LIKE most technology tycoons, Elon Musk exudes disdain for finance. Convertible bonds and lease accounting are problems for Wall Street, while the visionaries in California focus on driverless cars and space travel. Yet while he might be loth to admit it, Mr Musk has become America’s most audacious corporate financier as well as its best-known entrepreneur. In just over a decade he has created an empire valued at a cool $44 billion despite its heavy losses (see chart). A blend of financial laboratory, corporate labyrinth and buttock-clenching thrill ride, Musk Inc has pushed the boundary of what was thought possible.

As has been the case for a decade, Mr Musk’s businesses face a difficult struggle to sustain their market valuations over the next 18 months, and to bolster confidence he is expected to unveil new financial measures and also new products over the next few weeks. Mr Musk has repeatedly defied the odds. But the stakes have got bigger now that shareholders, creditors and counterparties have tens of billions of dollars at risk. Tesla, an electric-car manufacturer, must ramp up production quickly and also meet the threat from new electric models designed by traditional car firms. Mr Musk wants to merge two of his firms, Tesla and SolarCity, a company which installs rooftop solar panels. Both firms burn up cash. He already has a place in American business history, but whether as a cautionary or inspiring tale will soon become clear.

As a child growing up in South Africa, Mr Musk would enter trances in which he could imagine complex computer systems. His business can be visualised as having four parts (see diagram). The biggest one is Tesla, which is publicly listed. SpaceX launches rockets for government and commercial clients and is financed by private investors. SolarCity is listed and struggling, so Tesla is trying to buy it in a backdoor bail-out. Lastly there is Mr Musk’s personal balance-sheet. It is rich in assets—his stakes in the firms are worth $13 billion—but he has little cash on hand.

In total Musk Inc has perhaps $8 billion of sales, and is set to burn $2.3 billion of cash during 2016. Its structure developed in a haphazard fashion. It includes both public and private firms, reflecting the fact that Tesla and SolarCity floated before the craze for so-called unicorns, or technology firms such as Uber that rely on private investors. Musk Inc also carries echoes of Asian and Italian business federations, which pool resources and people: SolarCity uses batteries made by Tesla, for example, and SpaceX has made loans to SolarCity. Mr Musk is the chairman of all three firms, which share some directors. His cousins manage SolarCity. Fidelity, a big asset manager, owns large stakes in each of the trio.

Mr Musk dreams of populating Mars and of hyperloops that transport people in pods between Los Angeles and San Francisco in 35 minutes. But his financial objectives are probably identical to those of carpet or chewing-gum tycoons: to raise cash, to get a high valuation and to keep control.

Consider the ways in which Mr Musk drums up cash, first of all. He has raised an epic $6 billion of equity from investors, staff and even from Tesla’s competitors (for a while, Toyota and Daimler owned stakes in the carmaker). Musk Inc also owes about $6 billion of debt to bond investors and banks. But what sets it apart is the $7 billion of cash and revenue that it has squeezed from unconventional sources. That includes deposits from customers before their cars are delivered; asset-backed securities and special-purpose funding vehicles that raise funds against assets without guarantees from Mr Musk’s firms; emissions credits, loans from the government and deals under which leasing firms purchase cars in return for a guarantee that Tesla will buy them back. (Mr Musk’s firms dispute our total figure on their unconventional sources of funds).

It’s lonely out in space

The second goal, a high valuation, is vital to command confidence and for raising cash. The business itself is volatile—in April, 400,000 people pre-ordered Tesla’s $35,000 new car, the Model-3, a welcome surprise. In September one of SpaceX’s rockets exploded. So the key is to control perceptions of the distant future, in order to influence financial forecasts from banks and investors. Here Mr Musk is dazzlingly skilful. He publishes plausible “master plans” and uses shifting targets to anchor expectations. For example, in May he said Tesla would make 500,000 cars a year by 2018, ahead of his previous target of 2020. It will make only about 85,000 this year.

The result is spectacular: the average of investment-bank analysts’ projections says that Tesla’s revenues will soar from $7 billion to about $30 billion by 2020, following a path like those of three of history’s most successful firms, Google, Apple and Amazon, at their raciest point, in the mid-2000s. Only about a fifth of these cumulative sales are from existing customer orders, yet these medium-term bank forecasts, upon which the edifice partly rests, are stable despite operational wobbles. Incredulous short-sellers have queued up to bet against SolarCity and Tesla. But the Musk empire also has plenty of fans in Silicon Valley and on Wall Street.

The last objective, control, is key to Mr Musk, who in 2000 was ousted as the boss of PayPal, an internet-payments firm he co-founded. He owns about 50% of SpaceX, but his shareholdings in Tesla (23%) and SolarCity (22%) are near the threshold where control is no longer guaranteed.

To keep all these balls in the air, the firms must meet their targets. SpaceX generates cash and has an impressive order book, but must recover from the explosion in September. SolarCity needs to cut costs. Tesla must ramp up production of its Model X and Model 3 cars, and compete with rival electric cars to be launched by General Motors, Daimler and Audi, among others.

If the firms fall behind, a cash crunch becomes likely. Mr Musk’s companies insist they will not burn up much more money. But they could easily eat up $4.5 billion, starting from the second half of 2016 to the end of 2018. They will also need to refinance $2 billion of maturing debt. Against this, the Musk group has about $5 billion of cash and liquidity lines from banks. Mr Musk’s own finances look stretched. He has spent most of the $180m in cash from selling his stake in PayPal to eBay in 2002. He has personally borrowed $490m, secured against his Tesla shares, and most of that comes from Morgan Stanley, a Tesla underwriter. The car firm’s shares would have to fall by more than half before the loans went underwater.

In the event of a squeeze, the triple objectives of raising cash, boosting the valuation and keeping control will start to conflict. The proposed SolarCity acquisition illustrates this: by getting Tesla to buy the struggling SolarCity, Mr Musk can keep it alive and maintain control. But it could hurt the valuation of Tesla, which will be lumbered with its sister firm’s debt and losses. To his credit, Mr Musk has said that the independent shareholders of both firms must approve the deal.

Similarly, if Tesla were to try to ease the financial pressure by raising lots of equity, Mr Musk’s stake could drop below 20%, threatening his control. He could issue non-voting shares—as Facebook has—or invoke the poison-pill provisions Tesla has in its statutes. But that might hurt the group’s valuation. He could try to sell Tesla to a car or technology firm (Google almost bought it in 2013), or SpaceX, through gritted teeth, to a defence firm. But their punchy valuations mean that they would be a mouthful for even giants such as General Motors or Lockheed Martin, a defence group.

Given all this, it is likely that in the coming weeks Mr Musk will adopt a more familiar approach: squeezing costs in the short term, dreaming up new products and explaining how lean manufacturing techniques will allow his companies to revolutionise their industries. But with expectations already sky-high, it is hard to see how much more euphoria he can inspire. Mr Musk’s most extraordinary creation may not be cars or spacecraft, but a business empire with a financial structure that works only if risky companies perform perfectly on ambitious plans. Mr Musk is like an astronaut orbiting the earth with no easy way down.