Thread by @PlainSite

$TSLA: "A distressed credit and restructuring story." —Adam Jonas, Morgan Stanley $MS

$TSLA: "Could there be a worse time to depend on China to sell...robot...cars?" —Adam Jonas, Morgan Stanley $MS

$TSLA: "No one really cares about debt; no one cares about the CDS—as long as you're growing. When you... When the... When questions are calling into your growth these numbers start to...start to be noticed. [Sigh]." —Adam Jonas, Morgan Stanley $MS

$TSLA: "And I know it's heresy to suggest that you can compare the valuation of Tesla with its genuinely class-leading tech and brand positioning to Volkswagen, but you know, if the company's not growing, you invite yourself to those comparisons." —Adam Jonas, Morgan Stanley $MS

$TSLA: "Even at a *zero dollar* equity value, the enterprise value to sales ratio of Tesla would be fifty percent or so higher than a VW. It would be in the range of a BMW EV to sales. At zero dollars!" —Adam Jonas, Morgan Stanley $MS

$TSLA: "Nevertheless, the CDS on Tesla I believe the five-year CDS this morning was 673 basis points. That compares to Ford Motor Company at around 200." —Adam Jonas, Morgan Stanley $MS

$TSLA: "All the other companies, they know they're never going to catch they rabbit, they just hope they're the fastest dog. Tesla's the white rabbit. But if it's attached to execution liabilities—and real financial liabilities—then what is the rabbit worth? Right?" —Adam Jonas

$TSLA: "They've built this hulking physical infrastructure to supply more like a million cars a year. Not 350,000 cars a year. Right? And that's what... That's what's creating this bleeding." —Adam Jonas, Morgan Stanley $MS

$TSLA: "To be simple about it [inaudible]: Does demand recover or not? Okay? And then... And then, whether demand recovers or not, is it convincingly sustainable?" —Adam Jonas, Morgan Stanley $MS

$TSLA: "If demand does not recover, and one could argue that many signs in the fixed income market would tell you that there's questions to that, then this becomes a restructuring story. We think that, 'yes, that's right, Tesla, tech company, the auto industry's biggest...

...restructuring story?' And people will begin to a— run scenarios about management—a management team that really went in there and cleaned house. What could they do to lower the break-even point? In terms of head count reductions or writedowns..." —Adam Jonas, Morgan Stanley $MS

$TSLA: "For risk mitigation and liability containment, [Apple] may not want to expose themselves to the unlimited liability of being involved in *owning a business* where occasionally a car catches on fire...takes down a building..." —Adam Jonas, Morgan Stanley $MS

$TSLA: "Perhaps those big tech firms don't want to expose themselves to that up-front, and moreover, they realize that the autonomous 'race' is more of a marathon, where over a ten or twenty-year period you collect real-world miles." —Adam Jonas, Morgan Stanley $MS

$TSLA: "To exclude the possibility of Elon's $16 or $20 billion stake in SpaceX being potentially involved in some kind of collateralization, or in any other way strategically, in the future of Tesla, we think is a mistake." —Adam Jonas, Morgan Stanley $MS