RE: Logic Firstly, you don't know that they are not cash flow positive for the month of Feb or the current month March. To be sure, you need all the financial numbers which is only obtained at the end of the quarter. They don't do financial reports in the middle of a quarter. They can only do an estimate for the middle of a quarter, and they estimated that they would reach cash flow positive sometime in Feb.
Even that Tesla article you posted said this:
https://gigaom.com/2013/02/20/tesla-says-first-quarter-profit-non-gaap-expected-in-q1-2013/
"So for JUST December, Tesla generated positive free cash flow, which must have been what CEO Elon Musk meant when he tweeted that the company had narrowly become cash flow positive. Usually companies say this about quarters, not individual months."
Secondly, you are confusing operating cost with capital cost. The cost per oz is the operating cost. The capital cost is cost involved in constructing mill, machinery, trucks, mining equipment, land, exploration drilling, etc. What you are trying to do is insert the capital cost into the operating cost to make the cost per oz unnaturally high (that's of course BS).
Cash flow positive includes the capital cost because that uses cash. When you say 3017 oz/mon to reach cash flow positive, that includes all the capital cost, as well as any expenditures not related to operating cost. You can't just say the cost per oz is high, just because they had a lot of capital expenditures.
If you look at the NI 43-101 report, it shows the capital expenditures drop off a cliff in 2013. That's because the majority of the capital expenditures for building the mill and infrastructure were spent in 2011 and 2012. Like i said before, they don't need to build a new mill and infrastructure every single year.
The drop in capital cost for 2013 will drop their break even point, cash flow positive point, even if the cost per oz operating cost remains the same.
What will drop the operating cost would be an increase in grade from 5g/t to closer to their average 7g/t measured reserves (measured from all the drill holes they have already made). Like i said before, you can't expect the first stopes mined to be the same as the average of all the measured reserves. As well, fine tuning of operations as they ramp up drops the operating cost per oz.
All the numbers so far is for ramp up. Ramp up is always higher cost. They haven't reached steady state full production yet, which has lower cost per oz.