Let’s recap the measures Musk took to survive the gloomy winter of 2008–2009: Musk prematurely claimed to have secured a $40 million convertible debt round and a DOE loan that Tesla hadn’t even successfully applied for yet. He followed that up by raising cash deposits on the strength of a cobbled-together prototype, raising prices, and putting on a misleading show of profitability for a single month to secure the low-cost government loan that he’d already claimed to have secured.
