I am not biased on this matter and do not own PUTs on Tesla... Some little digging and reading I have been doing about this accounting fraud they have been doing, I wonder the consequences when this story gets out to mainstream media, general investors likely know about this already... Will Musk be outed ? Company likely sued and fined heavily to say the least... Paul Smith explains in a very detailed mini twitter thesis on this fraud musk started doing, here is a link among many you can find that new Tesla owners complaining car has not been registered after months of owning it... https://teslamotorsclub.com/tmc/threads/unregistered-model-3.139033/
https://forums.tesla.com/forum/forums/delay-getting-registration-paperwork https://forums.tesla.com/forum/forums/registration-delays I quote from someone else... There are numerous complaints about this issue, from all over the country. Call me cynical, but the only reason that I can think of, is that Tesla is using the sales tax portion of the purchases, to fund operations. This is not just an isolated problem. Customers in Florida, California, New York, Pennsylvania, and Illinois are all complaining about this. Before someone criticizes the post, please think logically about this. On about 12 sales transactions, Tesla can collect in excess of $100,000.00 in sales tax. This sales tax must be paid to the state when they apply for a new Registration, or new plates/tags. Now multiply that by all the sales in the country. Why else would this be happening? As Paul explains... Sells car (A), receives $, new owner drives off with temp tags. Tesla uses the money for other expenses, stealing from the ABL. They delay months, keep giving new temp tags as long as possible. Once they sell another new car (B), they take those proceeds,they register car (A) & pay down the ABL, but play the temp reg game with car B, till they sell another car (C)
I Quote... Not saying they do this for every car, but here's some interesting edge case math for just California: 50% of Tesla sales are in the US. 50% of Tesla's US sales are in CA. CA charges 7.5%. Auto revenue in q3 was 6,098,766,000. Multiply that by .075 divide by 4 and you have $114,351,862 (50% of their net profit btw) in cash still in your account and because they have the title on the car they can continue to borrow against it through their ABL. And this is just for CA. Fun stuff. https://teslamotorsclub.com/tmc/threads/tesla-advocating-driving-with-expired-temp-plates.130044/
No, not even close to Enron... Enron is US Shale industry, what Tesla is doing is bad and shows serious cash flow issues, but the company isn't a scam per say, just losses a lot of money and investor pool in shrinking I would say it is really desperate to attempt it, it will get red flagged instantly... According to IHS Markit Data, Q2 2018 Unregistered Model 3S was 3,445. In Q3 2018, it jumped about 900 % to 30,801
Great news for put buyers. TSLA has such high IV that I usually have plenty of free bearish bets on them via ratio spreads.
As for Musk, his involvement is what keeps TSLA price high. He is also being protected and treated with gentle slaps by both SEC and California state - to protect jobs, investors, environment, etc. And it’s not a secret as they openly stated this on occasions. At some point all this may fall apart, but so far it’s been held together.