TESLA WANTS MORE $

Odd bid to suppliers

Investors on Monday weren’t buying what Elon Musk was trying to sell.

Shares of Musk’s Tesla fell 3.3 percent, to $303.20, on news the electric-car maker was hitting up key suppliers for rebates.

Tesla was doing so to help it mop up some red ink, according to a report.

Suppliers were asked in a memo to kick back some of what they billed Tesla over the past two-plus years, according to a report in The Wall Street Journal.

The memo, sent last week, asked “all suppliers” to pay the rebates, according to the Journal.

But a Tesla spokesperson played down the memo, saying the company “asked fewer than 10 suppliers for a reduction in total [capital expenditures] for long-term projects that began in 2016 but are still not complete.”

“Any changes with these suppliers would improve our future cash flows, but not impact our ability to achieve profitability in [the third quarter],” he told The Post.

The company described the rebate request as normal. Some analysts weren’t buying that line.

Morningstar’s David Whiston acknowledged that carmakers often demand better deals from their suppliers for future work.

“But retroactive rebates is not something we hear much about, and this is troubling for us to hear,” he wrote in a Monday update.

HyperChange founder Galileo Russell agreed that “whatever they squeeze out of suppliers won’t be the difference to get them to profitability or not.”

Even with any rebates, Tesla will need to raise additional capital, Russell said — countering Musk’s insistence additional funding won’t be necessary.

If Tesla’s unorthodox refund request is true, Needham’s Rajvindra Gill told The Post, it “reveals the dire situation the company is in with respect to cash burn.”

Gill has calculated that nearly one in four orders for Tesla’s Model 3 had been canceled — exacerbating a tenuous cash position.

Tesla ended the first quarter with just $2.8 billion in cash — with $6 billion needed to get through 2020, Gill predicted.

The news of requests for supplier rebates spooked those holding Tesla debt. The cost to insure the bonds against default by using credit default swaps rose to its second-highest price ever.

On Monday the cost rose from Friday’s closing price by 13 cents, to $5.96 per $100 of Tesla debt.

The company’s race to become cash-flow-positive continues amid the release of glowing reviews for the new Model 3— the modestly priced sedan that Musk admitted in a Bloomberg interview this month was a “bet-the-company” initiative.