Quote from: Carlton Banks on May 28, 2018, 12:50:00 PM

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Netflix's business model is to borrow loads of money, then charge users less than their costs. They never made any profit on streaming; they're in huge, ever increasing debt.
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I would agree with you if we were talking about Tesla (Tesla is borrowing a ton of money and is unprofitable).
However, Netflix is growing like crazy and is in a much better situation.

E.g. take a look at this article from last month:
https://www.fool.com/investing/2018/04/22/netflix-will-be-more-profitable-than-you-think.aspx

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For the umpteenth time in recent memory, the streaming champ this week blew past earnings estimates...

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The first-quarter report featured the usual blowout numbers as revenue surged 40.4% ...

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However, the most impressive part of Netflix's earnings report was its rapidly improving profit margin.
Operating margin jumped to 12.1%, due in part to the timing of content spend, and management said
full-year operating margin would be 10%-11%, its best ever. While Netflix's earnings multiple is still
sky-high due to the stock's rapid growth, it's becoming clear that Netflix will be solidly profitable,
with double-digit margin that should continue to get wider.

I know that they are in debt, but this is mainly due to the expensive streaming contracts and licenses.
This is a misleading situation in my opinion for the following reason:
Let´s say Netflix produces a movie like "The Irishman", which costs 140M $. The costs are paid upfront,
but the income due to the movie will show up much later when they actually air the movie.

Netflix current strategy of heavy expansion and expensive productions may be a bit aggressive and fueled
by a huge amount of debt, but it still seems to be working so far.

Irrespective of this, the amount of debt doesn´t even look that high compared to the market capitalization of Netflix.

Companies like Tesla are much more likely to go down due to huge amounts of debt.

edit:
Actually I think that you are right on second thought.

The root cause of all these companies that
are "debt-fueled" (Tesla, Netflix...) is probably the fact that the whole economy is distorted due to the availability
of unprecedented amounts of liquidity at low interest rates.

In an economic environment where central banks couldn´t introduce liquidity to this extent (e.g. in an
economy that is based on sound money like Bitcoin) situations like this wouldn´t be possible.