Speaker 1: Bloomberg Audio Studios, Podcasts, radio news. Let me tell you
Speaker 1: we have a new star.
Speaker 2: A star is born Elon pumped up on Mars Juson Kennemy.
Speaker 3: He is the Thomas Edison plus plus plus of our age.
Speaker 1: Probably his whole life is from a position of insecurity.
Speaker 4: I feel for the guy.
Speaker 5: I would say ninety eight percent really appreciate what he does.
Speaker 5: But those two percent that are nasty, they are I'll
Speaker 5: be in four fos.
Speaker 1: We are meant for great things in the United States
Speaker 1: of America, and Elon reminds us of that we don't
Speaker 1: have a fourth branch of governments called Elon Musk. Welcome
Speaker 1: to Elon, Inc. Bloomberg's weekly podcast about Elon Musk. It's Tuesday,
Speaker 1: April fifteenth. I'm your host, Joel Webber, sitting in for
Speaker 1: David Papadopolos. It's tax day in the US, when the
Speaker 1: federal government is supposed to collect its money, and maybe
Speaker 1: it still came. But of course DIRS has been gutted
Speaker 1: alongside many other federal agencies thanks to Elon and DOGE.
Speaker 1: But the news stories about DOGE seems to have been
Speaker 1: slowing down a little bit. What exactly is Elon and
Speaker 1: his young team up to these days, We've got lots
Speaker 1: to discuss, so we'll talk about that, and then we're
Speaker 1: gonna dig back into the roller coaster of Tesla's share
Speaker 1: price as investors await next week's earnings call. Okay, let's
Speaker 1: start with doche and to unpack the leaders. We're joined
Speaker 1: by Elon Inc. Regular Dana Hole, Hi, Dana, Hey, Joel,
Speaker 1: and a special guest and now friend of the podcast,
Speaker 1: McKenna Kelly from Wired Magazine. Hello, McKenna, it's good to
Speaker 1: be back.
Speaker 4: Hey.
Speaker 1: Okay, I'm gonna start with a clip from October twenty
Speaker 1: twenty four at Maniston's Quare Garden, where Elon is on
Speaker 1: stage with Howard Luttnik out of Trump rally.
Speaker 2: Oh, I got one question for it that I'm getting
Speaker 2: out of here.
Speaker 1: This is your stage. But we set up doge. Yes,
Speaker 1: how much do you think we can rip out of
Speaker 1: this wasted six two point five trillion dollar Harris Biden budget? Well,
Speaker 1: I think we could do at least two trillion. Yeah, yes,
Speaker 1: two trillion. And now here's Elon just a few days
Speaker 1: ago with a new number.
Speaker 5: I'm excited to announce that we anticipate savings in FY
Speaker 5: twenty six from reduction of waste and broad by one
Speaker 5: hundred and fifty billion dollars.
Speaker 1: McKennon, we had two trillion. Now it's one hundred and
Speaker 1: fifty billion, dramatically smaller. How realistic is even that number?
Speaker 4: Yeah, I mean when you look at the kinds of
Speaker 4: areas that Dough just targeting right now, one of the
Speaker 4: biggest cost savings I think you can argue is all
Speaker 4: of these layoffs and riffs that have been happening across
Speaker 4: the federal government. But at a lot of agencies, the
Speaker 4: workforce is one of the cheapest parts of these agencies, right,
Speaker 4: And so again it's like it's hard to predict, right,
Speaker 4: if one hundred and fifty billion will actually be the number,
Speaker 4: or if it'll be even less. It's hard to even
Speaker 4: just trust Elon's goals here because even when we go
Speaker 4: to like doache dot gov, where all of these savings
Speaker 4: are supposed to be listed, a lot of these end
Speaker 4: up being incorrect and even removed from the website. So
Speaker 4: even if he claims to have met one hundred and
Speaker 4: fifty billions, say like six months from now, I have
Speaker 4: a hard time believing that number would even be accurate.
Speaker 1: And Dana how Active, I know this is an ongoing
Speaker 1: current on the show. How Active is. DOZE currently feels
Speaker 1: like it's winded down a little bit.
Speaker 3: I think I'm going to push back on that. I
Speaker 3: think that people think it's winded down because everyone is
Speaker 3: focused on tariffs and what tariffs are doing to the economy.
Speaker 3: But DOZE is still very much embedded in all of
Speaker 3: these agencies. You know, Antonio Gracias, one of Elon's best
Speaker 3: friends who's on the board of SpaceX, is like at
Speaker 3: the Social Security Administration, They're doing all this stuff with
Speaker 3: Social Security and immigration and putting people on these dead lists.
Speaker 3: And I just think that just because there's not maybe
Speaker 3: the wall to wall media coverage that there was in
Speaker 3: dozes early these days, does not mean that DOGE is
Speaker 3: winding down. Elon's time as a special government employee will
Speaker 3: sunset after the one hundred and thirty day mark. But like,
Speaker 3: DOGE is very much embedded in all of these agencies.
Speaker 3: And what McKenna has written about a lot is and
Speaker 3: what we've seen too is like, you know, it's not
Speaker 3: just this like band of kids that like got a
Speaker 3: lot of publicity in the early days. People are now
Speaker 3: in CIO roles, people have access to wide swaths of information,
Speaker 3: and so I just think it's incorrect to sort of
Speaker 3: act like DOGE is sort of on the way out.
Speaker 3: It is not like they have more access to more
Speaker 3: databases and more agency functions than ever, and there's like,
Speaker 3: you know, easily I don't know. I think our internal
Speaker 3: list is over eighty people, but there are people like
Speaker 3: at every agency accessing all kinds of data, and they're
Speaker 3: still doing a lot of work, like hand in hand
Speaker 3: with omb the Trump administration.
Speaker 4: I also think part of what's happening here too, and
Speaker 4: a lot from my reporting and the reporting that you
Speaker 4: guys have been doing at Bloomberg, is that at the beginning,
Speaker 4: there are these stories of these teenage strike forces of
Speaker 4: engineers descending on these agencies, and then also, I mean,
Speaker 4: it was every single agency. And now I mean, the
Speaker 4: way that I've been describing this to folks that I've
Speaker 4: been speaking with recently is that we've kind of we're
Speaker 4: kind of exiting the stage one of DOGE right and
Speaker 4: entering what I've been kind of calling stage two, although
Speaker 4: I don't have a proper definition for it yet because
Speaker 4: I don't think we're in it all the way, but
Speaker 4: a lot of what's happening at agencies specifically, I'm thinking
Speaker 4: about the IRS. It's tax day. There's a lot of
Speaker 4: very technical things happening. Groups of engineers you know at
Speaker 4: the IRS, and groups of doge folks and palenteer coming
Speaker 4: in and trying to build these like unified API layers.
Speaker 4: That doesn't really make a great headline. And then you
Speaker 4: have to also have to think like does your audience,
Speaker 4: you know, even understand fully what all of this means.
Speaker 4: And so there's a lot going on, right, but it's
Speaker 4: not this like headline grabbing, attention grabbing teenagers storming through
Speaker 4: the State Department right Instead, they're sitting at computers at hackathons.
Speaker 3: I feel like we've gone from like feeding a USAID
Speaker 3: into the wood chipper on a Saturday to like, let's
Speaker 3: remake like technical infrastructure of how this agency actually operates
Speaker 3: and like strip out all of the legacy software contracts
Speaker 3: and make a new database that is run by like
Speaker 3: private enterprise.
Speaker 1: And McKennon, tell us more about your reporting on this,
Speaker 1: because you have written about specifically at the IRS and
Speaker 1: this API that you mentioned ANDEER Palenteer, of course, private
Speaker 1: company that's legendary for being able to like create layers
Speaker 1: of software that can kind of reach across databases. What
Speaker 1: is the end goal here and what could this end
Speaker 1: up looking like?
Speaker 4: Yeah, I mean it's really hard to predict what the
Speaker 4: end goal is. But what's happening at the IRS specifically
Speaker 4: is that doge specifically the doge lead at IRS, his
Speaker 4: name is Sam forcos, he wants to build this unified
Speaker 4: API layer across all of the IRS systems, basically creating
Speaker 4: one kind of one cloud platform using Palentti your foundry
Speaker 4: software right to be able to create different apps to
Speaker 4: run LLLMS over IRS data. And he thinks he can
Speaker 4: do this in thirty days. This is happening at other
Speaker 4: agencies as well. A couple of weeks ago, I reported
Speaker 4: that at the SOID Security Administration, for example, there were
Speaker 4: doge folks who wanted to completely rebuild the SSA code base.
Speaker 4: And again they think that they can do this in
Speaker 4: like thirty days or a month, completely build it up
Speaker 4: from the ground up and removing all of this legacy code,
Speaker 4: whether that is assembly or coball, and get it ready
Speaker 4: for whatever. You know, This next phase of doges and Danna.
Speaker 1: When you think about what that looks like and how
Speaker 1: it's currently used in tech, like, what do you think
Speaker 1: it could end up looking like?
Speaker 3: Well, there's just like a lot of great privacy concerns
Speaker 3: because the federal government always had like really strict rules
Speaker 3: about who had access to what, and the inability to
Speaker 3: kind of cross agencies was sort of by design, right,
Speaker 3: because the federal government took very seriously the privacy of
Speaker 3: American citizens. But if databases can talk to each other,
Speaker 3: there's nothing that's stopping dose from like using IRS data
Speaker 3: to coordinate with like it, you know, with ICE or
Speaker 3: the student loan program, and like that is the big
Speaker 3: fear of a lot of civil rights experts and student groups.
Speaker 3: And you're seeing in a lot of the lawsuits that
Speaker 3: have been filed great concern about the lack of privacy
Speaker 3: controls that are going into these new systems. And you know,
Speaker 3: Musk is very focused on immigration and they you know,
Speaker 3: they are talking a lot about social security and what
Speaker 3: they're doing with social security and how so many immigrants
Speaker 3: have Social Security numbers, and so I think that there's
Speaker 3: just great concern about the lack of privacy controls as
Speaker 3: these new databases are being built and like cross reference
Speaker 3: across the government, you can argue that doing that is
Speaker 3: more efficient and will help find waste and fraud. But
Speaker 3: on the flip side, like the government now has unfettered
Speaker 3: more and more access to everyone's information than it ever
Speaker 3: had before.
Speaker 1: Mc kenneth, where else has your reporting on DOGE taking
Speaker 1: you here? We've got the IRS stuff, We've got HHS,
Speaker 1: the Palanteer stuff is really interesting, Like what's the signal
Speaker 1: through all of this, especially as you know, we start
Speaker 1: to look forward to perhaps Elon maybe stepping back a
Speaker 1: little bit at the end of his one hundred and
Speaker 1: thirty days as a special government employee.
Speaker 4: Yeah, to piggyback off of what Dana was saying. I mean,
Speaker 4: that's the fear right now, is that one of the
Speaker 4: administration's biggest goals right now is immigration and immigration reform,
Speaker 4: if that's what you want to call disappearing people immigration reform.
Speaker 4: But if you look at the agencies that DOGE has targeted.
Speaker 4: You mentioned AJHS, which has a database of unac companied minors.
Speaker 4: You look at IRS. Despite as much as what Elon
Speaker 4: wants to say, immigrants in our country do pay taxes.
Speaker 4: In a variety of ways billions and billions of dollars
Speaker 4: every year, and then ssay as well, they end up
Speaker 4: paying into Social Security as well. And so when you
Speaker 4: look at the agencies that DOT has targeted, with the
Speaker 4: priority of the administration being immigration, by building these APIs
Speaker 4: and modernizing these systems, allowing them to talk would make
Speaker 4: it a lot easier. And what sources that I've been
Speaker 4: speaking to the fears, you know, building this gigantic migrant
Speaker 4: surveillance system. And the scariest part of this to me
Speaker 4: is the idea that you can do this in thirty days.
Speaker 4: I mean, just identifying where all the databases are, what
Speaker 4: they do, who accesses them, and for what purpose would
Speaker 4: take longer than thirty days, you know, according to everyone
Speaker 4: that I've spoken to. And so even if you want
Speaker 4: to even beyond that thirty day limit, is there even
Speaker 4: time to test how these were built? Are things going
Speaker 4: to go wrong? I think you know. The big thing too,
Speaker 4: is like who is going to get trapped in this?
Speaker 4: We had over the weekend an immigration lawyer in Massachusetts
Speaker 4: right who received an email saying that she needed to
Speaker 4: self deport immediately. That was a mistake. There's just so
Speaker 4: many mistakes that could happen, and when the administration is
Speaker 4: sending so many of these folks down to the seacop
Speaker 4: prison in Al Salvador and not really fighting to bring
Speaker 4: them back when mistakes are made. That adds another layer
Speaker 4: to this, all right, because maybe they don't even care
Speaker 4: if you know, the system is one hundred percent perfect
Speaker 4: and doesn't make these horrible mistakes.
Speaker 1: Dana, that is all kind of scary. We're starting to
Speaker 1: think about, you know, what a complete kind of surveillance
Speaker 1: state might look like here in the US. It's also
Speaker 1: I'm curious, you know, I mentioned how Elon could be
Speaker 1: stepping away here At the end of a one hundred
Speaker 1: and thirty day period, he will have this special government
Speaker 1: employee status that will sort of supposedly end. Is he
Speaker 1: actually going to leave?
Speaker 3: So has discretion in terms of how the one hundred
Speaker 3: and thirty days are counted. Like if if you think
Speaker 3: if the inauguration on January twentieth was day one, then
Speaker 3: the one hundred and thirty days brings you till roughly
Speaker 3: the end of May. I mean, there have definitely been
Speaker 3: signals that Elon is going to like sort of step back.
Speaker 3: Trump has said basically at some point, Elon's going to
Speaker 3: have to leave. Elon talked very publicly at that Wisconsin
Speaker 3: rally about the sort of hit that he's taking in
Speaker 3: terms of the backlash against Tesla and how that's impacted
Speaker 3: his stock and the stock of everyone who owns Tesla frankly,
Speaker 3: and so there is a sense that, like he might
Speaker 3: pull back, but I think that he has unfettered access
Speaker 3: to the Trump administration. And we have to remind everyone
Speaker 3: he bankrolled this electoral comeback. He spent more than two
Speaker 3: hundred and fifty million dollars to get Trump reelected. He
Speaker 3: campaigned for Trump all across Pennsylvania. And he's not just
Speaker 3: going to like take his ball and go back to
Speaker 3: Tesla like he He funded this campaign for a reason.
Speaker 3: I think he is very proud of what Doge has accomplished,
Speaker 3: but frustrated that the public isn't giving him accolades like
Speaker 3: he is. He is frustrated by the backlash his companies
Speaker 3: are in. I mean, Tesla at least is in trouble,
Speaker 3: like they have a stale lineup byd is eating their
Speaker 3: starting to eat their lunch. Globally, the cyber truck is
Speaker 3: a disaster. In terms of sales, So like at some
Speaker 3: point he's going to have to reckon with like what
Speaker 3: is his company? But I don't think he's gonna like
Speaker 3: not be in touch with Trump. I mean, the two
Speaker 3: of them text each other all the time.
Speaker 4: The thing I would add to that too is that
Speaker 4: he owns x Twitter. I mean, his formal role is
Speaker 4: as a senior advisor. I think maybe you can just
Speaker 4: do that by competing. Unfortunately as well, because it's very unclear.
Speaker 4: You know that the administration Republican influencers everyone in this ecosystem,
Speaker 4: this Trump administration ecosystem is on there and probably you know,
Speaker 4: gets push notifications like we all do when Elon Musk tweets,
Speaker 4: whether we turn them on or not.
Speaker 1: Mcinnay. You know, that's an interesting idea and it does
Speaker 1: speak to maybe what the future it looks like. But
Speaker 1: like back just in the present, since he's still in DOGE,
Speaker 1: how involved is he on a day to day basis
Speaker 1: Based on what you've learned through your reporting.
Speaker 4: Yeah, I mean it sounds like the way that he
Speaker 4: operates with a ton of his companies, right, he has
Speaker 4: these grand ideas or whatever, and he builds a group
Speaker 4: of people who he knows can execute. Steve Davis seems
Speaker 4: to be heavily involved, who you know, is now the
Speaker 4: president of the Waring Company. He was brought in for
Speaker 4: the Twitter acquisition and did a lot of the cost
Speaker 4: cutting there. It seems like it's the same playbook, right,
Speaker 4: and then it gives Elan a lot of time to go,
Speaker 4: you know, do some of his company stuff. Played Diablo
Speaker 4: four at three o'clock in the morning to test his
Speaker 4: starlink or whatever. But yeah, I think it's still you know,
Speaker 4: him operating as this like philosopher King more than this
Speaker 4: everyday roll of like getting his hands dirty with firings
Speaker 4: or you know, doing specific stuffs.
Speaker 3: When I thought it was super interesting that Musk and
Speaker 3: a bunch of Doge people went on Fox News with
Speaker 3: Brett Baher to kind of talk about their work, and
Speaker 3: Steve Davis was sitting right next to Elon and he
Speaker 3: was introduced by the Fox host as the COO.
Speaker 1: Of Doge of Doge.
Speaker 3: Yeah, so did A McKenna's point, like it is Elon's philosophy,
Speaker 3: but he has kind of deputized some of his most
Speaker 3: loyal lieutenants to actually carry out the work. But Musk
Speaker 3: is still very much in DC. I mean, he was
Speaker 3: with Trump in Florida over the weekend at the UFC fight.
Speaker 3: Like he is not in Fremont, he's still very much
Speaker 3: in the nation's capital.
Speaker 1: So when he's not there, let's say, after these one
Speaker 1: hundred and thirty days or whatever, who are some of
Speaker 1: the key people you mentioned Steve Davis, who are some
Speaker 1: of the key people in DOGE that will be kind
Speaker 1: of primary reporting targets as you kind of look ahead, Dana,
Speaker 1: I'm gonna start with you.
Speaker 5: Yeah, I think I.
Speaker 3: Think it's super interesting to look at who's taken on
Speaker 3: the CIO roles so. At Social Security, for instance, the
Speaker 3: sort of interim CIO was this guy Mike Russo, but
Speaker 3: now it's Scott Colter, who's like a young kind of
Speaker 3: private equity VC kind of person and who is now
Speaker 3: like in that job. And so that's that's like one
Speaker 3: example of like an agency person that I would look
Speaker 3: closely at. I think it's super interesting to see how
Speaker 3: long Antonio Gracias, who's on the board of SpaceX, and
Speaker 3: Joe Gebia who's on the board of Tesla, stay involved
Speaker 3: in DOGE. They have both been very active Antonio at
Speaker 3: Social Security and Gebia's like at oh PM looking at
Speaker 3: the retirement system. You know, some of these people kind
Speaker 3: of cycled through and have cycled back to their companies already,
Speaker 3: Like some of the young like engineers who worked at
Speaker 3: Tesla and SpaceX, are already sort of done with their
Speaker 3: with their work and are now back at the companies.
Speaker 3: But to McKenna's point, like as we enter sort of
Speaker 3: DOGE two point zero or like the second phase, I
Speaker 3: think it's going to be some of the less lesser
Speaker 3: known names that will actually have the most influence. And
Speaker 3: they're lesser known by design. I mean a lot of
Speaker 3: what we know of the about these people is based
Speaker 3: on court filings and tros and declarations from the government
Speaker 3: in these various lawsuits. A lot of these people have
Speaker 3: scrubbed their social media. They don't have a LinkedIn page,
Speaker 3: like they are being very low key on purpose and
Speaker 3: worth mentioning.
Speaker 1: Dana, you work with Sophie Alexander and our graphics team
Speaker 1: here at Bloomberg to sort of map out what that
Speaker 1: universe of people really look like. That will be kind
Speaker 1: of leading DOGE potentially forward after elon the steps aside, Yeah,
Speaker 1: for sure, any particular names that we haven't mentioned yet
Speaker 1: that are of interest to you.
Speaker 4: Yeah, The people that I'm most interested in are the
Speaker 4: DOGE people who are within that USDs system, which was
Speaker 4: formerly of course called the US Digital Services created under
Speaker 4: Obama to resolve the whole healthcare dot gov debacle, now
Speaker 4: called the US Doage Services, seemingly led by a woman
Speaker 4: named Amy Gleason, who you don't hear a lot from.
Speaker 4: So I'm definitely interested in seeing what Amy's role evolves into.
Speaker 4: Does she end up making more decisions, does she take
Speaker 4: the reins on a lot of this. I have my doubts,
Speaker 4: of course, but definitely the leadership there and at GSA
Speaker 4: as well, because the General Services Administration to me has
Speaker 4: kind of seemed with all the layoffs happening and getting
Speaker 4: rid of so many folks at these agencies, it seems
Speaker 4: like they're building like this group of technologists that they
Speaker 4: can then just like deploy anywhere to you know, quote
Speaker 4: unquote like fix issues or do things.
Speaker 1: All Right, McKenna, we're going to have you back on
Speaker 1: the pod. Thanks for joining us today. Really appreciate you
Speaker 1: in your time.
Speaker 4: Great great to be here.
Speaker 1: Oh right now we're going to talk about the other
Speaker 1: most exciting thing in the world, which is Tesla as
Speaker 1: a stock. And we're going to be joined by Esha Day,
Speaker 1: a Bloomberg Stock reporter. Esha, thanks for joining us. Thank
Speaker 1: you for having me, Dana, you're still here, of course, Escha.
Speaker 1: What is going on with this stock right now?
Speaker 2: Well, that's an interesting question.
Speaker 5: As always, it's very volatile and it's mostly going down now.
Speaker 5: You would say that about the US stock market as
Speaker 5: better right now and.
Speaker 1: For numbers like about seven and a half percent down,
Speaker 1: And I.
Speaker 5: Just want to set up like you know, yes, Tesla
Speaker 5: is moving a lot like the US stock market, which
Speaker 5: itself is moving like a memestock these days.
Speaker 2: But I want to tell you, like how much wilder
Speaker 2: Tesla is.
Speaker 5: For example, Tesla shares are down last I checked, about
Speaker 5: thirty eight percent this year. Sm P five hundred is
Speaker 5: down about eight percent of over that time. The NaSTA
Speaker 5: one hundred, which is I would say usually a little
Speaker 5: more volatile than sm P five hundred index because it's
Speaker 5: so technology heavy, is down about ten percent.
Speaker 2: So you know that's a comparison.
Speaker 5: Now since April second, when this recent tariff turmoil really started,
Speaker 5: and by many accounts, some people would say that Tesla
Speaker 5: is relatively insulated maybe from some of the tariffs. Yet
Speaker 5: Tesla shares are down about eleven person since April seconds close.
Speaker 5: Sembly five hundred is down about four point five percent
Speaker 5: over that time, NaSTA one hundred down four persons. So
Speaker 5: you know, by whichever way you look at this, Tesla
Speaker 5: chees are doing very badly.
Speaker 1: Okay, there's this thing called the death crow that's come
Speaker 1: up a little bit and Tesla seems to be maybe
Speaker 1: flirting with it. How significant is this death cross?
Speaker 2: Yeah, it's significant for sure.
Speaker 5: It's a death cross is basically a chart pattern, but
Speaker 5: it's one of the more prominent ones out there, something
Speaker 5: that technical analysts and chart analysts kind of look at
Speaker 5: very closely. Now, any chart pattern we would not look
Speaker 5: at them in isolation. We usually want to see what
Speaker 5: else is happening with the stock at the same point.
Speaker 5: But overall, what this death cross is is it's basically
Speaker 5: is giving you a sense of what the momentum of
Speaker 5: the share price is doing.
Speaker 2: Right.
Speaker 5: So, the way it's defined is when a short term
Speaker 5: price support line of a stock or an asset falls
Speaker 5: below the long term support line or trend line. The
Speaker 5: way it's usually defined is by the fifty day moving
Speaker 5: average and the two hundred day moving average, and Tesla
Speaker 5: Shayes just cross that kind of ominous milestone yesterday. What
Speaker 5: it usually means is that you know that, like the
Speaker 5: momentum is now on the lower side.
Speaker 2: The last time it happened was in.
Speaker 5: Early I would say late January early February twenty twenty four,
Speaker 5: and right after that happened, Tesla Chez fell about twenty
Speaker 5: five person over fifty five trading sessions.
Speaker 2: So you know that's how it goes.
Speaker 1: Okay, Dana, I'm gonna turn to you. What's the word
Speaker 1: among investors and analysts? Were a week away from from
Speaker 1: earnings here, it seems like a pretty significant earning. So
Speaker 1: so what are we hearing as we march towards that day?
Speaker 3: Yeah, I mean you're seeing a lot of analysts cutting
Speaker 3: their price targets for volume because Tesla just does not
Speaker 3: really have a robust lineup, and people want to hear like,
Speaker 3: what is up with? Is Tesla ever going to make
Speaker 3: a cheaper car? Is the cheaper car like really a
Speaker 3: new car or is it just like a de content
Speaker 3: and Model three and Model Y. I've written about this
Speaker 3: that like Elon Musk is basically.
Speaker 4: Bored with making cars.
Speaker 3: He kind of proved to the world that you could
Speaker 3: make a high performance like car and he accomplished that,
Speaker 3: and now he's all about AI and the robotaxi. The
Speaker 3: company is supposed to launch some kind of soft robotaxi
Speaker 3: service in Austin in June. So I think the earnings
Speaker 3: call is all going to be about like the catalysts
Speaker 3: for the future. Everyone knows it was a really bad
Speaker 3: quarter in terms of sales. How testy analysts get with
Speaker 3: Elon on the call, I think will be interesting. I'm
Speaker 3: hoping that analysts will ask him like when are you
Speaker 3: stepping back from doge? When are you going to actually
Speaker 3: run the company? Like he has always been a part
Speaker 3: time CEO, and I think you're really seeing frustration about
Speaker 3: that spillover. Like Dan Ives, who's you know, always been
Speaker 3: one of the most boolish analysts on Wall Street, sort
Speaker 3: of talked about the brand destruction and that like Elon
Speaker 3: has to kind of make a decision and read the room.
Speaker 3: So yeah, it'll be as always, it'll be a very
Speaker 3: interesting call.
Speaker 2: Next week.
Speaker 1: Dan just brought up Dan Ives, who, as she also mentioned,
Speaker 1: is has been a huge test lablele. How significant was
Speaker 1: him changing his tune a little bit.
Speaker 5: Yeah, So, Dan Ives, I would say, is one of
Speaker 5: the strongest bullish voices among seal side analysts on Tesla.
Speaker 5: You know, he's very rarely criticized as a stock or
Speaker 5: Elon Musk himself. So him coming out was really kind
Speaker 5: of emblematic of how a.
Speaker 2: Lot of the bullish voices.
Speaker 5: And I speak to investors, both retail investors and institutional
Speaker 5: investors on Tesla all the time, and when around the
Speaker 5: time when Dan kind of came out and said that Okay,
Speaker 5: this is time for the company to really kind of
Speaker 5: you know, listen to the room really and for Elon
Speaker 5: Musk to take a step back and kind of refocus
Speaker 5: on the company again, that was really emblematic of the
Speaker 5: mood of the street. Like when I talked to investors
Speaker 5: that they're very cautious, like there are I mean, there
Speaker 5: is this thing about Tesla bullish investors where they're almost
Speaker 5: always optimistic in some way, but the mood of caution,
Speaker 5: the mood of concern is really coming out right now
Speaker 5: and that is like becoming really intense after the squatter
Speaker 5: deliver numbers and the results that we are expecting next week.
Speaker 1: Okay, so there's caution, but then there's short shorts. No
Speaker 1: one seems to be willing to short it though, right
Speaker 1: and Dana, You've written about shorts and how devastated they've
Speaker 1: been by this stock. So even though there's caution, like,
Speaker 1: is anybody really willing to bet against Elon?
Speaker 3: You know, that's a really good question. I mean, the
Speaker 3: sort of a group of short sellers known as Tesla
Speaker 3: Hugh really got blown out of the water when the
Speaker 3: Model Y became like the best selling vehicle and the
Speaker 3: company kind of very definitely navigated the pandemic and hit
Speaker 3: a trillion dollar valuation. I actually don't know if the
Speaker 3: shorts have come back. I mean, some of the biggest
Speaker 3: and loudest short sellers like David Einhorn and Jim Chanos,
Speaker 3: I don't actually know if they still are actively shortening
Speaker 3: stocks like ESHA. I haven't caught up with them recently,
Speaker 3: have you.
Speaker 2: No, You're right.
Speaker 5: I mean, there are almost no prominent bearish voices or
Speaker 5: short seller voices to be found in Tesla at this point.
Speaker 5: And you know, they kind of absolutely got blown apart
Speaker 5: during the twenty twenty two an even rally in the stock,
Speaker 5: so I just again numbers a little bit for context.
Speaker 5: There was a time, I would say around twenty eighteen
Speaker 5: twenty nineteen, the short seller percentage of Tesla stock was
Speaker 5: around thirty three percent of its free flow. Right now,
Speaker 5: it's hovering around three percent for the past four or
Speaker 5: five years. So that's where we are. Even when we
Speaker 5: see a slight bit of uptick in the stock, we
Speaker 5: haven't really seen anything that's you know, worth really noting.
Speaker 5: When I talk to people on the street, there are
Speaker 5: enough people out there who think this stock should be shorted,
Speaker 5: but they're just not willing to stand in front of it,
Speaker 5: just because it's such an immense beast of a momentum
Speaker 5: stock right just when the stock turns, it's very hard
Speaker 5: to tell when it might turn, and especially with Lan's
Speaker 5: kind of political prominence and everything, the understanding is that
Speaker 5: once the stock really turns, it's very hard to stand
Speaker 5: in front of that momentum, and nobody wants to get
Speaker 5: kind of blown part by that.
Speaker 1: Esha Danna, thanks for joining us on Elennik.
Speaker 4: Thank you always a pleasure.
Speaker 1: This episode was produced by Stacy Wong. Anna Maserakas is
Speaker 1: our editor, and Rayhan Harmanci, our senior editor. The idea
Speaker 1: for this very show also came from Rayhan, and she
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