After SpaceX rocket crisis, Elon Musk also faces Tesla safety and cash-flow issues

“The Palo Alto company is also building a $5-billion battery factory in Nevada. Many analysts are wondering whether it can maintain enough cash flow to see those projects to completion.

Kelley’s Brauer pointed out that state incentives for buyers of electric cars, which have helped power Tesla’s success, will be expiring over the next few years. Brauer believes Musk “is going to run out of tax rebates before he gets to the real world consumer.”

Tesla’s shares slid $11.24, or 5.3%, to $200.11. Shares of SolarCity fell even further, closing down $1.88, or 9.1%, to $18.78.”

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Ask Matt: Will Tesla run out of cash?

Tesla continues to burn cash and adding SolarCity to its operations accelerates that. Tesla burned $332.5 million from operations during the past 12 months and consumed $1.3 billion in capital expenditures. That’s a aggressive cash burn for a company with $3.2 billion in cash and short-term investments. Meanwhile, SolarCity tore through $2.8 billion in free cash flow during the past 12 months, a startling amont considering the company has $145.7 million in cash. Refinancing can shore up the cash situation in the short-term, but the combined company will need to start generating cash soon.

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Believe It or Not, SpaceX’s Falcon 9 Explosion Could Be Terrible for SolarCity

SolarCity’s Sugar Daddy

You might know that SolarCity actually owns most of the hundreds of thousands of rooftop solar systems it has built. As a result, it needs billions of dollars in funding each year. So the flow of debt coming into the company is vital to its very survival.

What people might not know is that SolarCity is getting a lot of funding from SpaceX and Elon Musk and family. They’re buying hundreds of millions of dollars in solar bonds that almost no one else is interested in. Below is a table that shows the large purchases of solar bonds by SpaceX, Elon Musk, SolarCity CEO Lyndon Rive, and CTO Pater Rive over the past year-and-a-half.

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SpaceX’s lost rocket could upset a global merger and delay America’s human spaceflight plans

The fire that burst from the top stage of a SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket, quickly consuming it and the satellite it was to carry to orbit, did more than melt aluminum and crack carbon fiber on a $62 million rocket and throw another wrench into Elon Musk’s already busy day. It will have repercussions across the globe.

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Tesla Motors Inc (TSLA) isn’t “a business”; it’s a cash incinerator

Also in July Musk published a much-hyped (in anticipation) single page vision of where he wants to take Tesla in the future. Unfortunately for him though, Tesla is far behind deep-pocketed competitors in nearly every facet of this vague and unfinanced “plan,” something easily discerned by conducting a simple Google search on each of his stock-pumping buzzwords. Here’s  one example, here’s another and here’s  a third. I could easily post twenty or thirty more.

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