I'm familiar with the discounted cash flow model of valuing a company. You're missing the point: If they keep losing money, they need more investments. At some point, they won't get any more investments, because potential investors won't believe that the company will be profitable in the future.
> [...] it has a good chance of making a lot more money by continuing to invest in itself.
Only if they don't go bankrupt in the near future, which is a very real possibility. Then all this talk about growth and "investing in itself" will be useless – they will make zero money.
At the moment, Tesla seems to have no real trouble raising the kind of capital they need in order to maintain the level of growth they're experiencing. But it's going to take a lot more growth before they're on par with GM or Toyota or the like. And since that's the obvious goal, it's foolish to be "profitable".
It’s different than the scenarios parodied in Silicon Valley, where companies with no business model, who can’t be profitable with their product, posture in order to be acquired to the extent that their founders believe the posturing.