Liam Denning, Columnist

Tesla's Push to Prove the Haters Wrong Only Proves Them Right

Until it can sustainably keep up Model 3 production, investors are right to be anxious.

March 29, 2018 at 5:58 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.

1522346181_GettyImages-479902152 — Photographer: Scott Olson

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There's a touch of déjà vu about my colleague Dana Hull's scoop Thursday that Tesla's vice president of production urged a blitz of Model 3 vehicle production to "prove a bunch of haters wrong."

You, too, may recall CEO Elon Musk's call in the summer of 2016 for Tesla Inc.'s staff to "throw a pie in the face of all the naysayers on Wall Street." Back then, it was all about pushing sales and cutting costs to help Tesla report a rare set of positive earnings. It worked, although only by pulling a couple of levers marked "zero-emission vehicle credits" and "working capital overdrive." Within a year, Tesla capitalized on investors' confidence with an equity issue and its first-ever bond sale.