It is called deductive logic, since we know we can't trust Tesla's reporting.
What do we KNOW?:
1. Elon loves to lie but also to boast. Now if the number of deposits were consistently growing (after the initial 400K claim) we would have heard about it. Yet we very seldom get an update on the actual current number.
2. People realized 2 things:
a/ There will be no 35K M3, probably ever.
b/ The 7.5K credit will run out faster than you can get a fairly cheap M3.
Because of these FACTS, it is safe to say that depositors started to cancel their positions in the line and even if there are newly signed up people, the cancellations probably outweight the incoming money.
3. They like to report absolute numbers (500K deposits altogether ever) instead of relative, current deposits (probably under 300K). This is a simple accounting trick and you only do that when the actual numbers are declining.
What neither we nor Tesla know is how many still in the line people wouldn't buy a 45K car, just a much cheaper 35Kish car, the car that will never exist. Some of these people might gamble and try to sell their newly delivered expansive car, but that will just shorten the line.
In all truth, Tesla doesn't want to quickly satisfy the people in line because there is way less people willing to pay 45K than 35K. Thus they would run out of customers much faster if they were able to make 5K cars per week. That is not in their best interest, so my bet is the production topping at 3K/week.
So Tesla does do GAAP accounting, every public company does. They also publish parallel non-GAAP numbers, as pretty much every tech company has since the .com era. Books have literally been written on how GAAP falls short in reflecting high growth company's finance and how non-GAAP numbers can be used to mislead, it's hardly a Tesla thing. However, there's no need to deduce anything, Telsa's deposits are right there in their GAAP consolidated balance sheet under liabilities, right where I said they'd be. This is as of Sep 30th, 2017 with the right column Dec 31, 2016 from Tesla's 10-Q for the quarter ending Sep 30, 2017. It's in thousands, so $686,084,000 in customer deposits on hand.
Here's the number for year end, it's up to $853,919.
We can expect the 10-Q for Q1 to come out any day now, at which point we'll see what the number is. I don't care enough to do the cash flow analysis, but if this liability was fabricated, then it would be trivial to catch it using the combination of the balance sheet, P&L, and cash flow. That's accounting 101 stuff and there are dozens and dozens of sharp kids poring over these hoping to be the one to catch the next Enron, so I'm pretty confident that this particular number isn't fabricated.
But bottom line is that the data is in the financials. Why in the world would you trust some jackass on SeekingAlpha with an agenda to push or deduce from pure assumption, when you can just look at the source code on EDGAR? They would have to be lying in the big 3 of their financials for that assertion to be true. And not just the "aggressive accounting" type of lying that Enron was guilty of but pure fabrication of a straightforward, easy to verify number that a whole bunch of Tesla employees and auditors would have access to and would all face significant jail time over if they were in fact lying. So sorry, but I'm a big believer in Occam's razor and the inability of more than 2 people to keep a secret, so if it's between taking the word of a jackass on SeekingAlpha or everything I just pointed out with everything all those people have to lose and nothing to gain for most of them who are just pogue accountants, I'm going to give the presumption of innocence to Tesla on this one thing. And again point out that pushing back on something that's so easily shown to be spurious weakens all the legitimate arguments. If the Q-1 deposits come back significantly lower and that's not accounted for by actual deliveries, then we can use that as a data point that it is. Until then, all the above us a pure assume, of the type that does make an ass out of u and me.
TL;DR: Read the financials, don't listen to jackasses on SeekingAlpha.
