Is it too late for Tesla?

What may have started as an ill-advised bit of summer whimsy — Elon Musk’s tweet on Aug. 7 suggesting that, as Tesla’s chief executive officer and its largest shareholder, he was going to take the company private and had the “funding secured” to do so — has turned into a full-blown crisis.

There’s the unwanted scrutiny: Thanks to Mr. Musk’s tweet, Tesla is the target of a criminal investigation by the Justice Department and a civil investigation by the Securities and Exchange Commission. There’s the missed opportunity: a Saudi investment fund that had been eyeing Tesla has invested $1 billion in a rival. There’s the brain drain: the sudden departures of Tesla’s chief accounting officer and its head of human resources. There’s the loss of investor confidence: Tesla’s stock price is down 25 percent since August.

And then there is Tesla’s biggest and most acute problem: its precarious finances. Mr. Musk promises investors that Tesla is going to start making more cars and profits any day now, but that’s wishful thinking. Tesla is not generating enough cash to pay back the mountain of debt that is coming due soon. Once stalwart investors are losing faith in Mr. Musk and his company, and Wall Street is turning on him. Tesla could soon become a case study of what can happen when an iconoclastic Silicon Valley entrepreneur, seduced by his own wonderfulness, thinks the rules of the marketplace do not apply to him.

Tesla’s finances are fragile. It has around $11 billion in long-term debt and no profits. “That is not a sustainable business model,” Jim Collins, a longtime auto industry research analyst, wrote in Forbes in April. “Not even close.”