulent.
As you astutely pointed out a few months ago, we are boning our customers hard with high vehicle prices and these morons keep falling for it and buying anyway. As such, the factories pay for themselves so quickly that interest rates are literally a rounding error in the economics. I posted about this just yesterday:
