The headline makes it sound like bad news. This was actually better than expected news. This would be like having a headline of "Sports Team Scores Least Points This Season" burying the lede that they actually won the game.

To be sure, there is plenty of mediocre to bad news in this quarterly report. They still can't make cars at nearly the rate they expected. They're not even mentioning the the autonomous stuff any more. But the loss itself wasn't really bad news.

The most neutral way to put it would be to say "Tesla Reports Loss of $675.4 in 4th Quarter." So yes, there's some hyping going on, to get the clicks from all the Musk haters.

However, this isn't a team that won the game; it's a team that lost $675M in 3 months. That's not wonderful good news that got manipulated and twisted around by the media. Not even if you use that trick where you make up a number ahead of time and then the reality looks good by comparison.[0]

[0]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anchoring

Some will say it's an "investment" of $675M. That will become true if it pays off, but currently it's a loss, and will remain a loss unless/until it makes money. Investments vs. "bad investments" (losses) are defined retroactively in other words, and we dont know yet.

If I was going to lose $675 million of someone else’s money, I might be tempted to cushion the news by first predicting an even bigger loss, then putting a positive spin when things didn’t turn out as bad as predicted - “clearly things are turning around”. You anchor down and focus on the improvement.

Investors look at what management expected versus how they performed to gauge how well they know their business and market. When they say "We expect to lose $100M this quarter." and "only" lose $90M, even though it may be the most they have ever lost, it was less than they were expecting. So perhaps the business is better than they know.