Elon Musk Gloats as Financial Times Walks Back Claim of $1.4B Tesla Accounting Gap
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Elon Musk wasted no time dunking on the Financial Times after the newspaper backtracked on a bombshell report published last week that implied Tesla had a $1.4 billion hole in its books.
“Turns out @FT can’t do finance,” Musk posted gleefully on X Wednesday.
The FT originally raised eyebrows last week when it flagged a suspicious mismatch between Tesla’s reported capital investment — $6.3 billion in the second half of 2024 — and the $4.9 billion increase in its gross assets over the same period. The newspaper flagged the hefty sum as having “gone astray” and vanished into the accounting ether.
But in a detailed “mea culpa” published Tuesday, the newspaper admitted the gap likely had a “benign explanation” and blamed their misunderstanding on the arcane complexities of cash flow accounting.
“Having last week got rather excited by the minutiae of Tesla’s accounting,” the FT wrote in its follow-up, “it’s time to row back.”
Expert correspondents had reportedly stepped in to clarify that reconciling cash flow and accrual-based accounting —especially when Tesla’s cash flow statement uses the indirect method — can be notoriously tricky. A combination of credit purchases, asset disposals, and depreciation narrowed the supposed gap to about $463 million.
The remaining discrepancy, the FT conceded, could plausibly be chalked up to currency movements or minor write-offs.
The publication concluded that “at a certain point it’s necessary to trust the auditor’s judgment,” offering what amounts to a financial journalism version of “our bad!”
The original article was updated with an editor’s note directing readers to the new explainer.
While the broader concerns over Tesla’s cash strategy and debt issuance remain, this takeback was taken as a clear PR win for Musk — who, thriving on any public clash with legacy media, jumped online to twist the knife.
