Squawk on the Street+ Tesla CEO Elon Musk 5/16/23

Gene Munster (0:00)

This is a CNBC Special Presentation.

Carl Quintanilla (0:03)

Elon Musk, live one-on-one with David Faber.

Looking live at Tesla Headquarters in Austin, Texas, in the room where in just minutes, our own David Faber will be sitting down for a rare one-on-one interview with Tesla's chairman and CEO, Elon Musk, a no holds barred conversation about everything from Tesla's future, the new Twitter CEO he hired from NBCU, SpaceX, AI, China, and a lot more. Here with us tonight to break down what we're gonna hear. Phil LeBeau, Fast Money Trader, Dan Nathan, CNBC contributor, Gene Munster. Also with us, Julia Borstin. Focus on Twitter, social media. Morgan Brennan will join us later to discuss SpaceX.

I'm Carl Quintanilla, live at the NASDAQ Market site, and welcome to the CNBC special presentation. We begin tonight with the annual shareholder meeting that just wrapped up for Tesla. Shares of the auto EV maker have been trading after hours. Phil LeBeau has been following the action. We got some headlines going into this interview, Phil.

Phil LeBeau (0:57)

A few headlines, you know, what stands out is that often these annual meetings get a little weird, get a little fanboyish with people screaming, we love you, Elon, and he kind of hems and haws, and we don't get much out of them. I thought there were a couple of nuggets within tonight's presentation. One of them being that he sees two new products that will be coming. Now, we know that there are gonna be more products, but the question has always been when will we hear about these? What will these new products be?

He wouldn't give a timeline, nor would he say what exactly they're going to be. But you get a sense that there is a road map.

Not that we didn't think there was one before, but now we get a little better sense that there is a road map in terms of when they have new products coming. I'm sure there's gonna be an entry level model in there. And whether another model is more of a traditional looking SUV, that remains to be seen. So that was one nugget that was within the presentation today, as well as I think he came across as pretty confident about where Tesla is and where it's headed despite the challenges with the economy.

Carl Quintanilla (2:00)

Not to mention the headline you brought us a few moments ago about succession or lack of succession, right? Dan, what does that mean for the name?

Dan Nathan (2:07)

Yeah, I think it's important. I mean, when you look at his university, you look at how many companies he has a CEO of, I think it really is important to see who's next because he really does have his hands full on a lot of really big businesses. You think of the valuation of SpaceX in the private markets, over $100 billion. At one point, Tesla was over $1 trillion, right? He bought a company in Twitter for $44 billion. It's worth much less right now. And so when you think about it, and you just mentioned who he just hired, I know Julia's gonna go into that. For Twitter, this is really important because it's been my view that this whole Twitter purchase was really on the shoulders of Tesla shareholders, if you think about it, right? And all the risk of what happens with Twitter is right there because that's how he funded the purchase and it's taken a lot of his attention over the last, call it six to nine months or so. So those are things that are really important to me too.

Carl Quintanilla (2:53)

As we watch them get set up there, Julia talking about Twitter and this notion that maybe Linda Yakarino will bring, not just advertising sends to Twitter, but maybe Tesla ads to Twitter. We'll see.

Julia Boorstin (3:04)

Yes, I mean, look, Linda Yakarino was such a force as the head of NBCUniversal's ads business, but also its partnership. She was the one who had the relationship with all the big brands. She also understands what it's like to put content and also ads on Twitter, because there was this long-standing relationship between NBCUniversal and Twitter. So I think that she's the perfect person to grow Twitter's ad business, which is essential right now, because this is a business that has suffered since Elon Musk has taken over Twitter. And then she also might explain to him the value of really marketing his brand, Tesla, along with that.

Carl Quintanilla (3:36)

Gene, are you seeing synergies between Twitter and the automaker that maybe were not visible, I don't know, even six months ago?

Gene Munster (3:46)

No, maybe something around that advertising piece that you're talking about. But no, I think this is, in some ways, Elon's thinking good riddance with that question that Phil had talked about earlier related to how you do an Elon in the Q&A. I think he said he's gonna be spending less time at Twitter.