Bloomberg Audio Studios, Podcasts, radio news from the heart of where innovation, money and power collide in Silicon Valley and beyond. This is Bloomberg Technology with Caroline Hyde and Ed Ludlow.
Live from New York and Caroline Hyde and I'm Jackie Devallis in San Francisco.
This is Bloomberg Technology coming up.
All eyes on Nvidia as it reports earnings today. Can it win over Wall Street once more? As the AI winner plus Jenna I infused Alexa plus Live updates from Amazon's long awaited launch event here in New York, and the Tesla fallout continues. Shares lower as we dissect Elon Musk's many detractors taking their anger out on the carmaker. But first we check in on these markets that power higher.
We make up for yesterday's well by more than a percentage point, and then as that one hundred and there is one key stock that drives us higher on our points perspective. It's in video anticipation builds for twenty pm New York time today, where we get the numbers up four point four percent on the day, managing to wipe out yesterday's loss. This is we anticipate earnings, will they live up to a seventy three percent increase in revenue and what does the investor base need in terms of forecasts.
Bluemerg's comen Rhinikey is here to break down what has been a torrid start to the year for in video. Just think about the six hundred billion dollar sell off we got when deep Seek was first unveiled and we suddenly thought maybe we don't need these chips, but it's managed to push back against that slightly.
Yeah, it's so interesting though. I mean, going into this earnings report, we're not only coming off of the deep Seek cellarf, we are down from the last earnings report, which is something that Nvidia shares haven't seen since twenty and we're actually down year to date even with today's gains, sort of calling back what we saw yesterday, and video
is still down about two percent on the year. Obviously it's a short period of time, but this is really rare going into an Invidia earnings report, especially for the market over the last few years. So I think that the bar is always set high for Nvidia. It's a huge stock, you know, it's the second biggest waiting in the S and P. It is the sort of de facto winner of the AI trade. But going into this report,
I think that the bar is set even higher. Investors need to see the beaten rays that they've become so accustomed to, and I think that forward guidance and what they can say about what they're seeing of the future of AI and the revenue that they'll bring in from their next wave of chips from the Blackwell is extremely important.
Carmen.
Aside from those forecasts, what else are investors really expecting? As it relates to commentary regarding deep Seat, the company really assuaged some of those concerns and comments right after that news hit in January, but at the same time they need.
To hear coming out of this report.
I think that they just need to hear more confidence from Nvidia that sales are still good, that people still need to be buying these chips, and that everything about AI,
the growth story that we've been seeing will continue. I'll say one good thing that should hopefully play into this report and maybe into the guide going forward, is that many of the big technology companies that have reported so far, including the hyper scalers, have said that they are going to spend you know, records amount of money on capital expenditures, so building out their AI, their their platforms, their their hardware, they're in software, all of those things, and Nvidia is
still the biggest winner of that money.
So trade restrictions though, for me common we are questioning how many h twenties can get into China going forward. We understand that there's been popsl LOLd of demand post Deep Seat.
We cannot continue.
We'll really have to see. I do think that you're right. What they say about the future, how they're going to guide if they have plans, you know, to work with those restrictions, or how they'll deal with them is going to be of.
The most importance tonight.
That's Bloomberg's Carmen Ryanicky, thanks so much for joining us. Let's continue this conversation with Kim for As, CIO of Boga Capital Partners, which has about thirty five million dollars in AUM.
Kim.
When it comes to model training, there's no question that in Nvidia holds the crown there, but when it comes to inferencing, they hold less than half of that business. There forty percent of their GPUs go towards this specific part of training. How would you say that risk kind of stacks up in comparison to the rest of what you're seeing going into in video.
Well, it's one of the really big risks, and it's kind of down from the headline. As you point out, this is a great point that not all chips are used in the same way, and they're not used in the same proportion. So what we're talking about here in building the model versus inferences that there's just different chips made. You know, you get the model and then you ask the model questions, So two different sets of thinking chips. Right,
So here's the big problem. I think in the past OpenAI specifically has just been throwing more and more horsepower at building its big model, and it looks like that's not working because they're not being able to produce the new big models on a timeline that they publish. So there's something wrong there. And so here's the problem that I think a lot of in thinking investors have with this company is is it really going to need all
of those chips to build these big models? I'm guessing no. I mean, nobody really wants to have like server farms covering the earth. You know, nobody wants that expense and it looked like that was necessary. But maybe there will be new ways to be able to build the big models without using you know, every last acre formally owned for a data center and thus you know, buying every chip that in.
Nvidia could make I do think though Jensen Huang thus far has done a good job at fighting back against that nervousness in the market that we were sort of peeking out in efficiency levels from large language models. I think he's pushed back against the fact that deep seek is an issue because he says they are needed for inference.
So what more do you need to hear from him?
Is an actual data that proves Blackwell is in us as hands that ultimately we will because investors, well analysts haven't changed their perspective on how big a revenue we're going to see from video come twenty twenty six.
Sure, Well, twenty twenty six is an interesting year, but almost irrelevant, right because everybody in the world that uses these things that are a public company have already told us they're going to spend you know, anywhere from what sixty to eighty billion dollars. That's Microsoft and you know, all the big magnificent seven users of this so that's
not really the problem. What we're doing is we're looking at twenty seven, twenty eight, twenty nine to thirty and saying is this really is the company going to be able to double like it has in the past, Like, that's the most amazing thing. And in a very short time period it went from having what like twenty billion in sales to sixty billion. That's incredible and you never see that, and it got rewarded for that in its valuation.
But looking forward, is that really the case? And I'm betting the answer is no, that's not the case that they're going to have that they have the opportunity to double again.
To your point, Kim, demand isn't going anywhere. We heard from the big tech giants that they are continuing affirming their CAPEX plans, even boosting some of them. So the spigot isn't going to be turned off to Nvidia anytime soon. But can the company handle that capacity? Do you have any concerns about whether it can actually supply this demand?
Sure? Well, I have two concerns. Can it supply the demand? And that's really TSMC and they're doing a good job, right, but you know, it takes time. To bring these extremely advanced fab lines online and they're just incredibly complicated. But secondly, are the chips working. You know, in the beginning of the releases, we heard about some overheating problems and this is legendary in the world of chips. This is not
a new thing. Intel had this problem, amd everybody. Everybody goes through this discovery whenever you're creating the hot, fast new chip that you go, oh, I forgot this little area here and it's creating a problem. So all of these are kind of little worries that people have, and yes, Jensen Wang will address these without a doubt. But you know we're talking about this isn't software, this is hardware. This stuff just has to work. It just doesn't.
Where does this leave the company from a hardware perspective when you do have chips exports this tip for tap.
Between Beijing and Washington.
Well, here's a crazy idea is I was listening to the intro. What if China starts building data centers over here? Would we sell them to would we sell the chips to them? Where would be the problem? So there are many ways you can get around this. Let's see how they fight. I think everybody's thinking out of the box.
Again.
Well, we know the President calls himself a deal maker. We'll see whether it ever apply himself to that sort of a deal with China building here, but certainly he's pushed TSMC and Taiwanese chip makers to want to build more manufacturing here in the United States. What's interesting is about you know, where you put your money, money is where your mouth is. Is it aligned with Nvideo? You seem to like other chip makers more at this valuation level, Kim, I.
Do, because I mean, I think they're an incredible company, but they really only have four product lines and two we don't care about anymore, game machines and graphics chips for PCs, we don't care. The third one is crypto. We kind of care about this. But the one that's been driving Nvidia is certainly AI and my bet is that they are not going to be able to in a relatively short period of time, like let's say, eighteen months,
double their revenues. Again, that is what brought them here, is that huge demand and their ability to create, you know, product that met that demand. I'm unsure of the demand portion again, not through twenty six or but the doubling of that demand, the ability to meet it, and really whether all of this can continue to work. It's a really narrow path that they're walking, and bad things can happen, and so I like to look at other areas, especially memory.
We are just creating so much data it has to live somewhere, and I think that's pretty much an over word.
Burier Kim Forrest.
Great to have you on Okay Capital Partners Now coming up. Amazon says it is investing more than any other company in You guess the AI will find out what this means for the company's devices and other investments after the break.
Alexa Plus here we come.
This is blue back technology, all right.
I pumped and reci LEXA Plus. This is the next generation of Alexa. She's powered by Jenai.
Smarter, conversational, personal, just get stuff done.
She's easy to talk to.
You can have almost any conversation, almost any conversation.
She's smarter than she's ever been before.
Amazon Senior vice president of Devices and Services Panas Pane, speaking at the company's event earlier today about its updated Alexa Assistant. For more on what the company has just announced, I enjoyed by Bloomberg Spenser so long in the waiting, and it was back in twenty twenty three we first heard about an AI alexas finally here and does it live up to the expectations.
Do you think?
Yeah, that's the big question. We've just seen their kind of canned presentation. But the proof will be in the putting is more people try this thing and try to use it, and if they actually bring it deeper into their lives, which has been a struggle for the Alexa voice activated platform to ever really get beyond being a kitchen timer kind of like a voice activated clock.
Radio.
Spencer.
What's the upside to this, like the ambitious vision for where Alexa can go, because as you mentioned, they've tried to kind of integrate this into things like shopping by voice, which kind of turned out to be a dud.
Yeah, I mean, I guess the vision is to make this kind of an irreplaceable piece of your day to day life. But it's just a question of whether that's actually necessary or if a lot of these things are solutions looking for problems. They a presentation and they talked about like you know, booking your favorite restaurant or getting an alert when you need concert tickets and so we'll just have to see if these things stand out any
more than they already have. And the bottom line is a lot of times people are wary of trusting chatbots to make critical decisions for them, like even you know, they don't mind getting product recommendations or stuff like that, but when it comes to actually executing a transaction, they prefer to do that manually and do that themselves. So there's still a gap between what these things can do and what people want them to do.
Panos Pane himself saying that they've been limited by the technology, maybe trying to reference why it took longer to get this into our hands. But when you've got Annie Jasse taking the stage saying Amazon is investing more in AI than any other company, it is interesting that they are llm agnostic with this product. Ultimately, they're still trying to be a supermarket here for AI devices and llms and access to compute.
Right, Yeah, that's exactly right.
And the big question of whether is Amazon actually the consumer facing product, the thing that people the brand that people associate with these services, or is it more the background infrastructure. It's very well positioned on the background infrastructure side, empowering a lot of these devices, things that you use day to day. You don't even realize that Amazon Web
Services is powering the background. But when it comes to the actual consumer facing thing that people use day to day, Alexa has been fading, and now they're trying to get Alexa back in the forefront.
That's Bloomberg.
Spenser Sober, thanks so much for joining us.
Time for today's AI in Action, we take a look at video's dominance over server makers. Bloomberg is reporting server makers including Dell, as seeing shrinking margins less influenced despite a sales surge driven by in video. Of course, Della is encountering the problem with a five billion dollar deal to supply service to Elo Musk's xai startup. But where's
the profit? Tony Ford joins us, You've done a really great deep dive and all these names that have seemingly benefited in terms of sales, but maybe not in terms of profitability.
Yeah, there's a whole category of these companies that are kind of second order AI winners.
Right.
Obviously you have the in videos, but you also have companies like Dell or Hpe that at one point were seen as a little sleepy, maybe a previous generation, but now billions of new sales from AI servers. What we have found is that these deals are very diluted to margins That was known, but part of why is that in Vidia just exerts so much control over the sales process in a way that in previous years it never would have been abled to brody.
So then what recourse do some of these companies have? You write that in videos also getting into the spaces where some of these companies are trying to tap higher margins. Where can they go or does in video just hold all.
The cards for now video holds the car. I mean, it's an incredibly competitive market. If you're a server maker, there's a lot of companies that could sell high powered servers, right. I mean, we see Dell, they're making this giant five billion dollar deal with Elon. That's a win for sure, but we got the margin on it, and it's you know, it's pretty low. It's a figure that I imagine they would
not have accepted in a different, less competitive market. I would say, in videos control in this way last until the competition, say AMD gets their act together and has a competing product or the pool of customers buying AI chips expands beyond the kind of you know, ten to twenty largest hyperscalers or AI forward companies like Tesla.
Can we just focus in on one of the companies you name as the server and make it super Micro Computer shares of course mashing it today more than twenty percent. Finally, they put in their financials a big relief, right.
I mean, it's been a huge overhang on the stock, right it's been unclear of like.
Are we going to get delisted this year?
A lot of investors weren't sure. But last night, you know, oh if thirty minutes on the clock, super Micro put them out and the stock's up twenty five percent. There are a lot of caveats in that report saying that we're still working on fixing the processes that led here, and it could even happen again, But for now investors are saying this is a good day.
That's Bloomberg's Brody Ford, thanks for joining us. Thank you now just announced one hundred and seventy million dollars seriesly funding round, and the company's company software is best known for its traction with partners like Nvidia who want to reduce their own errors when doing their Quantum Research co
founder and CEO, doctor Itamar Savon joins us. Now, doctor Ittamar, this is a great partnership you have, and it just kind of goes to show that there is an intersection here between AI in quantum what is that.
Of course, at the end of the day, quantum computing is there to provide us with the next very very big leap in computing power. Right, So quantum computers or of interest for a very very simple reason. They will unleash an amount of computing power that's far beyond any computer that we have today, in any computer that we'll be able to develop based on the technologies that we have today.
Let's just talk.
About your technologies and ultimately who you serve. You've got a massive funding round and many are saying it's because you serve half of all the quantum ecosystem. How big is that ecosystem and what are you serving them with?
So this ecosystem is actually quite big. It includes multiple organizations. So first of all, there are the hyperscillers that you were just referring to and other corporates all over the world that are already investing billions in building those computers. First of all, building quantum processors and then building quantum computers,
then you have government labs. At the end of the day, quantum computing is the most important technologic race of our generation, and governments are also investing billions in them, and therefore there is a lot of traction, a lot of interest, a lot of investments from.
So is that hundreds Sorry to interrupt here, but Cvan, is that hundreds of clients that you have or tens of clients? Can you give us a feeling of the size here we.
Have hundreds of clients, Yes, doctor Tamar.
How long before quantum.
Computing has its AI moment?
Yes, it's an excellent question. So because many people ask us in the field all the time, when will quantum computers become useful?
Right?
But the true answer is that quantum computers are already useful.
Right.
You were talking about Invidia earlier, and you see a very big market for Nvidia is high performance computing as well as scientific computing.
Quantum is already.
Within these categories. Right, We already have customers. There are already organizations that buy quantum computer and use them over the cloud. Right. The thing is that the industry will unleash more in more computing power as time goes right, so this will be gradual, right. The full potential of quantic computers is just you know, unimaginable. Right. It is truly going to be hard to foresee how much power
we will get out of quantic computers. And yes, to get to this full potential, it will take more time.
Let's talk about some of those customers where you're seeing the most traction and perhaps the sectors where you expect to see most of the demand coming in in the short term.
Yes, So, unfortunately I cannot mention specific customers by name because for obvious reasons. But Quantum Machines is working with all of the types of organizations that are developing quanta computers, so including some of the biggest corporates in the computing industry that are developing their own quantum computers and are also setting up quantum computers on the cloud. Many of them are.
Already clients of ours.
Is what is startups? I mean startups actually play a key role in this industry since there's an emerging industry, So many of our bigger clients are startups, mostly in the US and in Europe, and then again government labs, government labs invest You know, some of the biggest computers classical computers on Earth lies within government labs right mostly in the US, in Japan and China, and these organizations are already procuring quantum scale.
It's ama thirty seconds. What do you do with one hundred and seventy million? Where does that go?
First?
So first and foremost technology. So even though we're already at a very very advanced stage and quantum has made tremendous progress, we still have a lot to develop. So now we are with quantum computers at the thousands of bits in quantum machines viewing up to develop systems for twenty thousand bits.
So we thank you so much for joining us CO founda CEO of Quantum Machines. It's latest fundraise now coming up. We'll get back to in video's earnings. What to expect for the key investor. This is Blomberg Technology. Welcome back to Bloomberg Technology. I'm Caroline Hid in New York and.
I'm Deck you Devils in San Francisco.
Quick check on these markets because we bounced back after yesterday, Jackie. We're up more than a percentage point on the Nasdaq. And this is as we feed into the earnings focus rather than perhaps the macro picture that we were confronted with yesterday. We're at more than a percentage point. We dig into some key names on the point side that drive us higher. You know that we've got to keep an eye on what's happening with Amazon today. It's just
out with an event in New York. Finally a generative AI infused Alexa ninety nine nineteen dollars ninety nine or Free with your Prime and it comes out in March. We're at one point nine percent. The investor base likes it, even though we've been at least a year delayed on it. I'm also looking at Nvidia that is really crescendoing today. We're up four and a half percent as we expect the earnings after the bell four twenty pm New York time.
Can they push back on the anxiety related to capacity needs, related to China access, related to its valuation. We dig in when Richard Cloyed, he's with US portfolio manager at Janie Henderson, Richard, you own the stock. What do you need to hear from Jensen tonight?
And that's the key.
He's going to have to do a lot of handholding, I think to play to some of those sort of rising debates that we've had in the market. To be honest for the last eight months. You know, the stock's basically where it was, you know, back in June of
last year. So we want to hear that, you know, those supply issues around Blackwell are easy and we're going to get a very aggressive ramp into the back half of this year, and then we're going to have to address those debates around you the scale of AI capiccks today and that the monetization the ROI that this cap ex spending can continue not just through this year, which we've heard from a lot of their customers, but into next year and beyond what love.
Those for us.
Are you more concerned about demand because for many we were vindicated that hyperscale demand certainly still lives on if you look at any of their numbers and their capacity orders at the moment. But the supply side, I suppose have been the question with Blackwell and Indee whether they continue to access China with h twenties.
Exactly.
So there's a couple of things to unpack there. So I mean from a demand side, this year, you know, we're feeling pretty pretty comfortable. We all know it's a supply issue. The debate is more longer term, and then you know, all of those kind of concerns that came out of a deep seat that actually we need a lot less you know, capital spending on training in particular.
Actually we've seen the classic Jevans paradox. I really hope that everyone in his family is getting a dollar for every time we take William Devon's name.
But you know, we are.
Seeing actually incremental demand out of even China, and we heard that from Ali Barbar Who's going to be spending you know, as much in the next three years as they did in the last ten.
So it's more.
About you know, near term, will there be further restrictions on US exports of chips and take the AI chips into China? And then that longer term debate as to you know, can we see you know, what levels of growth the reasonable to think about for the company into the years to come.
Richard, there was a td Cawen report earlier this week that showed that Microsoft might be pulling back on some of its data center leases. Is this a short term BLib or are you more concerned about deeper warning signs there.
Yeah, I think that was that was misconstrued. I think there are a couple of elements there. You know, Microsoft's been very supply constrained and were very aggressive at taking up you know, a huge amount of leasing a data center sort of capacity, which then now sort of optimizing.
And the other.
Factor was obviously, you know, we saw the news around you know, what was happening with Project Stargate and the reimagining of those terms with with you know, between Oracle and open Ai and Microsoft, where a lot of that training capacity is going to be built for open Ai
BI Oracle and not by Microsoft. So again that's just that we've in our minds just as sort of a reimagining of kind of the trajectories of where that capital spending needs to go, rather than anything about sort of broader AI capex.
Let's start reasoning, because Anthropic released its reasoning model yesterday. All of other companies have been doing the same. These rely a lot on inferencing. How much of Nvidia's growth going forward is going to come from inferencing versus GPUs that train.
And I think most people, including Jensen, would expect this market to be larger than training. I mean, at the end of the day, you know, we need to see that monetization and return on spending of all this training capex we've had in the last couple of years. That's going to come from all of us using more AI services and products in the next few years, and that's going to require it, you know, significant step up in infancing capacity. And you're seeing different companies come at this
in different ways. So you know, Microsoft is much more focused on on wanting to do inferencing capacity. You've seen an Oracle much more willing to invest in that training capacity.
But I think we're going to need both.
But as we look forward to the next few years, we're certainly more excited about the inferencing sort of growth and capacity ramp up in the next few years as hopefully we all start using these services.
What's so interesting is the frenemy discussion around this industry because you also hold the hyperscalers that are busy making their own chips. Amazon one of them. We've just heard from Andy Jasse saying how they are the biggest spender on AI and in part of that is their own chip capacity that they're making internally. How much of a competitive threat ultimately is that for the likes of Nvidia.
I think there are a couple of elements there.
You know, One is that you know, it takes about three years to design a chip, So if you're sort of two years and a bit after the launch of chat GPT, you know it actually have chips that have been fully designed in a post chat GPT world. We're going to start seeing those from later this year and the new Google TPU.
We've got the new Microsoft chip coming out next year.
We got chips from Meta from open Ai as well coming So I think we'll see the full spectrum of what the hyperscalers are actually able to design over the next twelve to twenty four months, and those will be much more competitive. Within video, we still think that that competitive kind of intensity is much more on the inferencing side.
On training, you know, in video still has a huge amount of advantages not just in the GPU, but in terms of networking, in terms of software that it can bring to bear, and on the rack level, on the liquid cooling side as well, on the rack level with
Blackwell and then into Rubin. So we still think that they have a strong position there, but inferencing will just naturally be more about the cost of ownership, reducing power and also reducing reliance on a company like in Video that are certainly in the strategic mindset of these hyperscalers as well.
Just going back to the hyperscale is under Amazon and what else it provides consumer AI finally evident when it comes to Jennai being infused into Alexa plus today, Richard, what did you make of the announcements?
Yeah, and I think that's an important part when we think about training up proprietary large language models. I think Deep Seat kind of showed us how far forward open source models have come. And actually, if your business model is to try and monetize a proprietary model that's maybe a little bit better than someone else's proprietary model, someone else's open source model, that's going to be a pretty
tough game to play in. So companies that can really take a generative AI advancements and really monetize them by having distribution to billions of users or having a very strong ecosystem that they can roll those products and services into for us as a much more natural way to be able to anetize this technology. So, you know, Alexo and I think a whole host of ways that Amazon can monetize that, both on the consumer side as well
as on the cloud side. Again, you know, that's why we're you know, we think that's a very interesting company in an AI world.
Richard zooming out to Washington matters for a moment. What kind of assurance do you need from Nvidia today to make sure that the company isn't getting caught in the crosshairs between Beijing and Washington.
Yeah, well, we've been dealing with that for quite a few quite a few years, and you know, I think Tim Tim Cook probably could could have a role at the UN after stepping down from Apple in years to come. But you know, I think that's just going to keep keep going.
I mean, we know that, you know, AI.
Is the the front line of the sort of super power, sort of supremacy battle between the US and China. It's going to continue to see ongoing sort of restrictions around that, and so there's likely to be further moves made to restrict China's access to this technology, and they will make their own moves to try and localize that. So, you know, we've already seen some major impact to that business and already seen a major impact to the China sales of
that company as well as many others. We expect more to come, and again that's whereas active managers, hopefully we can help navigate some of that by talking to people in Washington and getting a sense of where this might end up in terms not just the risk but also the opportunity.
As active managers, you have to navigate the volatility that has been present in this stock. How much do you think you are in the long term when you're seeing some questions around the longevity of the demand and supply site.
Yeah, and that's where you know, owning a stock is very different to being a technologist. You know, we're thinking about, you know, what are the expectations of the market over the next few years and are those reasonable? And is the price being paid for that earning's power reasonable as well? So it's not just about you know, the franchise of in Video or how well they're doing, but you know, just thinking about, you know, is the market being reasonable
about pricing that opportunity into the stock today? And I think that's where having a cost of capital is actually good because actually I think we've seen a lot more rationality around you and Video as well as many other stocks related to this opportunity very different to twenty twenty and also why the stock has been in a digestion
mode since since June of last year. And I think, you know, as we start rolling forward into Blackwell and then you know, into GCC next next month, when they talk about the longer term roadmap and the longer term development of this technology, that's going to give us a much better sense as to from here, you know, where this stock can go.
That's Richard Cloud from Janis Anderson. Thanks for joining us.
Now let's get a look at Tesla as sales are plunging in some of the world's biggest ev markets. Protesters and vandals are targeting the company's stores following Musk's polarizing behavior. Bloomberg's Craig Trudel joins us now for more. Craig, this was an incredible story that really looks at the correlation between where Tesla is seeing lackluster sales and where Musk has really been inserting himself in politics.
What examples did you find? Yeah, I think there's absolutely coral here.
The question, of course will be, you know, causation, and that will take us some time to sort through. I think, you know, to your question, we were seeing, as you mentioned protests, We're seeing polls in countries that have, you know, quite a lot of EV demand, where Musk is not doing well and the Tesla brand also is not doing well. I think when people think Elon Musk, they think you know Tesla before they think of virtually anything else.
And you know, this is.
A case not necessarily of just politics for politics sake. You know, when you think about what Tesla is about and what their sort of values are, some of the parties that Musk is aligning himself with are very contrary to that. When you think about Trump's attacks on EV's sort of you know, oddly going after EV chargers at federal buildings for seemingly no reason other than to stick it in the eye of EV's this is a case where you know, he's kind of going against his own consumer base.
We're expecting him to join a cabinet meeting today.
Well, we'll perhaps hear yet more of a.
A political aligning at the moment between Trump and Elon Craig in your story that you helped edit, it says, I don't know if there's ever been a greater destruction of brand equity. Now, where is this in particular happening. We've seen so many pictures of the protests. Where exactly is this occurring?
Yeah, I mean you're seeing protests across the country, and we're also seeing, as was mentioned earlier, Jackie mentioned, you know, vandalism. We've seen stores damage all over the US in some pockets. Over here in Europe, we've seen a stunt where activists projected footage of musk at an inauguration event for President Trump onto the Tesla factory in Germany. And you know, we're seeing also on social media even you know billboards here in London, you know, attacking and attacking Tesla. So
you know this this is pretty widespread. I think it will take us some time to get a sense of just how much this is really hitting Tesla's sales, because I think there are other things at play here.
Of course, the model why.
Is in the midst of being updated, and the plans need some time to change over to this new design, and so you know, the company will get some lift from that. The question is, you know, will consumers be interested in that vehicle once these changeovers that the factories take place.
Craig what do investors have to say about this?
Lart If you look at some of the comments that you quoted in the story, it seems like at least some are starting to come around to the fact that they're not really loving what this means for the company's business, Elon's kind of growing political extracurriculars.
If you will, Yeah, it's a great question, you know, I think we do have a quote from from a major investor in today's story. I would say though, that you know, we should acknowledge, you know, institutional investors haven't said a whole lot or spoken up, you know, a whole lot about Musk's politics, and I think that is something to watch for and whether that changes. You know, it would be one thing if if a CEO was aligning with Trump in ways that were more consistent with
other CEOs. This is really emphatic, and you know, he's much more charged than say, you know, a Tim Cook or a Mark Zuckerberg in terms of how much he's getting behind Trump.