Earlier this year, Bloomberg reported that Tesla was running out of cash as the automaker was burning through more than $6,500 (£5,072 / €5,736) every minute.
That’s a massive amount of money and a number of people believed the automaker would run out of cash before the end of the year. While Tesla pushed back on the original report, it appears the story might not have been very far off.
In an interview with Axios, Tesla CEO Elon Musk confirmed problems with the Model 3 almost resulted in the death of the automaker. As he explained, Tesla was “bleeding money like crazy” and “if we didn’t solve these problems in a very short period of time, we would die.”
Musk went on to says the problems involving ramping up Model 3 production were “extremely difficult” to solve and the company only had “single digit” weeks to live. This put an incredible amount of pressure on Musk and he was working seven days a week and sleeping in the factory. The outspoken executive went on to describe this time as “very painful” as it hurt both his brain and his heart.
While the short clip doesn’t delve into many specifics, production problems with the Model 3 are widely known. The company overestimated their ability to get the car into mass production and this was compounded by bottlenecks which put the company into “production hell.”
The issues have largely been worked out, but there are still problems as Musk has previously noted the automaker went from “production hell to delivery logistics hell.”