Personally, I wouldn't recognize a corporate financial filing if it came up and bit me. Start talking about SG&A expenses or the difference between "income" and "revenue", and my eyes glaze over. But a lot of people are into the granular level financial stuff. So perhaps they will enjoy playing around with a spreadsheet for Tesla finances created by one Vijay Govindan, which he described in his Clean Technica article "How Does Tesla Get To Profitability In Q3 2018 And Beyond?" Now you, too, can play around with Vijay's SimTesla spreadsheet! Shall we call it "Tesla Fantasy Finances"? And altho I have no interest in using or abusing that myself, I did appreciate some of what Clean Technica writer Maarten Vinkhuyzen had to say in his article on this subject: Judging by the questions some analysts ask during the conference call each quarter, and the many shoddy journalistic products that are published, this model is more robust than what is used by many on Wall Street, Fleet Street, and Rockefeller Plaza. And I don’t even count what was recently written in the NYPost, which seemed to have no basis in facts, but I do think about the misguided Bloomberg reporting that I wrote a piece about some time back. This spreadsheet is perhaps helpful to put misinformed CNBC talking points into perspective. Or for cases like recent ones our editor Zachary felt obliged to clarify, since the facts were so conveniently ignored by the press as they ran with misleading narratives created and pushed by Tesla short sellers or missed the point completely as Tesla renegotiated contracts with suppliers out of a position of strength, something writers and editors at the Wall Street Journal should be able to understand. Misleading narratives are mindlessly copied in numerous papers and newscasts all over the spectrum, which makes it all the more important for people who care about this topic to dig into the numbers themselves and get a grip on the fundamentals. Full article, with a link to the spreadsheet for those who want to play "Tesla Fantasy Finances", here: "Vijay’s SimTesla Game — Create Your Own Truth About Tesla Finances"
