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Re:Tesla Says It Is Now Profitable, Ships 109 Roadsters In July by billclerico on Friday August 07, 2009 @09:09PM (#748818)
there are accounting tricks at work here. this is probably EBITDA profitable, which would means that amortization and depreciation is excluded (HUGE EXPENSES if you're building factories and buying machines)

so yes, you could borrow a ton of money and buy really expensive machinery and spend millions over the past 5 years on R&D and then be EBITDA profitable for a month because you sell 20 cars. but it doesn't really mean much.

Re:Tesla Says It Is Now Profitable, Ships 109 Roadsters In July by muhfuhkuh on Friday August 07, 2009 @09:18PM (#748822)
Amazon, no matter how much you fiddled with the numbers, ran at an almost absurdist fiction level of loss for its first 5+ years of existence.

Some businesses take time. We can't all be groping around for that ycombinator brass ring and get gnarly, outsized profits ridiculously fast.