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If you’re Tesla CEO Elon Musk, there’s some good news following the first quarter’s $702 million loss—and some bad news.

The good news is that you’re still seen as a better credit risk than Volodymyr Zelensky, the TV comedian who’s just been elected the president of Ukraine.

The bad news? It isn’t by much.

Yields on Tesla (ticker: TSLA) debt have surged amid growing investor concern about the electric-vehicle maker’s performance and stability. As of Thursday morning, following the first quarter’s disappointing results, the bonds due for repayment in 2025 were yielding 8.5%.

That’s slightly below the 8.7% yield on comparable Ukrainian debt. So, yes, investors still require slightly less compensation for risk to lend money to Musk than they do to Zelensky.

By...er...0.2 percentage point a year.

So at this point Tesla is viewed in the credit markets on a par with a country already partly occupied by Vladimir Putin.

Read more: Elon Musk Says He’s Selling Insurance — and Wishes Tesla Was Private

Investors trying to read the tea leaves on Musk’s extraordinary empire should keep an eye on bonds like these as well as on the stock price, which is now flirting with two-year lows. Analysts know it is notoriously difficult to come up with a fair stock value for a company like Tesla: It’s a high-risk gamble on massive long-term growth.

But the bonds are a simpler bet on whether the company is going to go bust or not. Arguably the key question for Tesla is whether it will have enough cash to get to the point where it is financially self-sustaining. It blew through $1.5 billion, or 40% of its cash and equivalents, in the first quarter, and predicts capital expenditures of $2 billion to $2.5 billion this year. On the other hand, it predicts operating cash flow will be positive for every future quarter, even after deducting capex.

It’s a sign of Musk’s battered reputation among investors that the credit markets are deeply skeptical.

At this point, Tesla is now apparently seen as a worse credit risk than, say, the governments of Turkey, Angola, Colombia, Benin, and Kazakhstan. All of those countries’ 2025 bonds sport yields below those of Tesla’s, meaning investors are willing to lend to them more cheaply than they are to Musk.

Tesla bonds now yield nearly three times as much as those from Greece.

The good news? As all those countries can now borrow money much more cheaply than Elon Musk, it widens the list of entities who could help bail out Tesla if it gets into deeper financial difficulty.

Write to Brett Arends at barends@marketwatch.com