David Faber's Exclusive Interview With Elon Musk 5/17/23

Carl Quintanilla (0:00)

Market Moving Insight and Analysis join Jim Cramer, David Faber and me, Carl Quintanilla, on the opening bell hour of CNBC Squawk on the Street.

Elon Musk (0:09)

I'll say what I want to say, and if the consequence of that is losing money, so be it.

Carl Quintanilla (0:17)

Elon Musk with Faber last night in Texas, covering everything from macro to AI to China to free speech. Good Wednesday morning, welcome to Squawk on the Street. I'm Carl Quintanilla with Jim Cramer, David Faber miraculously is back already at post night of the New York Stock Exchange. Some optimism around the debt ceiling today and regional banks feeding futures, even as we keep an eye on targets earnings and getting some numbers cut on China's recovery. But we'll begin with the Musk interview.

David, just remarkable and really a privilege that we got that much time, both on our end and his.

David Faber (0:46)

Yeah, I'm very happy to have obviously had the opportunity to speak to him for an hour. Always things that you don't get to because his views and everything is so wide ranging.

Of course, sorry we didn't talk more about space or Starlink. But what we did talk about, I thought was fascinating and I hope for our viewers as well, whether it was, as you heard, sort of his position in terms of he's going to continue to tweet and tweet things that make a lot of people unhappy. He doesn't care. That's exactly what he said. We talked a great deal about Tesla, which I think Jim is perhaps front and center for our viewers more than anything else. As a company coming right after the annual meeting, a little bit of news that we got into in terms of he may start advertising something he decided as he said, in that moment on the stage, which goes to how it works to some extent there. I said this earlier on Squawk Box, but guys, if you ever get a chance just to go down there to see the Gigafactory, it really is astonishing.

I think Fremont is even bigger, but oh my, Carrie and Todd and I, we were just stunned at what you're seeing physically and what they're doing, and how they're doing it in terms of making those automobiles.

Jim Cramer (2:04)

Well, you put a lot of his term pathological optimism. Something that I think that we have not seen in our country since perhaps when President Roosevelt went to major companies like GM and said, listen, it's World War II and you must do this. It's almost like he's creating this because he understands the future and what needs to happen in our country. I found it very reverential to our own country, which could have been. He's got to be in a lot of places. But I just want to say for a moment, for a moment, our partner delivered an interview. You search your mind if you're a journalist or anyone who's been following journalism for interviews that were significant. It made me think of the Roger Mudd interview with Ted Kennedy, where the interview starts and Ted Kennedy is the frontrunner. And at the end of it, Ted Kennedy is out of the race. I mention that because I haven't seen anything where I feel I now know what's happening with this man.

He is knocking others out of the race of not just engineering, but even humanity in the sense of the question you asked him about your boy and what happens when they win? What happens when they are smarter than we are? I was chilled by that.

There were that many moments in this interview where I felt differently about someone after the before.

David Faber (3:26)

Yeah, I was taken with the last question or the answer as well, or in some ways the inability to really answer it, which is partially why I asked it. A lot of people, though, focused, of course, on really what was the first conversation I think that Musk has had around his endless tweeting and the fact that he upsets a lot of people with tweets that seem to link to conspiracy theorists and the like. I asked him about it. Take a listen.

Do your tweets hurt the company? Are there Tesla owners who say, I don't agree with his political position because, and I know it because he shares so much of it? Or are there advertisers on Twitter that Linda Iaccarina will come and say, you got to stop, man, or, you know, I can't get these ads because of some of the things you tweet.

Elon Musk (4:24)

You know, I'm reminded of the scene in The Princess Bride, great movie. Great movie.