Tesla is denying a report that board members recently contacted executive search firms to get to work on finding a successor for CEO Elon Musk. The Wall Street Journal had a pretty explosive scoop about a month ago. [00:00:17] Allegedly, Tesla's board was on the hunt for a successor for Elon Musk, who is currently the CEO of the car company. Now, Tesla's board chair and Elon Musk have both denied the story, but I'm inclined to believe what the Wall Street Journal is reporting is here. [00:00:36] - What do you think, Jake? - No. I definitely believe it. They're not going to make up a story like this out of nowhere. Especially because Elon Musk loves to sue people. So the Wall Street Journal isn't going to be like, hey, why don't we just cook up a story that doesn't exist about how they might replace Elon Musk, [00:00:53] which would be a massive, massive story? No, they have insiders at the at the company. Also interesting part here is that not only are there insiders who are looking to oust Elon Musk, but they were leaking it to the press to try to push him out. [00:01:09] Dirty. Dirty? Yeah. And that's how this game is played. So it's definitely real. And and it's part of the reason that Elon Musk is now, beginning to run away from the white House and get back to work, which is probably a good thing for everybody. So first, it's important to note that Tesla has been struggling [00:01:28] a little bit lately. So last week, the company said its first quarter profit had plunged. Not that much, just 71%. Oops. Sales of Tesla's electric cars fell in 2020 for the first annual decline in more than a decade. [00:01:44] Now, Tesla's dismal earnings report showed quarterly revenue had declined 9%, including a 20% drop in automotive revenue after sales fell in important markets such as California, China and Germany. So let's take a look at this graph. [00:02:01] Because as you can see from the graph, Tesla shares skyrocketed after Trump was elected, but have come back down to earth in the months since. The company's market value peaked at $1.5 trillion, but now it's around $900 billion, which is still a lot of money. [00:02:18] But, my understanding is that corporations don't like to see their market value go down. - Is that correct? - Yeah. Losing 40% of your market value pretty bad. - Interesting. - Okay, okay. That would be catastrophic for almost any other company. [00:02:35] Now, to be fair, part of the reason why dip so much is because after Trump won, there was like this irrational exuberance about Tesla and they're like, that's it. And everybody bought Tesla stock and drove the price up to ridiculous levels. And then it crashed. And then it crashed a little bit more. Right. [00:02:52] So that's part of it here. But look, Elon Musk is a mystery to me. How does he run five companies and some of them are a disaster. Some of them are terrific just from a performance point of view. Starlink, SpaceX, etc.. Right. [00:03:10] He's also a mystery to me because he didn't really invent any of these things. He mainly bought them and ran them. And he's a marketing guy. A lot of these top guys are marketing guys like Steve Jobs was in a lot of ways. He's very good at tech, but in a genius in a lot of ways. Was mainly a marketing guy. Trump terrible at real estate. [00:03:27] Mainly a marketing guy. Same with Elon Musk, right? So on the other hand, what kind of a marketing genius decides to piss off half the country and especially the people more likely to buy electric vehicles? Right. And then is surprised that your profits fell 71% when you're out there [00:03:45] antagonizing your consumer base as much as any owner I have ever seen of any company antagonize their consumer base. You know, the other thing that I I've asked this question before, I'm going to ask it again. And who knows, maybe some people are able to multitask way better than I can. [00:04:01] But every day I'm faced with a decision, do I engage in my own personal marketing endlessly, incessantly on Twitter, which is what Twitter is for, right? - And all social media. - Or social media? Or do I spend my time doing what I need to do to get this show produced and ready, [00:04:19] which is reading, researching, making sure I cross my t's and dot my eyes? I don't know how you can be on Twitter all day and then run multiple companies, including Tesla. And Doge like so. It's absurd. It's absurd. It was never going to work. [00:04:35] It's it's untenable under any circumstance. So this is the chickens coming home to roost in a lot of ways. Some Tesla employees said that the first time they had heard from Elon Musk in months was at an all hands meeting in March, streamed to all X users, where he tried to reassure employees and [00:04:52] persuade them not to sell their shares. And according to an anonymous source, one Tesla executive even confessed that Musk's political activism was making it difficult for the company to hire and retain talent. The Wall Street Journal also reports that about a month ago, Tesla's board started looking in earnest for someone to replace Elon Musk as CEO. [00:05:12] Board members reached out to several executive search firms to work on a formal process for finding Tesla's next chief executive, according to people familiar with those discussions. And around the same time, the board reportedly met with Musk and even told him [00:05:29] that he needed to dedicate more time to Tesla, which I think is a reasonable ask and say that he would do so publicly. So Musk apparently did listen to that because he announced exactly that in Tesla's quarterly earnings call. And according to someone close to Musk, who spoke to the Wall Street Journal, [00:05:48] Musk has confessed in private that he does not want to be the head of Tesla anymore. However, he does not believe that any potential replacement could properly oversee the company's transition into robotics and autonomous vehicles. [00:06:04] So look, as we mentioned earlier, Musk is denying this. You know, there are also some members of Tesla's board that are denying this. So Tesla Chair Robyn Denholm wrote the following on the company's X account, saying that earlier today, [00:06:21] there was a media report erroneously claiming that Tesla Board had contracted recruitment firms to initiate a CEO search at the company. This is absolutely false, and this was communicated to the media before the report was published. The CEO of Tesla is Elon Musk, and the board is highly confident [00:06:38] in his ability to continue executing on the exciting growth plan ahead. Elon Musk followed up on that, saying that it is an extremely bad breach of ethics, that the Wall Street Journal would publish a deliberately false article and failed to include an unequivocal denial beforehand by the Tesla board of directors. [00:06:58] It's not that all Wall Street Journal stories are fake, but they are almost all mean spirited and deceptive. So that's that's what we know so far about the potential ouster of Elon Musk from Tesla. I want to just end on one final element, which is the CNBC anchors [00:07:18] kind of fighting about this. So Andrew Ross Sorkin and Joe Kernen got into one of their many on air fights on this issue. - So let's take a look. - I might like to tarnish media. You kind of like to tarnish Elon occasionally recently. - No I don't. - Okay. [00:07:34] All right. I just think the bloom is off the rose for you and Elon. I think you are so wrong that I don't even understand why you you do this. I'm not doing it, I just I work here. I sit across from you. I've seen a change ever since the flamethrower. [00:07:50] - Flamethrower was five years ago. - So that was even before. - That was even before. - The Orange Cheeto. Conan is so petty and so salty. So he's remembering a fight from, like, five years ago, in which Andrew Ross Sorkin got upset with Conan because he felt that [00:08:07] he was providing cover for Trump even as he was making bad decisions during Covid. Yeah. Okay. So, look, this whole Tesla board situation is straight out of succession, right? If you watch that show on HBO. And so. And is it true that the some members of the board, might be upset at Elon? [00:08:25] Just think about it logically, right. I don't have any insider information. But do people like losing billions of dollars? I pulled that one. The answer is no. Okay. And rich people like it even less. They're very, very, you know, vexed [00:08:45] when they lose that much when they, they lost $600 billion in value. The company did. That's no joke, man. That is a giant amount of money. So if they were all on the board going like, whatevs, man, who cares? Let's party. Then it would be super surprised. That would be super surprising. [00:09:02] Being deeply concerned and worried and wondering if you should have new leadership would be perfectly normal. So I'm going to end on two members here at Titcomb. Join them at Titcomb. Join. Don't shoot! I'm the goalkeeper says you can tell that Musk has the least involvement in space. [00:09:18] Because it's the only one that's not completely and utterly failing right now. Okay. And to be fair, Starlink is also very successful. And and sometimes you see Elon involved in those companies mainly when he's taking credit. But he seems to be a lot more hands on at Tesla and Doge, which is technically [00:09:35] not a company in the US government. But anyways, Earnest Flowerchild, which is a hilarious name also, right? And how is Elon allowed to just walk away from the mess he's created? I don't understand almost 200,000 people fired without cause and he just gets to walk away. And that's the current oligarchy that we have now, right? [00:09:53] The big giant donors give quarter of $1 million to Trump. They get to run the government, fire you, the plebian the masses and do whatever they want and walk away. Right? Well, there will be no consequences whatsoever. But guys, I will note this. And part of the reason why I read that comment is that Elon was obsessed [00:10:11] with getting into the computers at every one of these government organizations. To save us money, right? Oh, yeah. Yeah yeah, yeah. Now, they claim that they saved us $130 billion in Doge. They're about to pass a $5.5 trillion tax cut. So that's de minimis. [00:10:27] It's almost nothing compared to the tax cut right. So it wasn't about cost savings. And after he got into the computers all of a sudden he's like my work is done here. And he's heading back home. And remember all those guys we told you about that were part of Doge who were hackers and cybersecurity. [00:10:43] This guy and and then the people that resigned at the IRS and all those other agencies going, why are you letting them into our enormously sensitive databases and computer systems? But once they got that information, they got all they need. [00:11:01] They weren't looking to cut any costs. They were looking to get into those systems. Why? I have no idea. Every time you ring the bell below, an angel gets his wings. Totally not true. But it does keep you updated on our live shows.