Liam Denning, Columnist

Tesla's Nightmare Before Christmas

To keep feeding its cash furnace, the automaker needs to inspire confidence -- and that is slipping.

November 1, 2017 at 11:00 PM UTC

Liam Denning is a Bloomberg Opinion columnist covering energy. A former banker, he edited the Wall Street Journal’s Heard on the Street column and wrote the Financial Times’s Lex column.

1509577241_GettyImages-470486029 — Photographer: Joe Raedle/Getty Images

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It looks like Elon Musk just canceled Thanksgiving and probably Christmas, too -- if you work at Tesla Inc., anyway.

The electric-vehicle-cum-battery-cum-solar-equipment company Musk heads reported third-quarter results on Wednesday evening. Tesla missed earnings forecasts by a mile. But that number, never a huge concern, mattered even less this time around. It's cash and cars -- specifically the somewhat more mass-market Model 3 -- that count.