Quarter was as bad as expected. Cash balance is actually a touch better in a nasty quarter with a lot of vehicles in transit and the quarter ending on a Sunday again. Today is likely the point of max bearishness, but I'm pretty optimistic on the go forward.
The supply bottlenecks have been resolved, the full product portfolio is refreshed and rolled out globally. I would argue that no consumer product company in the world has the product vitality / freshness of Tesla. I see Q2 being a far better quarter than Q1 and then the true earnings power beginning to show through in Q3 this year.
Importantly too, deliveries should grow QoQ for quite literally the next two years between Shanghai coming online, Model Y launching (likely ahead of schedule), the semi ramping, and probably a European factory next year.
Cash flow should be positive from here on so they don't need capital (though I wish they'd raise but they won't do it here).
Q1 was terrible, but that should have been known post delivery results. I think you should quite literally throw it out. In no way is it indicative of the future earnings power of the business. Between supply bottlenecks, logistics challenges, and the Model S / X transition there's just not much of meaning to take away.
People are wayyyy too bearish. Next datapoint is going to be InsideEVs estimate for April deliveries, which I think will surprise people to the upside and confirm that demand has rebounded.
Beyond the quarter, I was at the analyst day and had a long conversation with Elon after the presentation. If Tesla achieves its autonomuos vision, the Company will be quite literally the most valuable business in the world. People are ascribing a 0% probability that Tesla can achieve their autonomous vision. I would argue that a 0% probability on anything Elon Musk is a very bad assumption. Maybe he'll be late but he almost always gets the job done. Cornell paper which came out supporting vision is very interesting validation from a third party.
