If Tesla were to run out of money, somebody would definitely buy the company. It probably wouldn't be another established car company, but there are plenty of other companies who would love to buy them out. Elon almost sold out to Google when the company almost went under in 2008. Alternatively Apple and Amazon are both sitting on a lot of cash.
There are also a lot of foreign investors who would love to scoop up Tesla. A number of Chinese companies would love to get an entry into the western car market and buying such a prestige brand would be a good investment. Volvo already sold out to the Chinese.
The thing the FUDs gloss over is the difference between a company that is losing money because of a lot of fixed costs. GM and Chrysler were in that situation by 2008 and went bankrupt because a drop in sales made them nonviable. A lot of the tech start ups that went bust in the dot com crash were losing money on every sale. Some didn't even have any real plan to turn a profit ever. In the latter case, their best bet was to sell out to a larger company and run with the cash. I worked briefly for a company that did that.
Tesla makes cars with massive profit margins. If Tesla wanted to shut down R&D and expansion and just milk the existing products, they would make a healthy profit, but that's very short sighted. They strategically burn cash to expand the company and develop new products at the fastest rate possible. That is a totally different scenario from a start up selling a product that costs them more to make than they get selling it or a legacy business with a lot of fixed costs they can't get out from under.
Tesla's situation isn't rock solid, but it's not all that wobbly either. The short term stock price fluctuations have a lot more to do with the emotional state of the investors than it does the actual bottom line of the company. The stock markets around the world have been down so far this year. Tesla is down a bit more than the averages, but that's not unusual for a stock in a company like this. When times are scary, money runs to the safer bets. Blue chip stocks are called that because they have a reputation for stability over many decades. Tesla may be a blue chip stock someday, but it won't be anytime soon because they haven't been around long enough.
Looking at the numbers, Tesla made $11.7 billion revenue last year and $2.2 billion in gross profit after the cost of revenue was figured in. They had a net loss because R&D was $1.3 billion and everything else was $2.4 billion. Without R&D they just about break even. A significant area where they burned a lot of money last year was the final push to get the Model 3 into production. They don't have any new car introductions planned for this year. They are tooling up for the semi and the new Roadster, but they aren't to the most expensive part of spooling up for production yet.
Someone upthread pointed out Tesla is making about $2.5 billion profit on Model S and X sales and when they hit 2500 Model 3s a week (they just hit 2000), they will make $5 billion from the Model 3. Say this year they just average 1250 Model 3s a week for the year. They will probably beat that if they are already to 2000, but let's take a worst case figure. That's still $2.5 billion in gross profit for the Model 3 and a total of around $5 billion gross profit for the year.
If R&D and other expenses are equal to last year (they could quite possibly be lower), that would be $3.85 billion in expenses that cut into the gross profit. They have $1.15 billion to pay off the bond or go to some other debts. When I saw Tesla was issuing bonds for the last round of funding for the Model 3, it told me Elon had run the numbers and figured there was a good chance he could pay off those bonds early. It will probably be slower than he thought because the Model 3 is ramping up slower than he had planned, but the company is not breathing fumes here.
Rather than run around hair on fire that Tesla is burning a lot of cash, look at what it has been used for and compare to other situations where companies had a burn rate. Tesla's situation is a lot closer to Amazon's circa 1999 than GM, Chrysler, Kodak, or even pet.com. Investing in young companies is always more risky than established companies. If you want steady, invest in GE or Kroger.
The car industry has hated Tesla from the start and has wanted them to go away. There are a couple of reasons for this. Tesla refuses to sell through dealerships, which makes the other car company's direct customers (dealerships) unhappy. The ICE makers have also been lobbying governments, especially in the US that the fuel economy standards the governments are trying to push are impossible to meet. Then along comes Tesla with cars that make the fuel economy standards irrelevant because they don't use fossil fuels.
Up to now, they could slough off Tesla arguments by pointing out that Teslas were very expensive and more moderately priced EVs sold by the traditional car companies don't sell all that well. Of course most of the EVs are weirdmobiles with poor range sold by dealerships that mostly try not to sell them.
Now along comes the affordable Tesla. All the companies were hoping Tesla would crash and burn before the Model 3 hit full production because if Tesla can sell several hundred thousand Model 3s a year, it would badly hurt their argument the public really doesn't want EVs, especially affordable ones. Now that Tesla's stock has taken a beating (along with most of the rest of the market) they are piling on to try and run the stock down as far as possible to make the claim Tesla is bankrupt.
The Tesla bears have been out there from the start. A lot of the loudest doom and gloom people today have been bad mouthing Tesla for years and at least some of them are confederates of the mainstream car industry. Some of the other short position people are doing what is essentially a pump and dump in reverse. They are trying to get the price down so they can jump in at a sweet price.
If investors are doing their job, the price of a stock should reflect the health of a company, but it doesn't. Technically Tesla's stock could go down to $1 a share and the company could do quite fine. The relationship between stock price and company health usually reflects reality because there are enough rational investors to stabilize a stock's price to reality over the long haul, but a stock can get wildly inflated or under valued when emotions run high.
I don't expect Tesla to go under as long as the overall economy remains relatively OK. If we have a 1929 type crash, then all bets are off. If it does, the company will live on in some form as a subsidiary of another company because what they have built is too valuable. It may end up being a shell of what it was, but you won't be left with a car that has zero support and it's almost certain new Teslas would be made, though the pace of innovation may slow down quite a bit.
