What people mean is Tesla cars are unit profitable, ex capital expenses, R&D, etc. If we assume the business is structured like most manufacturing businesses y

What people mean is Tesla cars are unit profitable, ex capital expenses, R&D, etc. If we assume the business is structured like most manufacturing businesses your capex, R&D, etc don't increase linearly with cars manufactured. That means at some point Tesla will cross that threshold where the profit on each car is enough to cover those expenses and thus the company becomes "profitable" even on paper. There is no scenario (known at the moment) where Tesla selling more cars would lead to increased medium or long term losses. I'm a Tesla investor (from IPO) and I understand this. I knew when I bought the shares that they'd have to raise money several more times. Making cars is a capital intensive business and they've done an excellent job by making premium sporty electric vehicles to demonstrate that electric doesn't mean crap range or crap performance. Everything else is just scaling to get costs down and unit volume up. People were also crapping on Instacart for saying they were unit-profitable in many cities but that's a good sign. It means we can see a goal line in the future made of dollar bills because the business is scaling up sales faster than expenses and eventually the two lines cross. It's also how Amazon ran their business for a decade and that seems to have worked out well for them.