Re:Tesla announces biggest quarterly loss
by rdiddly on Wednesday February 07, 2018 @08:15PM
(#16329404)
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.
Re:Tesla announces biggest quarterly loss
by pavlov on Wednesday February 07, 2018 @08:06PM
(#16329361)
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.
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.