Hey everybody, Rob Bauer here and today we are going to be talking about a new Elon Musk interview with the Wall Street Journal this afternoon. We've also got an interesting result from a brand survey regarding Tesla and some expansion of FSD beta, which we'll talk about in a few other items as well.
Alright, looking at the stock, after a nice start to the day, Tesla finishing down one and almost two thirds per cent to close at $185.77, well the NASDAQ was down one and a quarter per cent on the day today.
Alright, well hop right into the Elon Musk interview. So this was with the Wall Street Journal today. They had a CEO council, so Elon was one of a number of guests that participated in this council. And interesting interview, probably about an hour long, I think definitely worth listening. So I will put the link to that in the description.
I guess I'll need to add that, but I'll add that. Of course this did briefly follow or shortly thereafter follow the news that Elon Musk is actually going to be holding an interview himself with Ron DeSantis on Twitter tomorrow for an announcement, most likely for his presidential campaign. So that was sort of the thing that kicked off this interview.
So we'll talk about that sort of sequentially here first. Elon did say that this is a quite groundbreaking, this is quite groundbreaking for this announcement to be happening on Twitter. Obviously, Elon wants this to be a public town square, as he has mentioned many times, but he said he's not planning to endorse any particular candidate at this time.
He's interested in X and slash Twitter being again, that public town square, where more organizations make announcements on Twitter. And he said he's absolutely seeking similar interviews from across the political spectrum. So just like we saw when he did the interview with BBC and then going over to Fox News with Tucker Carlson, I think Elon is probably, you know, at least going to attempt to hold true with his target here of doing these interviews across the political spectrum. So although starting with Ron DeSantis, hopefully we'll see some some broader swaths of these types of things as well. Although, obviously, it's an interesting place for Elon to be in potentially on the interviewer side, which he sort of flipped into that role with the BBC. So it'll be interesting to see how he kind of handles that with DeSantis.
Anyway, in terms of Tesla related items, he did say that Tesla will probably pick another location towards the end of this year for their next factory. So obviously, we know we just had the announcement of kick in Mexico. If we back up even a little bit, Tesla at one point had said that they'd probably be announcing another couple of factories around a similar period of time. So not too surprising to say to hear Elon talk about another factory potentially being announced towards the end of this year. India was brought up as a possibility and Elon said that they were absolutely considering that. And then also one of the panel or one of the audience members asked about if Tesla would be considering England. And he said, quote, we're not currently looking at new locations, but we will probably towards the end of this year.
So it's a little bit confusing whether he's talking about an announcement being made towards the end of this year or if Tesla would just be sort of back to looking more specifically towards the end of this year. I lean more towards the former because we know that Tesla has been, you know, having meetings in India, having meetings with Indonesia, other places as well. So I think he's more towards the former here. But as we saw with kick in Mexico, that was, you know, the original announcement timeline for that was supposed to be end of 2022, dragged into 2023 a little bit.
So I'm not going to hang my hat on this timeline necessarily, but good to see obviously that Tesla's got these these plans, you know, in the works. As for AI, so Elon was asked about this X dot AI company that we've talked a little bit about. We've heard a little bit about no one really knows exactly what's going on there yet. But he was asked about that and he said it's possible that X dot AI would have some sort of a similar relationship to with Tesla and Twitter as open AI or deep mind due with Microsoft and Google. So we may see that, you know, partially folded into the umbrella of one or both of these companies as we have seen with open AI and deep mind. And, you know, it'll be very interesting to see what develops there. Elon not really willing to share too much on that yet just said kind of, you know, stay tuned. More will be announced on X dot AI soon. So we'll keep it close out for more news on that.
As for Twitter, just a couple of quick things he said, Elon said they probably reduced bots by about 90% so far at least. He said they're trending towards if they get lucky, perhaps cashflow positive next month. So I mean, that's good for the stability of Twitter, which carries over to Tesla as well. He said, hopefully that Twitter's on the comeback arc and that ad agencies have all lifted their concern labels on Twitter. And he expects that almost all advertisers will return to advertising on Twitter. As for bringing Twitter public again, the interviewer asked if that would happen in in five years. And Elon said, I don't know. So those were kind of the main things. Some other discussion on AI, you know, he was asked about when artificial general intelligence, artificial super intelligence would happen. And Elon said, do you think so this decade could be three years, could be six years, but obviously Elon is, you know, feeling like that is coming very quickly.
All right, moving on from that interview, we do have an update on Tesla's brand. So we talked about yesterday, we talked yesterday about a Harris poll on Elon Musk's sort of political favorability. And now we've got some some more from Harris poll on brands. So they have just published their top 100 reputation rankings for brands for 2023. Patagonia at the top here. Unfortunately, Tesla dropped significantly this year down to the 60 second slot in the top 100. And it's not top 100 brands necessarily, but rather of the most one of the most visible 100 brands, how those brands perform in terms of sort of their arc, he was what they call their reputational quotient, which is devised from a set of nine different categories here that they ask respondents on.
So Tesla dropped down still placing with a score that they call, you know, very good at 74.3 free scroll up and look at the scale. I guess good is how they define that. But a significant drop from last year, obviously, 50 points or 50 places. This was a, I believe, 6.4% drop in terms of the ranking from 2022, which I think is the second sick, most significant sort of percentage point or point drop seconds of BP in the rankings this year. So a couple of things to highlight with this.
This is just surveying Americans. This was done across 16,000 Americans from March 13th through the 28th. There then is a second follow-up survey that's done in May. But I think these scores are coming from this first survey back in March. So, again, just the US, I think probably the most significant impact is SLS brand this year, probably happening in the US. I don't think there's many people that would view this year as a real positive year for Tesla's brand, both just with the, you know, the Twitter volatility, the stock price volatility, Elon's, you know, more active role in political situations, and things like that, it certainly has not been helpful.
So, you know, not too surprising to see a little bit of a drop here with Tesla's brand score. Now, a couple of other things to keep in mind if we just look at where things were last year and just sort of the history in general. You can see, you know, there is a large number of companies that are clustered pretty closely together here. So a relatively small drop does, you know, move you pretty far, 79.5 last year, Tesla was in sort of the very good category, dropping, I think it was 74 this year, putting them into the good category.
Let's see, yeah, 74. So, it's not like it's that huge of a swing, even though it is a significant drop in terms of number of places, there's a lot of companies kind of clustered in that same, same sector. We'll talk more about that in a second, but just to see the breakdown of the scores by category year over year, we won't go through these specifically, but there you can see them lined up. It seemed they did add two new categories this year.
Now, kind of the final thing I'll say on this, I guess I've got two other things, but one thing is just to point out the volatility that is somewhat natural for brands in a survey like this, which I think isn't limited in general in terms of how valuable it is sort of in the first place, but you can see some of the brands that have consistently been the top 100 most visible brands. After the last, you know, 10, 8 years or so, you can see some of the volatility there, so not uncommon to see brands drop by four or five points. You know, Chick-fil-A had a nice year this year. I think they jumped back into the top five, but you can see they've had years before where they've dropped five points and similar with Disney and Coke, you can see there too. So, again, things like this are volatile and subject to change relatively quickly.
The last thing I'll say on this is that it was kind of interesting. They had a podcast that discussed some of the reasons for some of the declines here, and I don't know how well informed the podcasters are, but presumably they've got access to all this data. And interestingly, they didn't mention politics as one of the reasons for the drop. They mentioned obviously the Twitter volatility, new EV competitors making Tesla, perhaps a little bit less exciting relatively than it was perhaps last year, and you know, just some of those things.
But nothing there about politics, so kind of interesting to see that omission from, you know, their discussion on which again, they could just be not mentioning that for whatever reason, but thought was interesting.
Next up we've got China-insured vehicle numbers. So, it's been a couple of weeks since we've talked about this. Remember, the publishing of this is a little bit more inconsistent now, but we do have the last two weeks of data.
So from May 8th to May 14th, Tesla was just shy of 10,000 vehicles. So that was following the production shutdown that we had in early May for a few days there. Obviously that resulted in a lower week in the first week of May. Now, it bounds back for the last couple of weeks for Tesla, basically sitting around 10,000 for both weeks. For both weeks, if we look at the quarter to date then through the first seven weeks, basically April 3rd through the 21st of May, the numbers here are about 67,000 quarter to date, which again, this should closely tie to retail sales or domestic sales in China for this period.
If we go back to Q1, that was about 47,000. If we go back to Q4, it was about 57,000 at this point in time. So, Tesla quarter to date, fairing well. If we think about Q1, we do have to remember, of course, that Chinese New Year did impact production significantly during that period of time. So, overall, I'd like to see these continue to trend up a little bit.
Obviously, coming off that production shutdown, not too surprising to see a little bit of softness here, but we are going to start to come up against some pretty big weeks, probably in two to three weeks from now. If we're comparing the quarter to date numbers here versus Q1, you can see we're maybe at about right here right now, and then we'll be coming up against these weeks pretty soon. So we'll keep an eye on that as we get more data.
And then another big news item for Tesla today is they have started to roll out FSD beta to pretty much all vehicles in the United States that have FSD beta, whether that's purchased or subscription. So, this has been a while. It's been kind of paused this roll out for a while because of the Nitzar recall.
Obviously, we saw Tesla address those concerns a couple of months ago or maybe a month ago. And since that period, it's kind of been paused in terms of the roll out. So now we're seeing this happen. A number of people are applying to Tesla's scope today saying that they have subscribed to FSD beta today. And within sort of three or four hours, they were able to download the new version here and start running FSD beta on the vehicle.
So, no safety score, sort of gate to go through just wide access at this point in time. So, I think it's exciting both for the financials. Tesla may be able to recognize a little bit more FSD beta revenue this quarter. Also, with more people potentially subscribing, that'll help as well. And I think it's exciting because Tesla should be able to then continue to collect more data, broader data, as the user base grows. So, good to see that roll out continue.
I believe was the formation of a class action lawsuit basically against Elon for parts of the Twitter acquisition. So, no surprise, there's always going to be lawsuits that pop up around that. But basically the judge throughout the case basically saying that there was no sort of cheating of shareholders through the course of the acquisition process, Musk did have a little bit of a late filing when he was acquiring Twitter shares initially. But they said that the point of the judge said that the point of did not show any harm from that late disclosure of that initial Twitter stake.
I think it's really hard to make a case here when most people can look at this and say that, you know, had Elon not acquired Twitter, the you know, share price would have been a lot lower than where it ultimately ended up being. So, I'm so glad to see that that results of that case today.
Just kind of a fun one here. This was one of the top posts on Reddit has been that over the last day was that there's this Tesla that showed up to a detailer or, you know, maybe it's entering resale, but showed up to a detailer and allegedly hadn't been cleaned in 10 years. I'm not sure if that's quite accurate, but a very dirty car and you can see kind of the transformation that the detailer did. So, number one, just kind of cool detailing work, but also number two, you can kind of see just how the vehicles held up despite obviously not super tender love and care for the last many number of years.
So, I just kind of thought that was pretty cool and maybe people would like to watch that video. I think it originated on TikTok, but I did put the Reddit link down there in the description if you want to check that out.
And then the last couple of things, Waymo and Uber have announced a partnership to have Waymo driver vehicles available on the Uber platform in Phoenix. So, pretty interesting to see Waymo partner with Uber on this. They obviously have their own Waymo One app, which they say that riders will still be able to continue to use directly, but they'll also be integrating later this year with Uber to offer that as a possible option.
So, kind of interesting from Waymo's perspective, we talked about sort of the sorry for the sirens here. We talked about some of the you know cost challenges that Waymo is likely to have with the model that they've been pursuing. And I think if they're now also relying on Uber, Uber is going to want some some ability to profit off of that too, which just you know takes away a little bit more of the I guess adds further to the cost structure challenges that Waymo might already be having. So because it doesn't sound like it's exclusive, the impact of that's maybe not terrible for Waymo and depending on the length of the contract, maybe this is something we can get out of as they grow, but nevertheless something that could be a little bit concerning for their cost structure, if they are to be reliant upon Uber from sort of that network perspective.
And then lastly, just a quick correction on my comments yesterday on SpaceX. So, I'd said that the this was the first time of booster for a crew flight had landed back on Earth. Lended back at the landing zone or at the launch site is what I should have said there. They've done that on they've done landings for crew flights on drone ships before, but not flown the booster back to the landing or the launch site previously. So I just wanted to quickly make that correction from yesterday as well.
All right, that is it for today then. As always, thank you for listening. Make sure you're subscribed and signed up for notifications and also find me on Twitter at Tesla Podcast. And we'll see you tomorrow for the Wednesday, May 24th episode of Tesla Daily. Thank you.
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