Taking an "impairment hit" is a great way to lower performance a smidge so as to not let Wall St. run away with its Q4 projections.
I'm full-blown conspiratorial about how Tesla uses BTC to manipulate its financial reports. I don't think what they're doing is illegal or even all that innovative, other than to use BTC and not some other thing to do this.
Have you looked at Tesla delivery queue wait times recently? Not need to spin up controversies when the market demand is clear and explains the tailwind. They have been leveraging the demand to increase ASP both by increasing prices and shifting to a more profitable mix (Need the car sooner? Get the higher margin model!)
Right, which is why, if you knew about how that sausage was made (as an officer of Tesla), you'd want a way to control investor expectations, because what you just said sounds really good, and if something went wrong, or if it weren't quite as awesome as you just described, I'd be really mad if I were an investor and Tesla missed those lofty projections.
It doesn't "fool" anyone, because it's not foolish. Tesla buys Bitcoin, that's an expense. Tesla sells Bitcoin, hopefully at a profit, that's revenue. That action gets reported quarterly, which is what happened to generate this submission.
Tesla can time that to happen in specific parts of the quarter to either make its overall revenue look better or worse. It's not fake, it's not "fooling" anyone, it's just part of the balance sheet.
Companies do this all the time with non-crypto assets, crypto is just probably easier than buying/selling an office building, especially when your CEO is Elon Musk and can control the price of Bitcoin with a tweet.
It's separated out, any investor can see it clear as day. Hell if financial influencers on youtube go through these things you can sure bet that Wall Street is well aware and they would not be able to manipulate Wall Street's forecasts via this method.
Is there any evidence that they have sold Bitcoin more than the one time they did last quarter? I am pretty sure they also haven't bought any since their original purchase.
I'm confused about why you would want this evidence. Do you think I'm suggesting they're fraudulently hiding Bitcoin sales? Not selling (and taking the $50mil hit) is an action, too.
I'm full-blown conspiratorial about how Tesla uses BTC to manipulate its financial reports. I don't think what they're doing is illegal or even all that innovative, other than to use BTC and not some other thing to do this.