S & P sets Tesla's credit rating to B-

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in hardware on (#3N1)
The upcoming car manufacturer received an unsolicited B- credit rating from Standard & Poor due to "considerable uncertainty" about its long-term prospects. The rating, six levels below investment grade, was derived independently of Tesla and comes after over $2.3 billion was successfully raised by the company in March to fund a new battery factory.

Shares in Tesla have risen 41 percent this year.
Reply 16 comments

Waa waa (Score: 3, Insightful)

by bryan@pipedot.org on 2014-05-28 11:21 (#1XS)

Sounds like someone got butt-hurt about not being included. How dare they successfully raise money without getting one of our credit reports!

Re: Waa waa (Score: 2, Interesting)

by nightsky30@pipedot.org on 2014-05-28 12:29 (#1XX)

Exactly! And they haven't taken money from a bailout in order to stay afloat, unlike some other companies.

Re: Waa waa (Score: 0)

by Anonymous Coward on 2014-05-28 15:53 (#1Y3)

Or an attempt by another auto manufacturer to defame Tesla via their friends.

Re: Waa waa (Score: 0)

by spacebar@pipedot.org on 2014-05-29 20:07 (#1YV)

I've heard some competent economists say that Tesla's been fudging their books, which would make this much less about credit rating ego and more Elon Musk's.

Other Car Companies? (Score: 0)

by Anonymous Coward on 2014-05-28 11:25 (#1XW)

How does this compare to other car companies? Particularly, the credit rating itself, but also the collaborative (or not) process? Not that I suspect it's a conspiracy theory, but it wouldn't surprise me if S&P was pressured to say bad things about Tesla, so long as they could make it look reasonable.

Re: Other Car Companies? (Score: 0)

by Anonymous Coward on 2014-05-28 14:24 (#1Y1)

Other companies are backed by the government, giving them excellent credit.

Re: Other Car Companies? (Score: 5, Insightful)

by skarjak@pipedot.org on 2014-05-28 16:46 (#1Y6)

Given the way the auto industry has been trying to use the law to slow down Tesla and spreading a whole lot of FUD about it, at this point I'd say "it's a conspiracy!" is actually a very reasonable reaction when stuff goes wrong for them.

Huh? (Score: 2, Insightful)

by dotdotdot@pipedot.org on 2014-05-28 12:45 (#1XY)

Compared with larger, more established automakers, the company is less likely "to successfully adapt to competitive and technological displacement risks over the medium to long term," [S&P analysts Nishit Madlani, Dan Picciotto and Joseph Lin wrote in the report].
With Elon Musk leading the company, seems to me that the opposite would be true.

Re: Huh? (Score: 2, Insightful)

by Anonymous Coward on 2014-05-28 15:20 (#1Y2)

Telsa IS the "competitive and technological displacement risk"

Re: Huh? (Score: 2, Insightful)

by fatphil@pipedot.org on 2014-05-28 20:04 (#1Y9)

Not if it can be safely deflated using the mechanism of corrupt oligopolistic business practices.

Borked RSS feed b/c of THIS article title! (Score: 0)

by Anonymous Coward on 2014-05-28 16:00 (#1Y4)

<title>S&P sets Tesla's credit rating to B-</title>
The ampersand wasn't escaped and apparently pipedot is just regurgitating text entered on a webform. And, if that is true, is vulnerable to XSS attacks from maliciously entered titles. :-[

And what about body text and comments?

At the very least my aggregator is erroring out and red flagging pipedot's RSS feed.

Re: Borked RSS feed b/c of THIS article title! (Score: 3, Informative)

by Anonymous Coward on 2014-05-28 16:02 (#1Y5)

BTW, the red flagging is b/c pipedot's RSS feed is NOT valid XML (the unescaped ampersand).

XSS Test: <script>alert(document.cookie);</script> (Score: 0)

by Anonymous Coward on 2014-05-29 15:13 (#1YK)

XSS Test: <script>alert(document.cookie);</script>

Re: XSS Test: <script>alert(document.cookie);</script> (Score: 0)

by canorris@pipedot.org on 2014-05-29 15:15 (#1YM)

Sorry everyone, I saw a post on this page about XSS vulnerabilities in the title of posts, so I went ahead and submitted a benign example. It's ruining the page for everyone, but does illustrate the vulnerability quite nicely.