00:00 Speaker A
CEO Elon Musk spent the end of the earnings call campaigning for his one trillion dollar pay package, which is up for a shareholder vote in November. Join me now we got Ross Gerber, CEO of Gerber Kawasaki wealth and investment management. Ross, always great to see you. So, Tesla, I’m just looking at finished the day in the green here up about 2%. I wanted to start with that EV business though, Ross. Listen, Q3 deliveries, they were solid, but we knew they were going to be solid. The question I have for you as, you know, Tesla investor, Tesla shareholder,
00:31 Speaker A
what do you think Ross, the underlying growth looks like for that EV business now, though, in the quarters ahead in this post EV tax credit world we’re living in.
00:46 Ross Gerber
Well, unfortunately, I have to tell you, I think this is as good as it’s going to get. You know, I I think it’s all sort of we’ve maxed what Tesla’s EV sales potential is, which is at about 1.9 million units a year. So, you know, Tesla was always slated to make, you know, ideally 10 million plus vehicles a year in the original plan. And so now I think we’re stuck at less than two million and and going down.
01:13 Ross Gerber
Um so if the best they can do is close to 500,000 with the expiration, you know, now I’m estimating they’re looking at more like 1.6 million cars next year and no analysts have that in their numbers because they they always have this incremental growth irrelevant of the realities facing the business and I just don’t see where the growth comes from.
01:31 Speaker A
Well some some Bulls Ross on this show have countered, you know, they’re looking for those new uh more relatively affordable affordable models, Ross. They think that could drive demand. What do you think?
01:40 Ross Gerber
It’s not affordable.
01:41 Speaker A
It’s not affordable.
01:44 Ross Gerber
It’s not affordable. I mean, if I rip out half the car and sell it for half price, it doesn’t make the car more affordable. It makes the car worse at a cheaper price. And so so you’re getting less for your money. That doesn’t make it more affordable. What what it means is they’re diminishing the value of the product to sell it for cheaper, and that’s a bad business strategy. It’s a strategy of weakness when you can’t actually convince consumers to buy your product. A, because you don’t even advertise to create demand, and B, the CEO is one of the most hated people in the world. So you’ve there’s a huge disconnect between what Tesla needs to do to sell cars and what they’re actually doing.
