Tesla Ramps Up the Hype During Trying Times

Elon Musk will unveil the company’s electric semi-truck this week, following a huge quarterly loss and Model 3 production problems.

Elon Musk is breaking out his bag of pixie dust this week. Or, wait -- maybe it's a portal gun.

At Tesla’s semi-truck unveiling, which will be live-streamed online this Thursday night, Musk said he plans to “blow your mind clear out of your skull and into an alternate dimension” using his “portal gun,” according to his latest tweet.

In that alternate dimension, Tesla’s difficulties -- its largest quarterly loss ever, its three-month Model 3 manufacturing delay, its propensity to spend a billion dollars a quarter, and the myriad other worrisome financial metrics for the electric-car maker -- are all swept away by the latest shiny object.

This dimension is a reality distortion field.

Tesla is facing one of the toughest times in its history, akin to when the company struggled to get the first Roadsters and the Model S cars to customers. But this is a much grander scale.

Much more is at risk for Tesla today. It has hundreds of thousands of Model 3 reservations, over 30,000 employees, substantial debt and a stock price highly dependent on hitting its aggressive timelines.

No wonder Musk, who’s been camping out on the roof of the Gigafactory in order to help figure out Model 3 manufacturing bottlenecks, is looking for a flashy distraction.

When Musk shows off the company’s long-touted electric semi-truck, it'll no doubt be an impressive and sleek prototype. But it's just the latest Tesla product in a long line of partially baked ones.

Other such projects include the solar roof, the Buffalo-based solar factory, the Model Y, autopilot software, and Musk’s side gigs like the Boring Company, the Neuralink and the hyperloop. Why not throw a semi-truck in there for fun?

However, Tesla's bread and butter -- the Model 3 and its accompanying battery factory outside of Reno, Nevada -- are the most crucial projects to watch. They’ve sucked down much of the company's capital, and they’ll make up much of Tesla’s future revenue. The Model 3 and Gigafactory will make or break Tesla -- and they've both been facing some serious problems as of late.

Two weeks ago, Tesla revealed that it won’t be able to ramp up production of the Model 3 until late into the first quarter of 2018, a three-month delay. The company now expects to hit its goal of making 5,000 Model 3 cars per week by March of 2018, instead of late 2017.

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