Speaker 1: Well, Elon Musk gives now the richest person on the planet.
Speaker 2: More than half the satellites in space are owned and
Speaker 2: controlled by one man.
Speaker 1: Starting his own artificial intelligence company.
Speaker 3: Well, he's a legitimate, super genius.
Speaker 4: Legitimate, he says.
Speaker 3: He's always voted for Democrats, but this year it will
Speaker 3: be different. He'll vote Republican.
Speaker 5: There is a reason the US government is so reliant
Speaker 5: on him.
Speaker 4: Elon Musk is a scam artist and he's done nothing.
Speaker 4: Anything he does is fascinating the people.
Speaker 2: Welcome to Elon, Inc. Where we discuss Elon Musk's vast
Speaker 2: corporate empire, his latest gambits and antics, and how to
Speaker 2: make sense of it all. I'm your host, David Papadoppolos.
Speaker 2: The news is coming fast and furious in the Elon Verse.
Speaker 2: Last night, Elon announced that Neuralink had successfully implanted a
Speaker 2: chip into a human. Big news, clearly, but just how
Speaker 2: excited or terrified should we be? Meanwhile, over at X,
Speaker 2: the team had a strange response to deep fake porn
Speaker 2: images of Taylor Swift that had gone viral on the platform.
Speaker 2: They made it impossible to search for her at all.
Speaker 2: Oh and Tesla earnings came and went and the stock
Speaker 2: market gave Elon a big thumbs down. To talk about this,
Speaker 2: I'm sitting here in the studio with Max Schafkin, senior
Speaker 2: reporter at Bloomberg BusinessWeek. Hello Max, Hey, you missed me, Max, wwa.
Speaker 4: I did. It's so good to see you, David.
Speaker 2: Later, we'll be joined by Kurt Wagner and Dana Hall
Speaker 2: to talk about X and Tesla, respectively. But first we
Speaker 2: welcome Sarah McBride to the show. Hello Sarah.
Speaker 6: Hello.
Speaker 2: Sarah is Bloomberg's Neurlink reporter and will help guide us
Speaker 2: through this cerebral quantum leap. So, Sarah, what do we
Speaker 2: actually know here? What happened? A chip went in, the
Speaker 2: patient survived. What else do we know?
Speaker 6: Well? In his tweet yesterday, Elon said that signals were
Speaker 6: working in the patient's brain, that neurons were firing or
Speaker 6: words to that effect, which is great, but it would
Speaker 6: have been terrible news had that not been the case.
Speaker 2: And what exactly does neurons firing? What is that for
Speaker 2: the lay people out there like MEA Max? What does
Speaker 2: that mean?
Speaker 6: In his post yesterday, Elon wrote that initial results showed
Speaker 6: promising neurons spike detection and all that means is that
Speaker 6: there are one hundred billion neurons almost in the average
Speaker 6: human brain, and so the neurons, which are the cells
Speaker 6: of the brain that are near this device are working. There.
Speaker 6: When a neuron works, you can tell because it kind
Speaker 6: of activates at the end, there's a tiny electrical signal.
Speaker 6: So that's what they're picking up with the device as
Speaker 6: after it got implanted on Sunday.
Speaker 2: Pretty encouraging. I mean, hard to know exactly how much
Speaker 2: to read into it, but certainly positive for times the
Speaker 2: patient survives.
Speaker 6: Right, doesn't mean that the device is working. It means
Speaker 6: that it didn't destroy anything in the patient's brain, and
Speaker 6: probably a few days or weeks down the line, then
Speaker 6: they'll see if it can actually result in the patient
Speaker 6: being able to, for example, mover cursor on a computer
Speaker 6: outside outside their boxy.
Speaker 2: So we don't know that yet. We're not there yet.
Speaker 4: We don't know that yet, not even close, not even close.
Speaker 1: Sorry not to be the wet blanket, but like I
Speaker 1: think we need to approach the claims being made here
Speaker 1: with some skepticism. First of all, it's Elon Musk we're
Speaker 1: talking about. He's a guy who tends to present you know,
Speaker 1: let's just say like the rosiest possible version of any
Speaker 1: prospective technology. And this is a safety trial, it's not
Speaker 1: an efficacy trial.
Speaker 4: This is the point here is to put this.
Speaker 1: In a few people's brains and see if anything bad
Speaker 1: happens to them. And so far, according to a single
Speaker 1: tweet by Elon Musk, we don't know. We haven't heard
Speaker 1: anything from the patient. We haven't heard anything else. Patient's doing.
Speaker 4: Okay.
Speaker 1: I just want to remind everyone in the monkey trials
Speaker 1: that Neuraline did, there were a lot of serious COMPLICATIONDS
Speaker 1: for the monkeys. And I went back and reread the
Speaker 1: story that Wired published on this. Right, these these were
Speaker 1: not necessarily happening the next day, So I think there's
Speaker 1: still some time even before we can say these are safe.
Speaker 2: Right, So I was sort of thinking that the fact
Speaker 2: that here we are TK hours later the patient is
Speaker 2: still alive was fairly significant that as a positive sign.
Speaker 2: Max is sort of suggesting that, well, okay, great, made
Speaker 2: it through the surgery. But you know, these things tend
Speaker 2: to pop up down the road. Just how significant is
Speaker 2: initial survival? Obviously again great for the patient, but.
Speaker 6: Yeah, I have to say it's very significant. This has
Speaker 6: been years in the making. This has been Elon promising
Speaker 6: every year like, oh yeah, we're going to have this
Speaker 6: device in a few months or next year, and finally,
Speaker 6: literally years after he first promised that it is in
Speaker 6: a human brain. That said, other companies that have done
Speaker 6: similar work have tended to wait a few days before
Speaker 6: making similar.
Speaker 2: But this is Elon Mosky. You knew he wasn't gonna wait.
Speaker 6: This is Elon. Also, this patient is you know, monkeys
Speaker 6: can't indicate when there's something wrong. Monkeys try to scratch
Speaker 6: their heads and mess with the scar sites. I'm not
Speaker 6: saying that those surgeries weren't botched. I've read some of
Speaker 6: the UC Davis reports, and maybe there were mistakes made
Speaker 6: during the surgery, but this is a human patient and
Speaker 6: hopefully a lot was learned from those monkey experiments. They've
Speaker 6: done many implants in primates since those botched ones, so
Speaker 6: I think they know the stakes here and this one
Speaker 6: was super carefully done.
Speaker 2: Now on the surgery itself, it is not a human
Speaker 2: doing the surgery itself, right, It is a robot.
Speaker 4: Correct, there's a.
Speaker 6: Robot assisting in the surgery, but it's not like the
Speaker 6: patient goes in the surgeons are like, okay, up to
Speaker 6: the robot. We're out of here. It's still a lot
Speaker 6: of humans in the operating room kind of managing the robot.
Speaker 2: Well, that's reassuring that there are humans involved here.
Speaker 4: Now.
Speaker 2: Listen, Max made it sound like it was all this
Speaker 2: is all about the safety of the product and not
Speaker 2: so much so much about efficacy. But efficacy means when
Speaker 2: you were talking about whether this person will be able
Speaker 2: to move a cursor with his or her brain, that
Speaker 2: sounds like efficacy to me, not safety.
Speaker 6: So they definitely are interested in safety. That is, to
Speaker 6: Max's point, the top priority. But it's a little different
Speaker 6: to drug trials. So device trials don't go through the
Speaker 6: same phase one, phase two, phase three we might be
Speaker 6: familiar with from drugs. There are different stages and they're
Speaker 6: analogous to some of those phase one, two, three, But
Speaker 6: you don't put a device like this in somebody's brain
Speaker 6: and not know that it's working before you go ahead
Speaker 6: and implant the next patient.
Speaker 1: So, but just to be clear, Sarah, there's another phase
Speaker 1: that they're gonna need tomorrow.
Speaker 6: Yeah, there are two more phases there. We're looking at
Speaker 6: years of child right.
Speaker 1: Well, nonetheless, Elon Musk in addition to announcing that the
Speaker 1: neurons are firing or whatever whatever he said, whatever that means.
Speaker 1: And now it's a product name for this. It's called Telepathy.
Speaker 1: It sounds wonderful. I mean, telepathy sounds pretty good.
Speaker 6: Well, he's changed the name a few times, so let's
Speaker 6: see if telepathy sticks. But it's catchy.
Speaker 2: Matt Max seems to like it, so there we go.
Speaker 1: I just it's just funny how we've gone from we
Speaker 1: put this in the guy. The guy is not dead yet,
Speaker 1: thank god, and it's called telepathy, and you know, I
Speaker 1: feel like we're one tweet away from like pre order one.
Speaker 4: Now it'll only be as.
Speaker 2: Put your deposit in.
Speaker 6: I have a feeling it's not going to be called
Speaker 6: telepathy when it fie gets released to the market. Somebody's
Speaker 6: going to put the kibasha on that. But yeah, it's
Speaker 6: a great name.
Speaker 2: So what do stage two, Sarah, and stage three look like?
Speaker 2: And when do we all go around with these things
Speaker 2: in our heads?
Speaker 6: Elon said that he wanted to get it in over
Speaker 6: ten patients this year, which is ambitious, but they could
Speaker 6: do it, you know, if they did one a month
Speaker 6: and then they have to analyze all the data, submit
Speaker 6: that to the FDA. Once the FDA's reviewed it, then
Speaker 6: they can start the next set of trials. And then
Speaker 6: the third set is called the pivotal trials, and those
Speaker 6: are the most exciting. You know that it's closest to
Speaker 6: an actual product. Those will be hundreds, if not thousands
Speaker 6: of people, but that's probably five years away. Yeah, if
Speaker 6: everything works as hoped.
Speaker 2: Now, let me ask you, as you said, in a
Speaker 2: good scenario, they're able to do about one a month.
Speaker 2: I guess that's I'm curious about that is What is
Speaker 2: it about these that are so difficult that you can
Speaker 2: only do one a month? Is just simply the fact
Speaker 2: that they are still These are just baby steps for them,
Speaker 2: and they're being You have to be super cautious at
Speaker 2: this at this stage.
Speaker 6: I mean, yeah, it's the first time they're doing this.
Speaker 6: You're putting electrodes several millimeters deep into somebody's cortex. You're
Speaker 6: slicing open their skull to do it, You're cutting into
Speaker 6: their dora. You want to make sure that the first
Speaker 6: one goes pretty well before you even try patient too.
Speaker 6: Then you want to make sure patient two is doing
Speaker 6: pretty well before you try patient three, and then you
Speaker 6: need to start actually doing the stuff you're trying to do,
Speaker 6: get the patient to move cursors and so on, control
Speaker 6: external devices. Then you have to build all that data,
Speaker 6: collate the results, present it to the FDA, let the
Speaker 6: FDA review it. And this is assuming that every thing
Speaker 6: goes well. If you have a setback like some patient
Speaker 6: who's scarring, heals in a weird way, or that could
Speaker 6: delay everything by months.
Speaker 2: More sure, listen last question before we let you go here.
Speaker 2: So Neurlink in the musk constellation of companies isn't certainly
Speaker 2: isn't the most valuable or I don't even think towards
Speaker 2: the top end of those. But this is a big
Speaker 2: step right where roughly has it's a privately held company,
Speaker 2: where has its valuation roughly been, and what if anything
Speaker 2: does this development do for that valuation?
Speaker 6: Yeah, I mean it'll probably increase the valuation. And as
Speaker 6: to where it is in the constellation of musk companies,
Speaker 6: it's toward the bottom, but toward the bottom for a
Speaker 6: musk company. In this case, Neuralink's worth three point five
Speaker 6: billion dollars For a medical device company that just implanted
Speaker 6: its first device in a human That is huge, just unbelievable.
Speaker 6: So that's the must fact driving up the valuation. And
Speaker 6: then you know, if they make it to the next trial,
Speaker 6: it'll have another outsized jump that'll make every other medical
Speaker 6: device company jealous. And you're seeing it already. I said
Speaker 6: the CEO of a rival company called Synchron last night.
Speaker 6: I just think he couldn't help himself. He had to
Speaker 6: post a tweet of one of his I think it
Speaker 6: was one of his patients manipulating Pong with his mind,
Speaker 6: just like, we're still here, don't forget about us. We've
Speaker 6: got devices in patients, still there and.
Speaker 2: In many ways, as you report it many times, in
Speaker 2: many ways many steps ahead of of Neuralink.
Speaker 6: Actually right, yeah, exactly, Well, in some ways they're in patience,
Speaker 6: but in other ways their device isn't as sophisticated as
Speaker 6: the Neuralink device. Neuralink has a thousand electrodes more than
Speaker 6: a thousand on its device, and Synchron doesn't have that many.
Speaker 6: So you can go back and forth and debate the
Speaker 6: pros and cons. But yeah, they were in patients for Nearlink.
Speaker 1: And way they're way behind on names because, like I mean,
Speaker 1: because a normal sober minded medical device company would not
Speaker 1: just like go around, like you know, marketing a highly
Speaker 1: speculative brand name on their you know very much in development.
Speaker 1: Maybe it works, maybe it's safe. We don't know yet product,
Speaker 1: but you on, he'll it's difficult to go ahead and
Speaker 1: do that. And investors, you know, for better worse, they
Speaker 1: like that, they love it.
Speaker 2: Okay, Sarah, listen, thank you very much for being with us.
Speaker 2: We will have you on as soon as we know more.
Speaker 2: As soon as you know more about our first patient.
Speaker 6: Here sounds good. Thanks for having me.
Speaker 2: Max and are now joined by Kurt Wagner, a tech
Speaker 2: reporter here at Bloomberg covering social media and the author
Speaker 2: of the soon to be released book Battle for the Bird,
Speaker 2: about Twitter and the battle for control of the company. Kurt,
Speaker 2: I know there's something tailor about Taylor Swift and deep
Speaker 2: fake porn, and then Musks people came back and they
Speaker 2: knew they hit the nuclear option, and you suddenly couldn't
Speaker 2: search it all for her. What the what the heck happened? Yeah?
Speaker 5: I mean, you had all the ingredients right there of
Speaker 5: exactly what happened. So the end of last week we
Speaker 5: saw that there were some there was deep fake porn
Speaker 5: of the most arguably the most famous woman in the
Speaker 5: world right now, Taylor Swift, circulating on x and this
Speaker 5: violates several of the company's policies, first and foremost. And
Speaker 5: so what we saw was naturally people seeking it out,
Speaker 5: sharing it, commenting on it, outrage of course from swift
Speaker 5: E's and other fans of not only Taylor, but just
Speaker 5: people who realized that this is not a good thing
Speaker 5: to be happening on any platform. And then you saw
Speaker 5: the companies sort of scrambling to try and figure out
Speaker 5: what to do about this, right, and David you mentioned
Speaker 5: they ultimately for a couple of days literally blocked people
Speaker 5: from having searched results when they searched for Taylor Swift's name.
Speaker 5: It's sort of happy to get into sort of how
Speaker 5: extreme that.
Speaker 2: Is, right, Why did they take such an extreme step?
Speaker 2: Why could they not be more precise in there and
Speaker 2: their crackdown on this?
Speaker 5: So you do something like this when you're having trouble
Speaker 5: cleaning up all of the stuff on your own, right, this,
Speaker 5: this is I would consider a last resort or close
Speaker 5: to a last resort. And to me, the fact that
Speaker 5: they simply had to block people from even searching for
Speaker 5: Taylor Swift is a sign that they were not able
Speaker 5: to get the problem under control on their own, and
Speaker 5: so they had to take a drastic measure like this.
Speaker 5: I've covered Twitter for ten years. I don't remember this
Speaker 5: happening before in terms of the search ban, certainly not
Speaker 5: as it relates to a high profile user like this.
Speaker 2: And that tells you what then about the current state of.
Speaker 5: X Well, that the trust and safety function over there
Speaker 5: is not operating in the way that it was before
Speaker 5: Elon took over, and then it's not operating very smoothly, right,
Speaker 5: I mean, presumably how something like this would normally be
Speaker 5: handled is it would be flagged to the company, you know,
Speaker 5: oftentimes maybe even by the not Taylor directly, but probably
Speaker 5: her team. Right, They'd have a partnership's contact at the
Speaker 5: company that they would go to. The company would not
Speaker 5: only immediately take down the original tweet, but they would
Speaker 5: probably take those photos or videos and start to scan
Speaker 5: the rest of the service for either identical matches to them,
Speaker 5: or other photos or videos that look very similar. Maybe
Speaker 5: it's the same photo but it's been a watermark has
Speaker 5: been added or something like that, right, And they would
Speaker 5: sort of automate the process of taking the stuff down
Speaker 5: as quickly as possible. What we know is that the
Speaker 5: original content was up I believe for something like seventeen hours.
Speaker 2: It's now down. Ultimately, the original content is down.
Speaker 5: It's now down.
Speaker 4: That's right.
Speaker 5: And they've and to be clear starting last night. So
Speaker 5: Monday night they started letting people search for Taylor Swift again.
Speaker 5: So they feel like they've gotten the process or they
Speaker 5: excuse me, the problem under control. But it took several
Speaker 5: days on that.
Speaker 2: You mentioned the NFL game. The NFL game is, as
Speaker 2: all of basically mankind knows, Taylor Swift is dating the
Speaker 2: tight end for the Kansas City Chiefs. Travis Kelcey Kansas
Speaker 2: City Chiefs played on Sunday in the semi finals of
Speaker 2: the NFL playoffs. They won, They're going to the super Bowl.
Speaker 2: So this band though on Taylor Swift searches is happening
Speaker 2: as this playoff game, this Kens City Chiefs game is
Speaker 2: going on, and Kurt, the NFL has been right one
Speaker 2: of the few bright spots for X of late in
Speaker 2: terms of generating buzz and content and all that horrible timing.
Speaker 5: No terrible timing, I mean, imagine how many people are
Speaker 5: watching that game Sunday and see, you know, CBS cutaway
Speaker 5: to a shot of Taylor Swift jumping around in the
Speaker 5: you know, the Kelsey box or whatever and want to
Speaker 5: go to X and search about it or to talk
Speaker 5: about it or whatever. Right, and suddenly a huge part
Speaker 5: of the service is not working for that exact use case.
Speaker 2: Kurt, So the nuclear option, somebody there at X hit
Speaker 2: the button. There was a very very large button that
Speaker 2: just says nuke, and they hit it and Taylor Swift
Speaker 2: disappeared from X for basically a day. Is that what
Speaker 2: we're going to expect going forward is that the blueprint
Speaker 2: then as this comes up in coming days and weeks,
Speaker 2: including perhaps during the Super Bowl in two weeks.
Speaker 5: I mean, that can't be the long term blueprint, right.
Speaker 5: That's just not a good strategy, is not a good
Speaker 5: business model. It's a bad way to handle this, but
Speaker 5: it's what you do when you're desperate. So my hope
Speaker 5: is that there were a lot of learnings from the
Speaker 5: past couple days that the team that is there figured out, Okay,
Speaker 5: you know, here's what we did wrong, or you know,
Speaker 5: maybe add some new level of kind of monitoring for
Speaker 5: some high profile accounts. As you mentioned, the Super Bowl
Speaker 5: is two weeks from now. If this stuff starts to
Speaker 5: circulate again, like well, they have made enough of it
Speaker 5: change in the next two weeks, I'd be surprised. So
Speaker 5: it may be that we see something like this happen again.
Speaker 5: What I will point out real quick is that they
Speaker 5: did say, and they're they're announcing this very intentionally. This
Speaker 5: week they're going to open a trust and safety office
Speaker 5: in Austin, Texas. I claim they're going to hire one
Speaker 5: hundred full time employees to Now one hundred is a
Speaker 5: small amount, to be clear, but full time employees at
Speaker 5: X one hundred is actually a pretty decent size. And
Speaker 5: they're announcing this because Linda Yakarino is going to be
Speaker 5: speaking before Congress on Wednesday about protecting children online.
Speaker 2: Is it actually meaningful or is it just simply pr
Speaker 2: and for disappearance.
Speaker 5: I think it's more pr than it is meaningful.
Speaker 2: What would a reasonable number be for a task like that?
Speaker 5: Kurt, Well, it's tough because so many of these companies,
Speaker 5: like Meta, I think, was touting tens of thousands of
Speaker 5: content moderators, but most of them are contractors, right, They're
Speaker 5: like basically just sifting through this never ending wheel of
Speaker 5: terrible content and clicking allow or not allow or whatever.
Speaker 5: Having one hundred full time employees working on this could
Speaker 5: be meaningful if those people are, you know, writing policy
Speaker 5: handling high profile accounts like Taylor Swift. I need to
Speaker 5: see what these people ares jobs description are going to
Speaker 5: be before I can really say how meaningful it is.
Speaker 2: But okay, but what if you are a much lesser
Speaker 2: public personality and do not have the influence or the
Speaker 2: deep pockets that Taylor Swift has. When if you too
Speaker 2: are targeted in something like this, what is your fate?
Speaker 5: I think you're in trouble in that situation. Quite frankly,
Speaker 5: I mean, if it takes seventeen hours and several days
Speaker 5: to figure this out for Taylor Swift, you know, what
Speaker 5: chance does someone who has one hundred followers, or maybe
Speaker 5: someone who's not even on X right, but yet their
Speaker 5: face or their content or their body has been posted
Speaker 5: to X right. They might not even really be aware
Speaker 5: that it's up there. This is not just an X problem.
Speaker 5: So I don't want to continue. You know, we're talking
Speaker 5: about X because of the situation over the last couple
Speaker 5: of days, But like this idea of you know, women
Speaker 5: in particular, having their bodies shared online without their consent,
Speaker 5: Like this happens on websites all over the place, and
Speaker 5: it's not okay, right, But you just hold a higher
Speaker 5: standard to some of these larger companies because they have
Speaker 5: so much power, so much money, so much influence. You
Speaker 5: hope that the Metas and the x's of the world
Speaker 5: can get this right. Because if they can't get it right,
Speaker 5: what kind of hope do we have for anybody?
Speaker 1: Yeah, we should say there's been reporting suggesting this was
Speaker 1: a Microsoft tool that was used to create this or
Speaker 1: could at least create some of these images. There have
Speaker 1: been Google alphabet has had its own battles with basically
Speaker 1: deep celebrity deep fakes. So yeah, I mean a lot
Speaker 1: of big companies, a lot of big companies that have
Speaker 1: you know, gigantic vast teams of people you would think
Speaker 1: trying to stop this stuff, have also struggled, But they
Speaker 1: just haven't struggled in such a spectacularly comic way. The
Speaker 1: banning of Taylor Swift. Also, the risk isn't just like
Speaker 1: getting sued by Taylor Swift. It's like upsetting your users.
Speaker 1: I don't know if other people have noticed this, but
Speaker 1: like sometimes you're just searching for something on Twitter and
Speaker 1: there will just be like porn that that'll just like
Speaker 1: find its way in that has found its way past
Speaker 1: the filters and into your feed. Like it's very and
Speaker 1: again when you're talking about like the Taylor Swift fandom,
Speaker 1: I don't probably don't have to tell people people feel
Speaker 1: very strongly about it, Like I don't think they want
Speaker 1: to see normal people don't want to.
Speaker 4: See Taylor Swift revenge porn.
Speaker 1: And that might be enough to turn you know, large
Speaker 1: numbers of people off of X permanently.
Speaker 5: And advertisers max right, Like we could have an hour
Speaker 5: long conversation about advertisers fleen X and Elon, but this
Speaker 5: type of thing does not help them at all because
Speaker 5: Coca Cola, Apple, Disney, pick your brand. The last thing
Speaker 5: they want to do is be handing over their money
Speaker 5: to a platform that is, you know, known for Taylor Swift.
Speaker 1: Well, it's quite the advertising decks like Linda on Madison
Speaker 1: Avenue being like, listen, we've got some great products for you.
Speaker 4: We've got the NFL, we've got deep fake porn on
Speaker 4: one side, exactly.
Speaker 2: Yeah, yeah, Kurt, we will see how they do in
Speaker 2: two weeks when the Kansas City chiefs, Travis Kelcey and
Speaker 2: Taylor Swift take on to San Francisco forty hours and
Speaker 2: we'll see how X holds up. Then. Thanks for joining us, Yeah,
Speaker 2: my pleasure.
Speaker 5: Thank you.
Speaker 2: We are now joined by our ace Tesla reporter, Dana
Speaker 2: hall Low. Dana, thanks for having me. Okay, so last
Speaker 2: week and we previewed this on the show. Tesla released
Speaker 2: fourth quarter earnings and the market gave it, I said
Speaker 2: earlier thumbs out. I actually think they gave it two
Speaker 2: thumbs down. The stock cratered towards the end of last week. Actually,
Speaker 2: in all of the S and P five hundred index,
Speaker 2: there are only two companies year to date that have
Speaker 2: fallen more than Tesla, and they are two companies it
Speaker 2: mired in major crises. I know the stock is bouncing
Speaker 2: back some now, but still it seems like this was
Speaker 2: a flop. Dana tell us why did it fall so much?
Speaker 2: Was it something that was actually in the earnings report
Speaker 2: or was it something that was said that unnerved investors
Speaker 2: so much?
Speaker 3: Well, it was both. The January earnings call is all
Speaker 3: about forward looking guidance and this was a company that
Speaker 3: did not really give any guidance. They just said that
Speaker 3: things were going to be lower and that they're in
Speaker 3: between two waves of growth. Tellesla is currently between two
Speaker 3: major growth waves.
Speaker 5: Were folks on making sure that our next growth wave
Speaker 5: driven by next gen vehicle, mpgy, storage, both self driving
Speaker 5: and other projects is executed as well as possible.
Speaker 3: And you know, there was not a number like how
Speaker 3: many cars are they going to deliver in twenty twenty four.
Speaker 3: They didn't say two million, they didn't say two point
Speaker 3: five million. They just said that growth could be lower
Speaker 3: and that they're in between two waves. And that was
Speaker 3: sort of a nerving And then as the call went on,
Speaker 3: like things just sort of you know, Elon was very
Speaker 3: like sunny and optimistic and upbeat in terms of his tone,
Speaker 3: but the lack of guidance was really disturbing. And yeah,
Speaker 3: the stock is now down twenty two percent so far
Speaker 3: in twenty twenty four.
Speaker 2: You know, Max, My take is, as I was looking
Speaker 2: at this briefly, was that you have a company in Tesla.
Speaker 2: It has along been this great growth stock. Right, All
Speaker 2: stocks investor CEE stocks in two categories, neither a growth
Speaker 2: stock or a value stock, and a growth stock is
Speaker 2: a stock that you were buying an anticipation of great
Speaker 2: growth going forward. In the last few years, you know,
Speaker 2: around sixty percent a year that is slowed to twenty percent,
Speaker 2: and that seems to be roughly what people are forecasting
Speaker 2: going forward. So I guess, you know, when you're valued
Speaker 2: as much as it was eight hundred billion dollars at
Speaker 2: one point not too recently, I guess this is just
Speaker 2: sort of like a gravity moment here, right, Yeah.
Speaker 1: I mean I think that's and Elon himself kind of
Speaker 1: said that, you know, he's sort of in attempting, as
Speaker 1: Dana says, to kind of lower expectations. Said, you know,
Speaker 1: at a certain point, you know the growth is going
Speaker 1: to like we the law of large numbers comes in
Speaker 1: and and you can't grow fifty percent a year. I
Speaker 1: think that it's part of what's going on here is
Speaker 1: it's not just that Elon Musk is giving these predictions
Speaker 1: or non predictions that are dower, but when he's trying
Speaker 1: to tell the growth story, it's getting harder and harder
Speaker 1: to kind of conceptualize. Like during the call, he talked
Speaker 1: about optimists, the Tesla robot as this kind of be
Speaker 1: all end all.
Speaker 4: He said it is going to be the most valuable
Speaker 4: product of.
Speaker 1: All time, And on the call itself, you had like
Speaker 1: one of Elon's own employees kind of jumping in and saying, well,
Speaker 1: the big problem is for now, we can't figure out
Speaker 1: anything to do with optimists. So there's kind of this
Speaker 1: gap between Elon's version of what the company is and
Speaker 1: the kind of Wall Street version of the company.
Speaker 2: Do we believe that that employee is still employed at Tesla?
Speaker 1: It did not sound good because there was you know,
Speaker 1: when you're getting into an argument with the boss on
Speaker 1: the call, it's.
Speaker 2: There's a pretty big gap between the greatest product of
Speaker 2: all time and we have no I did what to
Speaker 2: do with this thing?
Speaker 3: I think what's really interesting is that, Okay, so Tesla
Speaker 3: fundamentally is a car company. Most of their revenue comes
Speaker 3: from cars. However, they don't really have a car right now,
Speaker 3: Like the cyber truck is barely in production. I mean,
Speaker 3: the why is this bestseller, but like the Why is
Speaker 3: getting old. So you're not going to see this like
Speaker 3: big wave of growth until they come out with their
Speaker 3: next generation platform, which they basically said would be like
Speaker 3: late twenty twenty five maybe. So in the meantime, what
Speaker 3: do you tell Wall Street about? You talk about, Oh,
Speaker 3: we're an AI company, we're a robots company, and they've
Speaker 3: got this optimist robot. We've got this Dojo computer which
Speaker 3: is now a long shot. We have an energy business.
Speaker 3: So they're gonna they have to talk about their other
Speaker 3: products because the core automotive product is just like, you know,
Speaker 3: they barely talked about the cyber truck on the call
Speaker 3: at all. I mean, it was it was like a
Speaker 3: huge emission.
Speaker 2: But having said that, I do see on my Tesla
Speaker 2: earnings Bingo card here the cyber truck box was. And
Speaker 2: I want to talk about this Bingo card. I missed
Speaker 2: this last week. I didn't play, and I'm a little disappointed.
Speaker 2: But it seems like that we came close to getting
Speaker 2: Bingo but came up short. Here is that right? We
Speaker 2: didn't quite we couldn't quite pull it off.
Speaker 1: No, And I will say that Elon Musk's you know, frantic,
Speaker 1: you know, citing all the future products, trying to come
Speaker 1: up with some kind of groc story was gold for
Speaker 1: Bingo because we had Dojo, we had optimists, we had
Speaker 1: you know, demand for Tesla's that are unlimited.
Speaker 4: This was good for Bingo, but there was.
Speaker 2: A bad for the stock. Good for Bingo, bad for
Speaker 2: the stock, which is which has been a hypothesis of
Speaker 2: mine for many.
Speaker 4: Their hedge funds all over the building models that you
Speaker 4: know correlate.
Speaker 2: But I'll also say this, and I don't know, Dan,
Speaker 2: if you, if you played a hand in formulating this
Speaker 2: Bingo card here, I feel like it was slightly rigged
Speaker 2: for us not to get it. I mean, audibly Puff's
Speaker 2: joint was only put on the card to block. There
Speaker 2: was no chance he was going to audibly puff a joint. No, no, no, no, no.
Speaker 2: Hold on also digging our own grave. I mean those
Speaker 2: are the two that blocked you hitting bingo. He wasn't
Speaker 2: going to repeat your own You guys rigged this thing.
Speaker 2: It was written.
Speaker 3: No, he repeats himself all that. He repeats himself all
Speaker 3: the time. I mean, that's the thing about Elon's as
Speaker 3: as our former colleague Sean Okayn used to say, he's
Speaker 3: like a comedian practicing his bit, Like he says a
Speaker 3: lot of stock phrases over and over and over again.
Speaker 1: But I want to direct your attention to I believe
Speaker 1: it's n five Uh reproduction is hard, which is something
Speaker 1: that Elon Musk has reiterated over and over and over
Speaker 1: again recently, and he very easily could have said that
Speaker 1: on the UH call you don't need audibly puffs Joy,
Speaker 1: and I want to remind you audibly puffs joyd was realistic, you.
Speaker 2: Know, I recogrect him first. Can you give me my
Speaker 2: bingo car back? All right, let's end it there. Thank
Speaker 2: you for listening to Elon Inc. And thanks to Dana
Speaker 2: and Max.
Speaker 4: Great to be here.
Speaker 3: Always a pleasure.
Speaker 2: This episode was produced by Stacy Wong. Naomi Shaven and
Speaker 2: Rayhan Harmanci are our senior editors. The idea for this
Speaker 2: very show also came from Rayhan Lake Maples handles engineering,
Speaker 2: and we get special editing assistants from Jeff Grocott. Our
Speaker 2: supervising producer is Magnus Henrickson. Huge thanks to Angel Rascio
Speaker 2: and Joel Weber. The Elon Inc. Theme is written and
Speaker 2: performed by Taka Yasuzawa and Alex Sugiura. Sage Bauman is
Speaker 2: the head of Bloomberg Podcast and our executive producer. I
Speaker 2: am David Papadopoulos. If you have a minute, rate and
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Speaker 2: you next week.