Is Tesla Running Out Of Money?

Elon Musk, the South African inventor and founder of Tesla Inc., unveiled his company’s shiny new semi trucks and Roadster sports car last week to much fanfare, and the New York Post reported Wednesday that the firm finished construction of the world’s largest lithium ion battery as part of a multi-million-dollar contract with the South Australian government.

But a new Bloomberg report more or less rained doom and gloom on those parades.

Taking a look at the company’s expenses over the past year, reporters Nabila Ahmed and Sally Bakewell crunched the numbers and found that Tesla burned through nearly half a million dollars per hour over that period. The automaker, they wrote, is set to run out of money by early August.

Shares hardly budged in the wake of the Bloomberg story, falling to $312.60 by market close Wednesday, down from $317.80 just ahead of the close on Tuesday and a spike to $322.87 the morning after Musk’s big truck reveal.

The company reported a net loss of over $773 million last year — down from close to $889 million in 2015 but more than 2.5 times 2014’s more than $294 million loss — according to its most recent annual Securities and Exchange Commission filing. Its revenues, meanwhile, spiked to over $7 billion in 2016 from $4.05 billion and $3.2 billion in 2015 and 2014, respectively.

Revenues rely mainly on auto sales, of which Musk, who is also the chairman and CEO, promised a record number for the fourth quarter of 2017. Still, that pledge came with a note that might scare Tesla shareholders: $1 billion in projected capital expenditures over the same three-month period.

Musk’s promises came in a letter to shareholders a little over a year after his 14-year-old company’s second-ever profitable quarter — and a little under a year after Tesla acquired what Musk wrote that he believes is becoming another moneymaker for the company. On Nov. 21, 2016, Tesla closed its $2.1 billion purchase of the energy company SolarCity Corp., and added hundreds of millions in energy generation and storage revenues ever since.

“Energy generation with Solar Roof will become a bigger portion of our business next year,” Musk wrote investors, citing an increase in residential solar system purchases, relative to leases, in the third quarter. “As we fine-tune and standardize the production and installation process, we expect to ramp Solar Roof production considerably in 2018.”

Although those revenues were still dwarfed by those stemming from car sales, the company has certainly turned its attention to solar on the lobbying front, spending tens of thousands of dollars lobbying Congress to pass legislation in favor its interests in solar energy policy over the past year, federal lobbying documents show.