Elon Musk Peter Parks | AFP | Getty Images

Tesla shares have crushed the market's performance for years, but patience is starting to run thin among some investors after Chairman and CEO Elon Musk's too ambitious Model 3 production goals. In the third quarter, Tesla delivered 26,150 total vehicles and just 220 Model 3 cars versus Wall Street analyst consensus estimates for 25,860 and 1,260, respectively, according to FactSet. The Model 3 delivery miss revealed on Oct. 3 came just two months after the company gave guidance of more than 1,500 vehicles for the quarter. "We are confident we can produce just over 1,500 vehicles in Q3, and achieve a run rate of 5,000 vehicles per week by the end of 2017. We also continue to plan on increasing Model 3 production to 10,000 vehicles per week at some point in 2018," Tesla said in its second-quarter 2017 update letter on Aug. 2.



Tesla shares fell 4 percent Monday after The Wall Street Journal reported Friday that the company was building "major portions" of the Model 3 car by hand away from the automated production line as of early September, according to people familiar with the matter.

"Frequent wide-of-the-mark forecasts..."

Even though the company called the report "fundamentally wrong and misleading" investors are saying any further stock price decline may be a sign sentiment is finally shifting on the Street.



"Tesla's stock has been egregiously overvalued for years. However, up until now, the stock market invince-a-bulls have been able to ignore all bad news - not just Elon Musk's frequent wide-of-the-mark forecasts," Fred Hickey, editor of High Tech Strategist, wrote in an email. "Therefore, if Tesla's sharp Monday decline continues, it could tell us as much about how much gas is left in the bull market's tank as it does about how much rope Musk has remaining." Hickey owns long-term Tesla put options. Wall Street is also noticing the sheer magnitude of Tesla's cash burn. Bernstein analyst Toni Sacconaghi estimated Tesla will burn through $4.7 billion of cash this year in a note to clients on Sept. 27. He said the company will reach a total $10.6 billion of cash burn as a public company by the end of 2017, which is unprecedented for a nearly $60 billion market-cap company. In comparison, he cited how Amazon burned $1.1 billion of cash over three years and was generating billions of dollars of cash when it reached a $60 billion valuation.

"Cash incineration engine..."