Today Tesla paid back almost 1/2 billion in loans to the department of energy; that's 9 years earlier than the loan called for.
It's good news because it shows that not all government investment in new technology is inherently bad. The...
Today Tesla paid back almost 1/2 billion in loans to the department of energy; that's 9 years earlier than the loan called for.
It's good news because it shows that not all government investment in new technology is inherently bad. They're taking on a new market (electric vehicles) and doing so very well; at the moment. They still have a long road ahead of them in terms of being able to make money, but if they fail it won't be at the expense of taxpayers.
They were able to take a government loan and use it well enough to generate enough private investment to pay back the loan in its entirety way ahead of schedule.
http://www.teslamotors.com/about/pre...ne-years-early
Here's a copy of someone's insight from hacker news (where I got the original article) that does a good job explaining what is going on and (generally) the road ahead.
Quote:
The reason why Tesla is able to pay the Dept of Energy loan early is because of a secondary stock and bonds offering worth about >850+ million. In another words, Tesla is raising funds by generating more debt (from bondholders) and diluting share value (from shareholders), roughly about 3.5 mil out of 40 mil float, and using that money to pay the US govt.
TSLA rose on the news despite diluting shareholders is because coupled with the announcement, Elon Musk mentions that he will personally put an additional 100mil into the secondary offer; and general exuberance that TSLA will use the cash for more infrastructure build-out, a la Google, Yahoo during their heyday's. Make no mistake, this is as much a PR ploy by Tesla to pump up their offering.
It's incredibly smart for Musk and company to raise money in a very favorable environment as TSLA climbed from 45 to 90 after earnings. However, it remains to be seen if they can be still profitable. Note that they are still selling each car at a material loss; and only managed to show a profitable quarter by trading green credits they gained from their manufacturing. To truly scale, they need to either drive down the production cost of their cars down and broaden their market as there are only so much supply of carbon-emission credits on the market.
Disclosure: I trade TSLA options on volatility, without any directional bias.
