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Tesla’s Missing $1.4 Billion Could Be The Final Nail In The Coffin.
Tesla is speed-running its death.
Facebook co-founder Dustin Moskovitz made a rather ominous post about a year ago. “I know I sound crazy to most people who don’t follow $TSLA closely but at this point it really needs to be said. This is Enron now, folks.” For those whose birth year doesn’t start with 19, Enron committed one of the most significant cases of accounting fraud in US history. It exaggerated its revenues by 95% and got away with it for years until it totally collapsed in 2001, when it was caught red-handed. Now Moskovitz was likely being hyperbolic in his comparison, as he would go on to accuse Tesla of committing consumer and security fraud over Tesla’s failed FSD program, and even exaggerating the car’s ranges, and not rigging the books like Enron. Cut to the present day, and an FT report found that Tesla is missing $1.4 billion from its books, sparking further questions about its dodgy financial practices and exposing Tesla to be far closer to Enron than anyone thought possible.
Okay, so what did this report find?
Well, in the last six months of 2024, Tesla spent a whopping $6.3 billion in capital expenditure (buying assets like property and equipment). However, their books only showed an increase in gross asset value of $4.9 billion. A massive $1.4 billion had somehow disappeared. For some sense of scale here, Tesla only made a $7.1 billion profit in 2024. Tesla has somehow “lost” the equivalent of 20% of its annual profit, and neither they nor their auditors noticed. The FT rightfully pointed this out as damn fishy.
Now, such gaps can be caused by selling off depreciating assets, a company taking on a bad deal, or a global company being hit by lousy exchange rates. However, FT could find no evidence that this was the cause. It seems that Tesla has pulled some accounting wizardry to move $1.4 billion out of its assets and into something else. More on that in a second.
But FT also noted that Tesla raised $6 billion in debt in the latter half of 2024, most likely to pay for this expenditure. However, Tesla reports to be sitting on $37 billion of liquid cash, so why did they go and get an expensive loan? On top of that, Tesla’s operational profits were reportedly far higher…
