$1.4B is a lot to fall through the cracks, even for Tesla, FT says

As Tesla’s (TSLA) car sales and share price plummet in response to Elon Musk’s political and physical stances, Financial Times calls readers’ attention “to something puzzling in the group’s accounts,” Dan McCrum and Stephen Morris write. Compare Tesla’s capital expenditure in the last six months of 2024 to its valuation of the assets that money was spent on, and $1.4B appears to have gone astray, the authors say. The sum is big enough to matter even at Tesla, and comes at a moment when attention is returning to the group’s underlying numbers, now that its fully diluted stock market valuation has crashed from $1.7T to below $800B. A closer look at Tesla’s cash flow statement may also prompt investors to ask other questions, such as why a business with a $37B cash pile raised $6bn of new debt last year?