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