Well, Elon Musk gives now the richest person on the planet. More than half the satellites in space are owned and controlled by one man, starting his own artificial intelligence company.
Well, he's a legitimate super genius, I mean legitimate.
He says.
He's always voted for Democrats, but this year it will be different. He'll vote Republican.
There is a reason the US government is so reliant on him.
Elon Musk is a scam artist and he's done nothing.
Anything he does is fascinating the people. Welcome to Elon, Inc. Where we discuss Elon Musk's vast corporate empire, his latest gambits and antics, and how to make sense of it all. I'm Joe Webber, sitting in for David Papa Duplas for the first time on Eloni. We're gonna get you ready for Tesla's earnings called this Wednesday, and we have a little surprise to take the fun factor to ludicrous mode.
To help us prep the popcorn will convene Dana Hole, who's covered more Tesla earnings call than any other reporter I know. Hi, Dana, Good morning. Sarah Fryar, who leads the Big Tech team here at Bloomberg News. Hello, and Max Chafkin, Senior reporter at Bloomberg BusinessWeek. Hey, but first, some recent topics we've discussed on elon ink have been back in the news. A big one anti Semitism. Both X and Musk have been accused of amplifying hate speech
on the platform. On Monday, Musk got a private tour of the Aschwitz concentration camp in southern Poland. Later he participated in a discussion hosted by Ben Shapiro, a controversial media pundit. Let's listen, why as.
Many Jewish friends as non Jewish friends. I'm like Jewish by association, I'm aspirationally.
Jewish, Sarah, what do you make of this visit to Aschwitz and sort of this Musk non apology apology.
It's extremely crn to go to a concentration camp to try to launder your image and say that you are aspirationally Jewish, basically like this happened to your people by association. I mean, I can't believe it happened.
Just welcome to the tribe, brother, Thank you. As a Jewish American, I'm just so happy to have encountered another Jewish American. Elon Musk I also agree, why is doing
this cringe? So our editor Naomi joke yesterday that you know, normally, if you commit an anti Semitic faux pa, you have to go to the Holocaust Museum in Washington, d C. If you commit a world historical anti Semitic foe pa, if you allow hundreds or maybe even thousands of crazy anti Semitic accounts, if you buy into crazy conspiracy theories, if you, as the world's richest man, promote all this nonsense,
then you have to actually go to Ashwitz. And so yeah, I mean, he's like attempting to make things right, I guess, but of course doesn't seem to be really addressing any of the normal stuff, and is claiming Jewish identity in an extremely depressing and cringe worthy way.
In my opinion, just struck me as like a very political It's like all optics. It's like there's Elon Musk looking somber with let us note his three year old toddler on his shoulders.
And an Auschwitz survivor standing next to him too, and an.
Oshwitz survivor standing next to him, and then like the images that were released, it very much struck me. It looked like a political campaign.
Stop.
Obviously, Musk is not running for any kind of office, but it had all of the stage craft of a political moment during the week when Tesla's reporting earnings and so for him to sort of take the time to fly to Poland and fly back. Why now it's all because of X and advertising, right, Sarah, I mean, this is still sort of an effort to lure the advertisers back.
It's wild because this is the only thing that Elon Musk and Linda Yakarino are talking about. Linda's the CEO when they speak publicly like they're just doubling down on the how could you think we were ever anti semitic? Meanwhile, if you look at what Elon Musk is tweeting, there's there it runs the gamut. There's there's all sorts of anti immigrant sentiments, all sorts of of you know, other race t stuff, and he's promoting a lot of these accounts that are the worst of the worst. It is
not just anti semitism. It is a wholesale embrace of people who were banned before were considered dangerous to have on the platform in the name of his his free speech initiative and So.
The funniest thing about this about this event was that Elon Musk and the European Jewish Association which hosted it, started with this kind of thought experiment like what if we had X during the late Weimar period in Germany,
maybe we would never have had the Holocaust? And Elon Musk claimed essentially that, yes, if we'd only had Twitter, you know, back in the late thirties, early nineteen forties, a Holocaust never would have happened, which, like I guess, you know, pay sign up for groc guys.
Okay. Elsewhere in current events, Florida Governor Ron DeSantis dropped out of the Republican presidential race ahead of the New Hampshire primary. One of our mini Elon in pilots was all about DeSantis announcing his campaign on X with Elon, which was glitchy, shall we say, I.
Think we've got.
Just a massive number of people online, so it's serve as as training somewhat so very glitchy, Sarah Fryar Howell history, remember that Musk DeSantis embrace just a you know.
A bad bet, right, but you know, it wasn't the only candidate that he has aligned himself with. He also did one of those for RFK Junior, the known anti vax conspiracy theorist. He's also been in spaces with the vik Ramaswami. This is is all kind of wishful thinking on his part, because he would really like it if he didn't have to cozy up to either Trump or Biden. But sounds like that's what he's going to have to do. And he's already We've already discussed on this podcast that
he has said he will not vote Biden. And so we do see a lot more Trump aligned rhetoric these days on X, including voting conspiracy theories.
Max if Runda Santis is out of the race. Who is Elon's horse? Now?
I mean we've we're already seeing I looked at Elon's X page earlier today, and you know, he's he's tweeting about twenty twenty election stuff. We've talked about this on the podcast before. He's been stopped to steal curious, you know, for some time, and he is, you know, reiterating those concerns, sort of rebroadcasting or or promoting what essentially amount to like willful misreadings by Donald Trump and Donald Trump type supporters of the twenty Tony voting results, among many other things.
I mean, he is essentially, you know, moving towards Trump. As Sarah said, I mean, I think I think we're already seeing it. I'm guessing we'll see it more like Frankly, like many billionaires who affiliate with the right right, where like there were other candidates that they might have preferred. We have a new Hampshire primary today. It doesn't look great for NICKI Haley, and I think we're gonna see this same evolution playing out among other people, not just Elon.
Musk, Max any Musk Trump predictions. Obviously, Trump was a prolific tweeter before Musk purchased the platform. Trump obviously has not been active on X but there's sets up this dynamic where you've got Musk and Trump.
Perhaps another first of all, to me, Musk supporting Trump is like a four on conclusion. Basically, I think it's it's going to happen. I think you could argue it is, it has already happened. The real question to me is
like what happens. You know after twenty twenty, there were all of these right leaning social networks that launched, you know, one of which was truth Social, Donald Trump's company, and then another one of them is X essentially, and it does seem like X has a chance of like claiming that market. You do sort of wonder, you know, this
is kind of a deep cut. I mean, you really have to be the interested in sort of right wing media and media landscape to care like what happens to truth Social, parlor Getter, what's the right wing dating site of the right stuff?
Like, they're all these sort of.
Media business media adjacent businesses that seem like their reason for being doesn't quite doesn't exist as much now that now that Elon Musk has so firmly turned X to that market.
So in that sense, you know, it's like all gravy for Elon.
I think I think the consolidation of the Republican Party probably allows, you know, X honestly to consolidate this sort of ecosystem.
But let's be clear, Trump does not need X the way he needed Twitter in twenty twenty or twenty sixteen. It is a completely different platform now and Trump has managed to build up his own network that he has control over of email addresses, of phone numbers, of people who will hand him those five dollars donations when he
sends a scary thought. I think that that's really how we are seeing political fundraising evolve, and the idea that a politician needs to use X in order to rally their base may still be in Musk's mind, which is why he rewarded the candidates that we're leaning into it. But as we've seen, that hasn't been successful for them. And I think that what Trump is seeing with a platform is the same thing we're all seeing. It is not as effective anymore for driving results with an audience.
The followers that it shows you you have are not all visiting the platform anymore. So I think in that sense, maybe Musk needs Trump more than Trump needs Musk at this point.
I one hundred percent agree with that, And I do think there's some question about whether Trump ever needed Twitter, like I think there was a there has been a tendency to kind of like overstate the impact of social media, and a lot of times media kind of chases like whatever people are into rather than like setting the agenda.
But with Trump, it definitely is kind of has reached a different dynamic where he's basically been absent from this platform for a very long time, and it hasn't seemed to make a huge difference.
One more fallout of DeSantis exiting the race, there was a potential Few of the Week max from Elon Musk trolling economist Paul Krugman, who's a commist at the New York Times. What happened?
Well, I mean, I'm a little as an Elon feud connoisseur, I am sad to report that Paul Krugman, the Nobel Prize winning economists Princeton University, New York Times columnist, well known progressive liberal commentator, did not take the bait.
So it's kind of a fake.
Krugman trolled DeSantis, essentially saying like, let's not forget how wrong Rondistances was on covid, pointing to long standing criticisms among the left that Dessant has kind of ignored you know, basic CDC guidelines and so on, and Elon must responded like, you are a disgrace to the economics profession, which Krugman
sadly did not take the bait. And I'm mostly sad because it was sort of amusing to think of Elon as a connoisseur of like academic economics, Like he's like, oh, man, you know, you're just like disgracing canes or like like Elon has no idea who like it does not follow the deep nuances of economics, like he follows the Wait.
He's starting university and he has an economics degree from or business degree from Wharton. Come on, he has like some grounding in business as a point, But.
That doesn't mean he's like some kind of connoisseur of who you know, like academic economic academia. Yeah, he doesn't know what whether Krugman's or disgraced anything. He's just responded to the vibes.
It's not a few if it's not what's below a feud? Is it like a schoolyard scrap. It's like a it's like.
A we have I think it's a big nothing burger. It's like it's like.
On the hurricue, you have the one to five on the hurricane scale, but below that it's like a tropical storm. This is like a tropical depression. Maybe I guess as far as fews go.
Maybe watch yeah Witchery mix And now for our main event earnings. Okay. Publicly traded companies like Tesla get to do these quarterly meetings where they reveal how much money they made or lost. It's to face the music moment that gives investors, analysts, and journalists a better look at what's happening in a given companies business. Dana, you are the Tesla pro here. How many earnings have you done? And can you give us a short history of Tesla's earnings calls?
So I've covered Tesla since two thousand and nine. They went public in June of twenty ten, and I don't think I've ever missed an earnings call. So that's what ten years, four times year, I don't know, I've done like over forty maybe fifty that rest in my life.
And they're pretty wild because if you so, like, most corporate earnings calls are pretty boring, frankly, like the CEO reads scripted remarks, the CFO reads scripted remarks that basically repeat what they've just put out in the shareholder letter, and then they take questions from analysts that are like, congratulations on a good quarter, Bob, like can you give us some color about the YadA YadA? And it's just like,
very frankly, it's very boring. Like test Le earnings calls are not like that at all, like Elon is not scripted. He gets really pissed off at the analysts. He gets bored and like a big question like when this call starts is like ooh, what kind of mood is dear leader in? And we've had some really wild earnings calls over the years. I mean, at one point in twenty eighteen he called Tony Secanagi, who's like a great analyst at Bernstein, like you know that his question he like
didn't answer his question. He was like this is boring and boneheaded. At one point he went to YouTube and took spent twenty five minutes talking to like a millennial who has like a YouTube channel, and they're just really they're very interesting calls, and so much of like how Stock reacts is to what does Elon say? And then like what's the actual news from the call? Because it's all about like what does he say about, you know,
things going forward? And the January call is always really important because it kind of sets out the expectations for the year. So tomorrow the question is like are we going to get embulent, expansive, like wonderful Elon or is he going to be like morose Elon talking about how they're digging their own grave, Like that's the big question on everybody's mind.
Elon is such a fixture here, right, Like how many of these has he missed in your time covering the company?
He's only missed one. He made this big show a couple of years ago about how he's like not going to be in the earnings calls unless he has big news to announce. And then there was one call that he missed that the CFO led that was great, and then Elon was back and he just can't stay out of the limelight, like he's got to be the main character. Like, so he's only he's been on every single call.
Okay, So because this is a January call, this one is more year ahead leaning than a typical one, which would typically look back at the previous quarter. Is that right? Yeah?
Yeah, especially because Tesla has not given guidance for twenty twenty four. They have not said publicly how many vehicles they expect to deliver in twenty twenty four. We know that they delivered roughly one point eight million cars in twenty twenty three through so like what is the forecast? Like we're seeing kind of slowing growth in the EV sector. Like evs are still growing as part of the overall auto market, but it's not this like blockbuster fifty percent
year of year growth. So that's a big question for investors. Are they going to say that they're going to deliver two million or two point five? Like what is the growth trajectory? And then how much does Musk talk about all the other aspects of the business. Is he going to be like, we're an AI company, or is he going to talk about energy or insurance or you know, the optimist robot. I mean, there's all these different sort of aspects of the business that people are curious about.
And and what do everybody who's watching the company, what do we think about what the twenty twenty four numbers could look like, especially after all the price cuts of last year but also possibly this slowing demand.
Well did they tend to over promise? You know, because I know like a lot of companies have the opposite strategy, where they underpromise and then they try to beat that. But historically Tesla has said more good things are going to happen than actually end up happening. So what do we think?
It's kind of weird they'll give like a range where a Musk will be like, well, like there could be a force measure and things that I can't control, like earthquakes and pandemics and tsunamis, and like, I don't really know how things are going to go. But he actually tends to blame the macroeconomic environment quite a bit, like you know, on previous startings calls, he's he's really bashed to FED and high interest rates and been like, look, you could sell more cars if interest rates were lower.
The fact that interest rates are high is making the cars too expensive for people, which is why they made this big gambit to chase volume over profit margins. And they could do that again. He could say we're going to continue to dominate and we're going to cut prices, and I mean that would be one strategy. It's just that then the margins are much smaller. But you know, Tesla has room to play with their margins, and we could see that again in twenty twenty four.
It also seems like there's like a real guidance and then an Elon Musk guidance. Elon will throw in hey, like anything's possible, like full self drive. There's this whole other category of stuff that doesn't relate to like number of units sold or like margins where the guidance is whacked out, and kind of everyone agreed. Everyone understands that this is like, these are not real timelines. These are
Elon Musk timelines. You know. I was reading an analyst note that Dana sent me just before we went on, and they're talking about the question of robotaxis as anywhere from three years to a decade out like that. That's the timeline that this analyst was suggest which is like a huge range, and it reflects the fact that Elon Musk has essentially said robotaxis are just around the corner
basically every year for almost a decade. So it's like very confusing and analysts have just learned to, I think, just kind of ignore slash discount some of those wilder promises.
And now for the really fun part. The brains behind Elon Inc. Have created a special bingo card which you can download at Bloomberg dot com, slash Elon Inc. Or on the Mini BusinessWeek social media accounts. Max, what is earnings bingo and how do I play along? Okay, so earnings bingo is this is a thing that exists.
We did not invent this you know, all credit to the Elon stands out there on Twitter as well as the Elon critics, the tesla Q army. Basically anyone who has an opinion about this guy has been making these bingo cards for years.
And the idea is you.
Have a card the one that we have, which you can go to Bloomberg dot com slash Elon Inc. And download and it's twenty four squares. It's plus I love it, plus the free space. I'll just tell you, so, some of these are are ones that I think are definitely gonna happen like these are. This is like easy money some of these. So so for instance, through the Okay, so we've got B I n G G four that's cyber truck.
That's come on. That's a gimme. That's practically a free space.
Now B one is definitely less likely, I would say, and that one's audibly puffs joint. So, as I understand it, like my job at Bloomberg now, at least part of my job anyway, is I'm gonna be listening to that podcast as the you know, person who has to listen for the audible joint puffing. By the way, sorry, B two because It's not enough to just puff a joint. It has to be it has to be audible.
Dan, do you have a favorite on here that you're gonna hopefully get to scratch out.
Yes. I think what's really interesting is, you know, Elon just has this very peculiar way of speaking that all of his fans then adopt. And I am a big fan. I forget what the square is, but reasonably optimistic, because you know, Elon will say I'm reasonably optimistic that we'll have full self driving at the end of the year, or I'm reasonably optimistic that we will, you know, sell
fifty thousand cyber trucks in twenty twenty four. And so the Bingo card is really about Musk and his language and his very unique use of language and how he invents all these words that then enter the lexicon, like gigafactory is not a real word, but Elon started calling his battery plant a gigafactory, and now every automaker in every battery company on the planet talks about how they have a gigafactory. Similarly, megapack like what the hell is
a mega pack? It's Tesla's name for their like utility scale battery products. So I mean, I would love to get a like linguist on the phone someday to talk to us all about this. But his use of language is very unique and it is adopted by his life regions of fans. And the other thing about the earnings calls is that like tens of thousands of people listen to them, like employees listen to them, fans listen to them, like a lot of people dial in and listen. And
it's not just like Wall Street analysts. It's like hundreds of thousands of people.
We talk a lot about on this podcast about like how to think about Elon, and I think on the last episode Davey Alba compared him to Donald Trump right as as sort of a political influencer and so on.
But I was thinking, like with the looking at this BNGO card and thinking about the way, as Dana says, that Elon sort of remixes himself, like he has these tropes that he repeats and reuses, And you know, I think the sort of great oral poets, right, like the way that I think linguists believe that oral poetry Homer and so on was consumed was you'd have these like little like couplets or little bits of language that would
then be arranged in order. And it's almost like that with Elon, where he's got these like catchphrases that just get tossed in and it becomes like a part of the fandom. As Dana said, it's something that the that his fans repeat and also that they look for, right and it's it is like the experience of like one
of these Elon Musk Earnings calls. It's like not all that different from the Taylor Swift concert right where you see the snake and you're like, oh, the snake, Like here it is, except here, it's like it's like optimists or dojo or the phrase, you know, digging our own
grave or whatever. My other favorite square here is not many people understand this, which is just like a thing that he says all the time and just really speaks to like this sense of inn Elon fandom, of that you're given access to this truth or really it's like a set of truths that are not well understood, and if you understand them, you are going to have You're gonna get rich, you're gonna you're gonna be a part
of this. It's not only gonna be a source of cultural meaning, but it's gonna be a source of wealth.
Now, I was just gonna say, like, I love O three refers to Earth as a market because that is just so how he talks about everything, like are you with humanity or against it? We're fighting for our consciousness, We're fighting for the future of Earth, and referring to Earth as a market implies that there will be future planetary markets, which is of course his worldview.
And because he uses these tropes so often, part of the challenge of listening to a Tesla earnings call as a journalist or an analyst is that you almost get like a focus hangover, because you have to listen very carefully for any change in nuance because that's what the news is like. Is he slightly altering these tropes in a way that's either positive or negative for the future of the company, And is he backing away from you know,
dojo or is he talking down cyber truck. I mean, on the last call he very famously said that with the cyber truck we dug our own grave. And it was like, ooh, like what is that about, man? So you have to listen very very carefully for any kind of change in nuance or tone.
We dug our own grave.
Every big things are gray better than themselves, and.
It's kind of it's just really wild and usually but I'm on the calls, I'm like blowug and I'm listening and I've got my Bingo card. But I'm also like texting, like employees and analysts and like fans, and everyone's like, you know, did you catch when he said this? Did you catch when he said that? And you if you've never listened to an earnings call, we really encourage you to join along.
And play and go to Bloomberg dot com slash elon and to download our first Bengo card. I think we'll do this again, will we? Okay, well we.
Have to the great thing about the Bingo card is that everybody wins. We only made one card, so for everyone loses.
Yeah, yeah, what happens if I win? Do I get all that money that you were talking about? Max?
Well, I just want to say, like it sounds kind of superficial to be Dana opened this conversation talking about do we get dour elon? Do we get happy elon? But like that actually matters, and like that's what what Dan's kind of saying is that because he repeats these phrases, like it sounds like we're just we're doing like theater
criticism or something. But like the fortunes of this company hundred it's of billions of dollars, you know, hundreds of thousands of jobs sort of depend on like what Elon projects, and like does he sound depressed, you know when he's talking to this audience of analysts and fans and like it's such a weird It's just such a weird world we live in, and like you can kind of understand.
I doubt this is a cause for Elon to believe in the simulation, but it kind of makes me like question our reality when so much depends on you know, basically how Wall Street interprets Elon Musk's mood.
Yeah.
The other thing that's really fun fun to do if you have a terminal is while he's talking, watch gip post and you can see the stock trade after hours in real time. And if he gets like dark, and if we get like dark Elon, you will just see the stock completely tank. And then if he's like embulent and like very confident, you'll see the stock go up.
So that's like another trick of the trade that a lot of people do. You all just learned to terminal function.
I love that Dan and I are going to be live blogging on the terminal as well.
You know, get ready.
People are also already criticizing our Bingo card. We don't have a square that says the limiting factor. We don't have a square that says, you know, talks about population collapse. But to be fair, like he doesn't really talk about population collaps on the earnings calls. He talks about them like all the rest of the time.
You know what, Listeners, tell us what's wrong with our Bingo card?
Tell us what's missing?
Make your own Bengo cards. We you know, yeah, we'll be back in qeqe Q one is only three months away, exactly.
All right, enough, let's call it. Thanks for listening to Elon Inc. And thanks to our panel Dana, Sarah and Max, thank you, Thank you.
Always a pleasure.
This episode was produced by Stacey Wong me and We Shaven and Rayhan Hermanchi are our senior editors. The idea for this very show came from Rayhan. Like Maple's handles engineering and we get special editing assistants from Jeff crocott. Our supervising producer is Magnus Hendrickson. The Elon Inc. Theme is written and performed by Taka Yazazawa and Alex Sigira. Sage Bauman is the head of Bloomberg Podcast and our executive producer. I'm Joe Webber covering for David pop Douglass.
If you have a minute, please rate and review our show. It'll help other listeners find us. Also, let us know what you think of Tesla Bingo. See you next week.