Tesla Burns More Money Than Ever as Model 3 Production Crawls Along

Just 27 hours after launching a Tesla Roadster into orbit around the sun, Elon Musk has turned his gaze from the red planet to the blue one, where he's trying to get a different sort of project off the ground. "If we can send a Roadster to the asteroid belt, we can probably solve Model 3 production," Musk said on an investors call today. What 400,000-odd potential customers and more than a few investors want to know is, how much more time? The $35,000 Model 3 sedan is crucial for Tesla's success. It's the car meant to take electric cars mainstream--and Tesla into the ranks of the big automakers. Yet the Silicon Valley company just released financial figures revealing that it ended 2017 with its largest quarterly loss ever: $675 million.