Let's say good morning right now to ABC's technology reporter Mike Debuski.
Morning, Mike, good morning. How are you good.
So yesterday first quarter earnings report for Tesla was released and it was not a great one.
It was not Yeah, revenues for this company. Automotive revenues were down twenty percent, Total revenues for the company were down nine percent, and overall profits down seventy one percent. Amy So this is not great for Tesla. Obviously, a hugely prominent electric vehicle manufacturer, used to be the biggest electric vehicle manufacturer in the world that has since been
surpassed by a Chinese company. Obviously, the CEO of that company, Elon Musk, has been generating some controversy for his actions at the Department of Government Efficiency, and this was our first real indicator as to what effect Elon Musk is having on Tesla sales. Obviously, we've seen major protest movements crop up across the country at ten dealerships Tesla charging stations.
This protest movement calls itself the Tesla takedown, and these are people who are dissatisfied with Elon Musk's moves at the federal government. His efforts to trim the federal workforce. I've spoken to these protesters. They say Elon Musk is an unelected billionaire wreaking havoc on our federal government and
on people's lives. And clearly that seems to be showing up at Tesla's dealerships for Tesla deliveries and sales, you know, and you know, to say nothing of the stock price of Tesla, which was down pretty dramatically yesterday though is trading slightly up in pre market trading today. So would be.
Interesting to see what happens with that as he exits his role at DOGE, because he had said one hundred days and he's done, so that's like the end of April.
Yeah, and he made sort of more you know, mention of that yesterday after the earnings report was released. During an earnings call, Elon Musk said that his work at DOGE is pretty much done and that he plans to step back. He was always a temporary federal worker, right. His status at DOJE was always had sort of this time limit on it, and that time limit comes due next month, so it seems like he's not going to renew. He says his work is pretty much done as I mentioned.
So yeah, it seems like he's going to take a step back to focus a little bit more on Tesla, which is facing a number of challenges right now. Aside from sort of the controversies that its CEO connotes on the brand, they're also facing increased competition from a sort
of resurgent establishment automakers both from here and abroad. The sales are down in Europe, sales are down in China, and he has mentioned that the tariffs that the Trump administration has imposed on the automotive sector will have an effect on the company, despite the fact that Tesla builds all of its domestic market Tesla's here in Texas and in California. They do say that the tariffs on components automotive, you know, parts are going to have an impact on
Tesla prices and therefore Tesla sales. So a lot of challenges that this company's facing.
Okay, so I want to move on because we have a very important happy birthday.
Yeah, that's absolutely right. Twenty years ago today was the first YouTube video. It's hard to believe that this company, this platform is now twenty years old, but yes, on April twenty third of two thousand and five, This video is called Me at the Zoo was uploaded to the platform. Here's what it sounded like. All right, so here we are one of the elephants and the cooping book these guys is that they have really really really long.
From thanks.
So a pretty innocuous video, I think it's fair to say, but that was Jawad Kareem. He was one of three founders of YouTube uploading this video to the platform. Interestingly enough, these are three ex PayPal employees who started a video
dating service. Essentially, this was their attempt to connect people on the relatively early Internet, but they found that people were using the video component of that dating service for all kinds of things, so they decided to spin it off into its own standalone video streaming platform called YouTube. It quickly became very popular. By March of two thousand and six, just a few months after that video was uploaded,
YouTube was hosting twenty five million videos. About twenty thousand new videos were being uploaded to the platform every day, and amy that required a lot of computing power. They were also dealing with copyright claims from music studios and movie studios mad that people were uploading copyrighted material to the platform, so Google stepped in in two thousand and six to acquire the company for one point sixty five
billion dollars. Now, according to Nielsen, Americans watch about a billion hours of YouTube content every day.
Well, Mike, I can tell you that I've already been watching it because I had to pull a clip from a segment that I'm going to do next. I had to pull a clip from The Shining, which I have not seen and refused to watch.
And also it is crazy. That's a great movie. It's so good.
A right, I've got the Big Bear Eagle Cam on YouTube and it's live all the time in the thing because our little eaglits, Sonny and Gizmo are growing bigger every day. ABC's Mike Tubuski, thanks so much.
Of course, they take care, right,