Liam Denning, Columnist

The Perpetual Motion Machine Driving Tesla’s Stock

Sheer belief in an elusive ability to “self-fund” keeps the whole contraption going.

August 2, 2018 at 3:46 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.

Elon Musk wants you to believe.
Photographer: Mark Brake/Getty Images AsiaPac

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The market has lapped up Tesla Inc.’s latest quarterly numbers, along with Elon Musk’s relatively subdued performance on Wednesday’s call. The stock jumped about 10 percent on Thursday morning.

The bullish narrative is that everything has changed. The cautious counter is that this has yet to show up in the actual numbers, especially where it counts: liquidity.