Hey, how was everyone’s long weekend?

April Fools’ Day – I don’t care.

Now I dunno what kind of mischief you got up to, and whether or not you were forced to do a Sunday sit down lunch with your in-laws, but I’m still willing to bet your weekend was better than Elon Musk’s.

CNN have called the past few days “Tesla’s dumb, awful weekend”, and they offer a blow-by-blow account of how it all went so wrong:

On Friday, Tesla acknowledged that its “autopilot” self-driving mode was engaged during a recent fatal crash. On Sunday, the National Transportation Safety Board said Tesla mishandled its accident investigation.

And for some reason, CEO Elon Musk sent a series of April Fool’s tweets on Sunday, joking that the company had filed for bankruptcy.

Tesla (TSLA) investors weren’t amused. Shares closed down 5.1% Monday after falling as much as 8.1% earlier in the day…

Moody’s downgraded its debt rating deeper into junk status last Tuesday, and warned that further downgrades could be on the way if Tesla can’t ramp up production of the Model 3, its first mass-market car.

The company has more than $1 billion in loans coming due over the next 12 months, and Moody’s thinks Tesla may have trouble repaying them if it can’t get Model 3 cars out the door.

Damn, Elon, what’s going on? About those tweets he sent:

I mean 10 points for trying, but it’s the timing that makes this miss the mark.

Over on Forbes, they’re dissecting Tesla’s mess in further detail:

…the real issue here is not newsflow. It is the fact that Tesla is staring at mountain of debt maturities over the next 20 months, just at the time when it needs available cash to fund operations…

The Model 3 rollout has been so fraught with delay that it is easy to forget that running an automotive business requires significant capital expenditures. This is true for any automaker, not just one that is trying to disrupt a century-old industry…

The numbers simply don’t work for Tesla. They never did, actually. The process of adjusting a company’s value downward to adjust for financial realities is called re-rating, or, more specifically, de-rating.  Tesla shares have been de-rated by more than quarter in the past month, and I look for that process to continue throughout 2018.

But they put a car in space, you ungrateful heathen!

Perhaps Tesla will fight back, but I reckon Elon is still going to be financially OK either way.

Which means his weekend might not have been as bad as yours, I guess.

[sources:cnn&forbes]