Speaker 1: Bloomberg Audio Studios, podcasts, radio news.
Speaker 2: One of the biggest bulls on this stock for quite
Speaker 2: a while. On the street, our convest CEO Kathy Wood. Kathy,
Speaker 2: thanks for making time for us this morning. Let's just
Speaker 2: talk about what Dan I've said to us yesterday that
Speaker 2: he believes Elon Musk is crossing a line and that
Speaker 2: the board needs to step in. Do you share that
Speaker 2: for you?
Speaker 1: Well, I have to tell you we've been dealing with
Speaker 1: controversy around Elon Musk in one form or another since
Speaker 1: we first bought the stock when the company was founded
Speaker 1: in twenty fourteen, and we owned Tesla in It's one
Speaker 1: of the top holdings in three of our ETF so, arkk, W,
Speaker 1: and Q. So we are watching this like a hawk,
Speaker 1: no question about it. But with the experience over the
Speaker 1: last eleven years, we turn around today and see Tesla
Speaker 1: really not an EV manufacturer anymore. Moving into the robotaxi age,
Speaker 1: we believe successful and we believe it will scale much
Speaker 1: better than most of its competitors. We see SpaceX really
Speaker 1: only ninety percent of all of the satellites out there
Speaker 1: neurally transforming lives of paralyzed people, people with als and
Speaker 1: probably most surprising of all XAI. Now we own all
Speaker 1: of those again in our venture fund, following them very carefully.
Speaker 1: Xai is on some benchmarks. It hit a point that
Speaker 1: three pro hit in June, it hit it in February.
Speaker 1: So you know, we are very focused on barriers to
Speaker 1: entry technology moats and we believe that the moats that
Speaker 1: Elon has built, And obviously this is not just Elon.
Speaker 1: He's attracting the best and the brightest to help solve
Speaker 1: some of the world's biggest problems. So again, we do
Speaker 1: trust the board and the board's instincts here and we
Speaker 1: stay out of politics.
Speaker 2: Well, we'd love your opinion on the current situation just
Speaker 2: on Tesla specifically. You mentioned some phenomenal companies doing some
Speaker 2: incredible things for Tesla, though, do you believe that Elon
Speaker 2: can pursue his political ambitions at the same time pursuing
Speaker 2: the best interest of TENSA shareholders.
Speaker 1: One of the announcements Elon made recently is that he
Speaker 1: is going to oversee sales in the US and in Europe.
Speaker 1: And when he puts his mind on something, he usually
Speaker 1: gets the job done. So I think he's much less
Speaker 1: distracted now than he was let's say in the White
Speaker 1: House twenty four to seven, at what.
Speaker 3: Point do you see sort of the political landscape shifting
Speaker 3: though not just for Tesla, but for the haves and
Speaker 3: the have nots in some of the big tech space.
Speaker 3: I know you've had a complicated relationship, say with Apple,
Speaker 3: which seems uniquely pegged by some of these tariffs. Is
Speaker 3: there anything that you could see that would make you
Speaker 3: like that stock again or do you think that really
Speaker 3: it is going to fall out of magnificent seven.
Speaker 1: Yes, we've been watching Apple for a long time with
Speaker 1: an AI lens, and that started, I'm going to say
Speaker 1: about seven years ago when it was becoming serious about
Speaker 1: autonomous vehicles. If you think about the ultimate mobile device,
Speaker 1: it's an autonomous vehicle, and that should have been Apples
Speaker 1: to win. And what we've seen there is one turnover
Speaker 1: of management teams after another, and it's all autonomous driving.
Speaker 1: Is an AI project, just the largest AI project on Earth,
Speaker 1: we believe, and so losing the talent that it has,
Speaker 1: and as I understand it lost another one today to
Speaker 1: Mark Zuckerberg's Top fifty. So they've had a lot of
Speaker 1: trouble in this regard, and I think the burden of
Speaker 1: proof is on them.
Speaker 3: Do you think that it is time to follow the talent,
Speaker 3: that this is going to work the gamble that you're
Speaker 3: seeing over at Meta, and that that's the path of
Speaker 3: travel for the other big tech companies that are going
Speaker 3: to just eat some of the companies from the inside
Speaker 3: out take the talent unnecessarily by the company.
Speaker 1: You know, it's a very good question. We're trying to
Speaker 1: figure out if what Mark Zuckerberg is doing today is
Speaker 1: much like he did when he was pivoting hard to
Speaker 1: the metaverse, which proved because he thought that was the
Speaker 1: next big thing, and that was incorrect. AI is the
Speaker 1: next big thing, no question about it, and you do
Speaker 1: have to have the right DNA and you have to
Speaker 1: move fast and break things, as he would say. So,
Speaker 1: you know, it'll be interesting to see if he's able
Speaker 1: to turn his open source strategy and we've admired that
Speaker 1: quite a bit in terms of generative AI into a
Speaker 1: leader again or as we were observing it, Apple's LAMA
Speaker 1: three at the time was improving at a faster rate
Speaker 1: than some of Openay's models, and that was true of
Speaker 1: open source generally, and then that has stopped. So, yes,
Speaker 1: he had to do something. Is this the right thing?
Speaker 1: Why did that stop?
Speaker 2: I don't know, Kathy. Next time you're with us, we'll
Speaker 2: have a longer conversation. Two leaders, incredible men doing incredible things.
Speaker 2: I confessed the Kathy word.