Those crazy margins lasted for like 2 quarters until it was revealed that one of the main ways they managed it was severely under allocating warranty. It was a neat trick, until vehicles actually started to come back with warranty claims and they realized they literally make the least reliable and most expensive to repair cars on the market. IIRC they were allocating like 1/3 of what Toyota does per-vehicle, which is absolutely insane given the kind of vehicles they make. Hence why they became insanely stingy with warranty claims, and you saw tons of in-warranty repairs being allocated to “goodwill” which is a distinctly different pool from warranty allocation.

The entire company is built on fraud and shell-games with SpaceX/Starlink/Boring Co. and Musk has straight up admitted as much. No one gives a shit and a judge literally ruled he’s allowed to do it because line go up.

I can rant for hours about all the insanely sketchy stuff they’ve done solely for a one quarter boost, and plenty of other stuff where their cost-cutting directly resulted in loss of life.