I just laid out the numbers for anybody to
pick apart. All of the things you mention are included in the shareholder's letter guidance. I have hard time to follow logic of general discussion of why they can't be non-GAAP profitable, without paying attention to guidance and actual numbers.
Regarding Tesla actually meeting their guidance, the jury is obviously out, but there are signs that extrapolating past onto this year is not going to work. Few things commonly noted and other few which are
not to consider:
- "Cash is King" mandate
- Tesla beat their OpEx guidance in Q1 (I think for the first time ever): guided for slightly more than $429M, actual - $417M
- There is a contradiction in Tesla's Q2 production/delivery guidance. They said that production will be 20K and they will deliver as many produced cars as possible in Q2, but deliveries are guided to 17K. This is very clever sand bagging. When Tesla is planning their production batching in a way that maximizes deliveries of cars manufactured in a quarter within the same quarter, they routinely able to deliver about 1K cars less than produced (Q1 is the latest example - manufactured 15,510 cars; delivered just 700 cars less - 14,810)
The US and European delivery (estimated) numbers for April are out, and they follow the same pattern of light deliveries in first month of the quarter, wich is an indication that the bulk of deliveries will be happening in the third month, as in Q1, and that deliveries will be about 1K less than production.
If they will build 20K cars, the deliveries will likely be around 19K, not 17K.
To make it clear, meeting guidance is possible, but far from guaranteed. But if they do meet guidance, they will likely to be non-GAAP profitable in Q2-Q4.