> Considering that, if I were in Elon's position, I'd prefer the state to be paying my employees salaries, and leave most of my factories closed. Keep the R&D d

> Considering that, if I were in Elon's position, I'd prefer the state to be paying my employees salaries, and leave most of my factories closed. Keep the R&D department going so I have some awesome new products in a year's time when the economy starts recovering. Back orders/deposits are clogging up the system, thus affecting the total supply chain of deliverable cars. Model Y was not as popular in deposits as 3 was, that might have changed since I looked at the data, but also 3's line at Fremont is optimized for Y's output. Also, that's the only factory that make S/X/Y chassis for now. so its a bottleneck issue, too. Essentially, this comes down to opportunity costs; people have paid, in part, for a car which if they choose to can/will always be refunded if they don't want it before taking delivery. Tesla would then have to not only give them their deposit back, but also have to figure out what to do with the chassis--taking on a net loss, but also assume liability for its inventory. If Elon is right, Y is supposed to be their most popular chassis yet, so it'd probably just go to the next customer with the same specs. But still, my best guess is that this comes down to opportunity costs and unrealized gains--they have procured all the materials for assembly and its creating a backlog in production/vin assignment along with costly storage fees. Which after the pain-staking processes with Model 3 ramp up, and optimization it has to be near unavoidable to want to learn and iterate as fast as possible to streamline the process to meet Global demand. I still can't figure out why the Gigafactory at Sparks isn't being used as an adjunct of their manufacturing, instead of just cramming ever-more of their entire inventory into Fremont. I agree with Elon's position that most don't take the importance and difficulty of Manufacturing and its Supply Chain/Logistics very seriously at best and totally for granted and way too lightly at worst, because in reality it's a myriad of ever-changing cogs and gears all working in what may seem to the outsider as an effortless machine. It's like plumbing, if you've done it right most don't/won't even notice it until something goes catastrophically wrong: and then they're up in arms about having to deal with not getting fed because someone like Amazon is taking 3.5 weeks to deliver goods when it used to be same day.