If you take a closer look at their financial data, you'll find that it's quite a bit better than what people repeat.

In Fiscal Year 2018, they had positive operating cash flow of $2.1 billion. Part of the reason for the difference between accounting earnings (a loss) and actual cash flow is the huge depreciation charges ($1.9 billion) for historical capital expenditures, versus present-day cash outflows.

In that year, Tesla still spent a lot of cap-ex dollars on Model 3 capacity and battery capacity (to the tune of $2.3 billion), so overall cash flow was slightly negative - about $200 million for the year, off of $21 billion in revenue.

In the six months since then, they're reported additional positive operating cash flow: $224mm off of $10.9 billion in revenue.

This is a company experiencing 47% y/y revenue growth for the first half of the year. Yes, they're spending on cap-ex, but they are producing positive operating cash flow and their total operating+cap-ex cash flow is running a little in the red, but <1% of revenues.

And in context, they have $5 billion in cash and $10 billion in short term assets.

Tesla is not at significant financial risk.

Netflix

Revenue — $17 billion Gross Profit — $5.8 billion EBITDA — $2 billion Market Cap — $111 billion Debt — $14 billion Enterprise Value — $125 billion

Tesla

Revenue — $25B Gross Profit — $4B EBITDA — $2.33B Market Cap — $39B Debt — $14B Enterprise Value — $54B

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Uber

Revenue — $12 billion Gross Profit — $4 billion EBITDA — negative $7.6 billion Market Cap — $53 billion Debt — $6.2 billion Enterprise Value — $50.5 billion

Tesla

Revenue — $25B Gross Profit — $4B EBITDA — $2.33B Market Cap — $39B Debt — $14B Enterprise Value — $54B

I can go on but hopefully you get the point.

Partly I think this is motivated by the law that gives tax breaks to companies that show losses. So then no big surprise that many tech companies show losses, regardless of their corporate health. Amazon is one; they've almost never shown a profit ever, and when they have it has been exceedingly slight (surely an accounting "mistake"). Yet they are still in business over 20 years later, and that success has catapulted multiple individuals into the billionaire range. Shady? Definitely. Too much capital? Clearly not, since Amazon has out-performed any possible influx of capital.

There is clearly some dark art in accounting, but I don't think it's always because the companies are covering up bad business. It might be because they're trying to make as little taxable profit as possible.