AI Anticipation as Amazon Announces Alexa + and Investors Prepare for Nvidia Earnings
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Bloomberg Audio Studios. Podcasts. Radio. News. From the heart of where innovation, money, and power collide. In Silicon Valley and beyond. This is Bloomberg Technology with Caroline Hyde and Ed Ludlow. I am a star.

Live from New York, I'm Caroline Hyde. And I'm Jackie Davalos in San Francisco. This is Bloomberg Technology. Coming up, all eyes on NVIDIA as it reports earnings today. Can it win over Wall Street once more as the AI winner? Plus, a Gen AI-infused Alexa Plus. Live updates from Amazon's long-awaited launch event here in New York.

And the Tesla fallout continues, shares lower as we dissect Elon Musk's many detractors taking their anger out on the carmaker. But first, we check in on these markets that power higher. We make up for yesterday's loss by more than a percentage point in the Nasdaq 100. And there is one key stock that drives us higher on a points perspective. It's Nvidia.

anticipation builds for 20 p.m. New York time today when we get the numbers up 4.4% on the day managing to wipe out yesterday's loss this is we anticipate earnings will they live up to a 73% increase in revenue and what does the investor base need in terms of forecasts Blue Megs common Reineke is here to break down what has been a torrent

start to the year for NVIDIA. Just think about the $600 billion sell-off we got when DeepSeq was first unveiled and we suddenly thought, maybe we don't need these chips. But it's managed to push back against that slightly. Yeah, it's so interesting though. I mean, going into this earnings report, we're not only coming off of the DeepSeq sell-off,

We are down from the last earnings report, which is something that Nvidia shares haven't seen since 2022. And we're actually down year to date, even with today's gains sort of calling back what we saw yesterday. Nvidia is still down about 2% on the year. Obviously, it's a short period of time.

But this is really rare going into an Nvidia earnings report, especially for the market over the last few years. So I think that the bar is always set high for Nvidia. It's a huge stock. It's the second biggest weighting in the S&P. It is the sort of de facto winner of the AI trade. But going into this report, I think that the bar is set even higher. Investors need to see the beat and raise that they've become so accustomed to. And I think that forward guidance and what they can say about what they're seeing of the future of AI

And the revenue that they'll bring in from their next wave of chips from the Blackwell is extremely important. Carmen, aside from those forecasts, what else are investors really expecting as it relates to commentary regarding DeepSeek? The company really assuaged some of those concerns and comments right after that news hit in January. But at the same time, what do they need to hear coming out of this report?

I think that they just need to hear more confidence from Nvidia that sales are still good, that people still need to be buying these chips, and that everything about AI, the growth story that we've been seeing, will continue. I'll say one good thing that should hopefully play into this report and maybe into the guide going forward is that many of the big technology companies that have reported so far, including the hyperscalers, have said that they are going to spend records amount of money on capital expenditures. So

building out their AI, their platforms, their hardware, their software, all of those things. And NVIDIA is still the biggest winner of that money.

Trade restrictions though for me, Carmen. We are questioning how many H20s can get into China going forward. We understand that there's been perhaps a lot of demand post-Deep Seek, but can that continue? We'll really have to see. I do think that you're right. What they say about the future, how they're going to guide, if they have plans to work with those restrictions or how they'll deal with them is going to be of the utmost importance tonight.

That's Bloomberg's Carmen Reinecke. Thanks so much for joining us. Let's continue this conversation with Kim Forrest, CIO of Bogut Capital Partners, which has about $35 million in AUM. Kim, when it comes to model training, there's no question that NVIDIA holds the crown there. But when it comes to inferencing, they hold less than half of that business there. 40% of their GPUs go towards this specific part of training. How would you say that risk kind of

stacks up in comparison to the rest of what you're seeing going into NVIDIA.

Well, it's one of the really big risks and it's kind of down from the headline, as you point out. This is a great point that not all chips are used in the same way and they're not used in the same proportion. So what we're talking about here in building the model versus inference is that there's just different chips made. You know, you get the model and then you ask the model questions. So two different sets of thinking chips, right?

So here's the big problem, I think. In the past, OpenAI specifically has just been throwing more and more horsepower at building its big model. And it looks like that's not working because they're not being able to produce the new big models on a timeline that they publish. So there's something wrong there.

And so here's the problem that I think a lot of thinking investors have with this company is, is it really going to need all of those chips to build these big models? I'm guessing no. I mean, nobody really wants to have server farms covering the earth. Nobody wants that expense.

And it looked like that was necessary, but maybe there will be new ways to be able to build the big models without using every last acre of farmland for a data center and thus buying every chip that NVIDIA could make.

I do think though Jensen Huang thus far has done a good job at fighting back against that nervousness in the market that we were sort of peeking out inefficiency levels from large language models. I think he's pushed back against the fact that deep seek is an issue because he says they are needed for inference. So what more do you need to hear from him? Is it actual data that proves Blackwell is in users' hands that ultimately we... Because investors...

well analysts haven't changed their perspective on how big a revenue we're going to see for nvidia come 2026. sure well 2026 is an interesting year but almost irrelevant right because everybody in the world that uses these things that are a public company have already told us they're going to spend you know anywhere from what 60 to 80 billion dollars that's microsoft and uh you know

all the big magnificent seven users of this. So that's not really the problem. What we're doing is we're looking at 27, 28, 29, 30 and saying, is the company going to be able to double like it has in the past? That's the most amazing thing.

In a very short time period, it went from having, what, like $20 billion in sales to $60 billion. That's incredible. And you never see that. And it got rewarded for that in its valuation. But looking forward, is that really the case? And I'm betting the answer is no, that's not the case, that they have the opportunity to double again.

To your point, Kim, demand isn't going anywhere. We heard from the big tech giants that they are continuing affirming their CapEx plans, even boosting some of them. So the spigot isn't going to be turned off to NVIDIA anytime soon. But can the company handle that capacity? Do you have any concerns about whether it can actually supply this demand?

Sure. Well, I have two concerns. Can it supply the demand? And that's really TSMC, and they're doing a good job, right? But, you know, it takes time to bring these extremely advanced fab lines online. And they...

they're just incredibly complicated. But secondly, are the chips working? You know, in the beginning of the releases, we heard about some overheating problems. And this is legendary in the world of chips. This is not a new thing. Intel had this problem, AMD, everybody, everybody goes through this discovery whenever you're creating the hot, fast, new chip that you go, uh-oh, I forgot this little area here and it's creating a problem. So all of these are kind of

Little worries that people have and yes, Jensen Wong will address these without a doubt But you know we're talking about this isn't software. This is hardware. This stuff just has to work It just does a weird Where does this leave the company from a hardware perspective when you do have chips exports this tit-for-tat between Beijing and Washington?

Well, here's a crazy idea. As I was listening to the intro, what if China starts building data centers over here? Would we sell the chips to them? Where would be the problem? So there are many ways you can get around this. Let's see how they fight. I think everybody's thinking out of the box again.

Well, we know the president calls himself a dealmaker. We'll see whether he'd ever apply himself to that sort of a deal with China building here. But certainly he's pushed TSMC and Taiwanese chip makers to want to build more manufacturing here in the United States. What's interesting is about, you know, where you put your money. Your money is where your mouth is. Is it aligned with NVIDIA? You seem to like other chip makers more at this valuation level, Kim.

I do because I think they're an incredible company, but they really only have four product lines and two we don't care about anymore: game machines and graphics chips for PCs. We don't care. The third one is crypto. We kind of care about this, but the one that's been driving Nvidia is certainly AI.

And my bet is that they are not going to be able to, in a relatively short period of time, like let's say 18 months, double their revenues again. That is what brought them here, is that huge demand and their ability to create product that met that demand.

I'm unsure of the demand portion, again, not through 26, but the doubling of that demand, the ability to meet it, and really whether all of this can continue to work. It's a really narrow path that they're walking, and bad things can happen. And so I like to look at other areas, especially memory. We are just creating so much.

data. It has to live somewhere. And I think that's pretty much an overlooked area. Kim Forrest, great to have you on Boca Capital Partners. Thank you. Now coming up, Amazon says it is investing more than any other company in, you guessed it, AI. We'll find out what this means for the company's devices and other investments after the break. Alexa Plus, here we come. This is Bloomberg Technology.

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All right, I'm pumped to introduce you to Alexa Plus. This is the next generation of Alexa. She's powered by Gen AI. Smarter, conversational, personal, just get stuff done. She's easy to talk to. You can have almost any conversation, almost any conversation. She's smarter than she's ever been before.

Amazon Senior Vice President of Devices and Services, Panas Pane, speaking at the company's event earlier today about his updated Alexa Assistant. For more on what the company has just announced, I'm joined by Bloomberg's Spencer Soper. Long in the waiting. I think it was back in 2023 we first heard about an AI Alexa. She's finally here. And does it live up to the expectations, do you think?

Yeah, that's the big question. We've just seen their kind of canned presentation, but the proof will be in the pudding as more people try this thing and try to use it and if they actually bring it deeper into their lives, which has been a struggle for the Alexa voice activated platform to ever really get beyond being a kitchen timer, kind of like a voice activated clock radio.

Spencer, what's the upside to this? Like, the ambitious vision for where Alexa can go? Because as you mentioned, they've tried to kind of integrate this into things like shopping by voice, which kind of turned out to be a dud. Yeah, I mean, I guess the vision is to make this kind of a...

irreplaceable piece of your day-to-day life, but it's just a question of whether that's actually necessary or if a lot of these things are solutions looking for problems. They gave a presentation and they talked about booking your favorite restaurant or getting an alert when you need concert tickets. We'll just have to see if these things stand out any more than they already have. The bottom line is a lot of times

People are wary of trusting chatbots to make critical decisions for them. Like even, you know, they don't mind getting product recommendations or stuff like that. But when it comes to actually executing a transaction, they prefer to do that manually and do that themselves. So there's still a gap between what these things can do and what people want them to do.

Panos Panay himself saying that they've been limited by the technology, maybe trying to reference why it took longer to get this into our hands. But when you've got Andy Jassy taking the stage saying Amazon is investing more in AI than any other company, it is interesting that they are LLM agnostic with this product. Ultimately, they're still trying to be a supermarket here for AI devices and LLMs and access to compute, right?

Yeah, that's exactly right. And the big question of whether is Amazon actually the consumer-facing product, the thing that people, the brand that people associate with these services, or is it more the background infrastructure? It's very well positioned on the background infrastructure side and powering a lot of these devices, things that you use day to day. You don't even realize that Amazon Web Services is powering the background.

But when it comes to the actual consumer-facing thing that people use day to day, Alexa's been fading, and now they're trying to get Alexa back in the forefront. That's Bloomberg Spencer. Soper, thanks so much for joining us.

Time for today's AI in action. We take a look at Nvidia's dominance over server makers. Bloomberg is reporting server makers, including Dell, are seeing shrinking margins, less influence, despite a sales surge driven by Nvidia, of course. Dell is encountering the problem with a $5 billion deal to supply servers to Elon Musk's XAI startup.

But where's the profit? Tony Ford joins us. You've done a really great deep dive on all these names that have seemingly benefited in terms of sales, but maybe not in terms of profitability. Yeah, there's a whole category of these companies that are kind of second-order AI winners, right? Obviously, you have the NVIDIAs, but you also have companies like Dell or HPE that at one point were seen as a little sleepy, maybe a previous generation, but now...

Billions of new sales from AI servers. What we have found is that these deals are very diluted to margins. That was known, but part of why is that NVIDIA just exerts so much control over the sales process in a way that in previous years it never would have been able to.

Brody, so then what recourse do some of these companies have? You write that Nvidia is also getting into the spaces where some of these companies are trying to tap higher margins. Where can they go or does Nvidia just hold all the cards?

For now, Nvidia holds the cards. I mean, it's an incredibly competitive market. If you're a server maker, there's a lot of companies that could sell high-powered servers, right? I mean, we see Dell, they're making this giant $5 billion deal with Elon. That's a win for sure, but we got the margin on it and it's, you know, it's pretty low. It's a figure that I imagine they would not have accepted in a different, less competitive market.

I would say NVIDIA's control in this way lasts until the competition, say AMD gets their act together and has a competing product, or the pool of customers buying AI chips expands beyond the kind of 10 to 20 largest hyperscalers or AI forward companies like Tesla.

Can we just focus in on one of the companies you name as the server maker, Supermicrocomputer shares. Of course. Mashing it today up more than 20%. Finally, they put in their financials, a big relief, right? I mean, it's been a huge overhang on the stock, right? It's been unclear of like, are we going to get delisted this year? A lot of investors weren't sure.

But last night, you know, with 30 minutes on the clock, Supermicro put them out and the stock's up 25%. There were a lot of caveats in that report saying that we're still working on fixing the processes that led here and it could even happen again. But for now, investors are saying this is a good day.

That's Bloomberg's Brody Ford. Thanks for joining us. Thank you. Now, just announced $170 million Series C funding round, and the company's software is best known for its traction with partners like NVIDIA, who want to reduce their own errors when doing their quantum research. Co-founder and CEO Dr. Itamar Sivan joins us now.

Dr. Itamar, this is a great partnership you have and it just kind of goes to show that there is an intersection here between AI and quantum. What is that?

Of course. At the end of the day, quantum computing is there to provide us with the next very, very big leap in computing power. Right? So quantum computers are of interest for a very, very simple reason. They will unleash an amount of computing power that's far beyond any computer that we have today and any computer that we'll be able to develop based on the technologies that we have today.

Let's just talk about your technologies and ultimately who you serve. You've got a massive funding round and many are saying it's because you serve half of all the quantum ecosystem. How big is that ecosystem and what are you serving them with? So this ecosystem is actually quite big. It includes multiple

So first of all, there are the hyperscalers that you were just referring to and other corporates all over the world that are already investing billions in building those computers. First of all, building quantum processors and then building quantum computers. Then you have government labs.

At the end of the day, quantum computing is the most important technological race of our generation. And governments are also investing billions in them. And therefore, there is a lot of traction, a lot of interest, a lot of investments from government labs. So is that hundreds? Sorry to interrupt here, but Dr. Sivan, is that hundreds of clients that you have or tens of clients? Can you give us a feeling of the size here? We have hundreds of clients, yes.

Dr. Itamar, how long before quantum computing has its AI moment? Yes, it's an excellent question because many people ask us in the field all the time, when will quantum computers become useful? But the true answer is that quantum computers are already useful. You were talking about NVIDIA earlier, and you see a very big market for NVIDIA is high-performance computing as well as scientific computing.

Quantum is already within these categories. We already have customers. There are already organizations that buy quantum computers and use them over the cloud. The thing is that the industry will unleash more and more computing power as time goes. So this will be gradual.

The full potential of quantum computers is just unimaginable. It is truly going to be hard to foresee how much power we will get out of quantum computers. And yes, to get to this full potential, it will take more time. Let's talk about some of those customers where you're seeing the most traction and perhaps the sectors where you expect to see most of the demand coming in in the short term.

Yes, so unfortunately I cannot mention specific customers by name for obvious reasons, but Quantum Machines is working with all of the types of organizations that are developing quantum computers, so including some of the biggest corporates in the computing industry that are developing their own quantum computers and are also setting up

quantum computers on the cloud. Many of them are already clients of ours, as well as startups. I mean, startups actually play a key role in this industry since it is an emerging industry. So many of our bigger clients are startups, mostly in the US and in Europe. And then again, government labs. Government labs invest

You know, some of the biggest computers, classical computers on Earth, lies within government labs, right? Mostly in the US, in Japan, in China. And these organizations are already procuring quantum at scale. Itamar, 30 seconds. What do you do with the 170 million? Where does that go first?

Right.

Dr. Ismar, Sue, we thank you so much for joining us. Co-founder and CEO of Quantum Machines on its latest fundraise. Now coming up, we'll get back to NVIDIA's earnings, what to expect for the key investor. This is Bloomberg Technology. This is a message from sponsor Intuit TurboTax. Taxes was dealing with piles of paperwork and frustrating forms. And then waiting and wondering and worrying if you were going to get any money back.

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The world is built on code. From the apps we use every day to the systems powering industries, developers like you are the architects of tomorrow. But let's be real, the road to innovation can get a little tricky. You need the right tools to move fast, but you also need a community to help you go further. That's where Microsoft comes in. Microsoft has the tools to help you move at lightning speed, like GitHub Copilot, VS Code, and a ton of AI resources to keep you on the cutting edge.

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Welcome back to Rewind Technology. I'm Caroline Hyde in New York.

And I'm Jackie Davalos in San Francisco. Quick check on these markets because we bounced back after yesterday, Jackie. We're up more than a percentage point on the NASDAQ. And this is as we feed into the earnings focus rather than perhaps the macro picture that we were confronted with yesterday. We're up more than a percentage point. We dig into some key names on the points side that drive us higher. You know that we've got to keep an eye on what's happening with Amazon today. It's just out with an event in New York. Finally, a generative AI infused Alexa. $19.

$19.99 or free with your prime and it comes out in March. We're up 1.9% the investor base likes it even though we've been at least a year delayed on it. I'm also looking at Nvidia that is really crescendoing today. We're up four and a half percent as we will expect the earnings after the bell. 4:20 p.m. New York time. Can they push back on the anxiety related to capacity needs, related to China action?

related to its valuation. We dig in with Richard Claude, he's with us, Portfolio Manager at Janus Henderson. Richard, you own the stock. What do you need to hear from Jensen tonight?

And that's the key. He's going to have to do a lot of handholding, I think, to play to some of those sort of rising debates that we've had in the market, to be honest, for the last eight months. You know, the stock's basically where it was back in June of last year. So we want to hear that, you know, those supply issues around Blackwell are easing and we're going to get a very aggressive ramp into the back half of this year. And then we're going to have to address those debates around the scale of AI CapEx today and the monetization, the RRF.

that this capex spending can continue not just through this year, which we've heard from a lot of their customers, but into next year and beyond. Level those for us. Are you more concerned about demand? Because for many, we have indicated that hyperscale demand certainly still lives on if you look at any of their numbers and their capacity orders at the moment. But the supply side, I suppose, has been the question with Blackwell and indeed whether they continue to access China with H20s.

Exactly. So there's a couple of things to unpack there. So I mean, from a demand side this year, we're feeling pretty comfortable. We all know it's a supply issue. The debate is more longer term. And then all of those kind of concerns that came out of a deep seek that actually we need a lot less capital spending on training in particular. Actually, we've seen the classic Jevons paradox. I really hope that everyone in his family is getting a dollar for every time we take William Jevons' name. But we are seeing actually incremental demand out

out of even China. And we heard that from Ali Baba, who's going to be spending as much in the next three years as they did in the last 10. So it's more about near term, will there be further restrictions on US exports of chips and particularly AI chips into China? And then that longer term debate as to can we see what levels of growth are reasonable to think about for the company into the years to come?

Richard, there was a TD Cowen report earlier this week that showed that Microsoft might be pulling back on some of its data center leases. Is this a short-term blip or are you more concerned about deeper warning signs there?

Yeah, I think that was misconstrued. I think there were a couple of elements there. Microsoft's been very supply constrained and were very aggressive at taking up a huge amount of leasing of data center capacity, which they're now sort of optimizing. And the other factor was obviously we saw the news around what's happening with Project Stargate and the reimagining of those terms between Oracle and OpenAI and Microsoft, where a lot of that training capacity is going to be built for OpenAI customers.

by Oracle and not by Microsoft. So again, that's just, in our minds, just a sort of reimagining of kind of the trajectories of where that capital spending needs to go rather than anything about sort of broader AI capex. Let's talk reasoning because Anthropic released its reasoning model yesterday. A slew of other companies have been doing the same. These rely a lot on inferencing. How much of NVIDIA's growth going forward is going to come from inferencing versus GPUs that train?

And I think most people, including Jensen, would expect this market to be larger than training. I mean, at the end of the day, you know, we need to see that monetization and return on spending of all this training CapEx we had in the last couple of years. That's going to come from all of us using more AI services and products in the next few years. And that's going to require a significant step up in inferencing capacity.

And you're seeing different companies come at this in different ways. So, you know, Microsoft is much more focused on wanting to do inferencing capacity. You've seen an Oracle much more willing to invest in that training capacity. But I think we're going to need both. But as we look forward to the next few years, we're certainly more excited about the inferencing sort of growth and capacity ramp up in the next few years as hopefully we all start using these services.

What's so interesting is the frenemy discussion around this industry because you also hold the hyperscalers that are busy making their own chips. Amazon, one of them, we just heard from Andy Jassy saying how they are the biggest spender on AI and part of that is their own chip capacity that they're making internally. How much of a competitive threat ultimately is that for the likes of Nvidia?

I think there are a couple of elements there. One is that it takes about three years to design a chip. So if you're sort of two years and a bit after the launch of ChatGPT, to actually have chips that have been fully designed in a post-ChatGPT world, we're going to start seeing those from later this year, the new Google TPU. We've got the new Microsoft chip coming out next year. We've got chips from Meta, from OpenAI as well coming. So I think we'll see the full spectrum of what the hyperscalers are actually able to design over the next 12 to 24 months. And those will be much more competitive with NVIDIA.

We still think that that competitive kind of intensity is much more on the inferencing side than training. You know, NVIDIA still has a huge amount of advantages, not just in the GPU, but in terms of networking, in terms of software that it can bring to bear and on the rack level, on the liquid cooling side as well, on the rack level with Blackwell and then into Rubin. So we still think that they have a strong position there. But inferencing will just naturally be more about the cost of ownership, reducing power and also reducing reliance on a company like NVIDIA. That's certainly in the strategic direction.

mindset of these hyperscalers as well. Just going back to the hyperscalers and to Amazon and what else it provides, consumer AI finally evident when it comes to Gen AI being infused into Alexa Plus today. Richard, what did you make of the announcements?

Yeah, and I think that's an important part of when we think about, you know, training up proprietary large language models. I think, you know, DeepSeat kind of showed us, you know, how far forward open source models have come. And actually, if your business model is to try and, you know, monetize a proprietary model that's maybe a little bit better than someone else's proprietary model or someone else's

open source model, that's going to be a pretty tough game to play in. So companies that can really take a generative AI advancements and really monetize them by having a distribution to billions of users or having a very strong ecosystem that they can roll those products and services into for us is a much more natural way to be able to monetize this technology. So, you know,

Alexa and I think a whole host of ways that Amazon can monetize that both on the consumer side as well as on the cloud side. Again, that's why we think that's a very interesting company in an AI world. Richard, zooming out to Washington matters for a moment. What kind of assurance do you need from Nvidia today to make sure that the company isn't getting caught in the crosshairs between Beijing and Washington?

Yeah, well, we've been dealing with that for quite a few years. And, you know, I think Tim Cook probably could have a role at the UN after stepping down from Apple in years to come. But, you know, I think that's just going to keep going. I mean, we know that, you know, AI is the...

the front line of the sort of super power, sort of supremacy battle between the US and China. It's going to continue to see ongoing sort of restrictions around that. And so there's likely to be further moves made to restrict China's access to this technology, and they will make their own moves to try and localize that. So, you know, we've already seen some major impact to that business.

and already seen a major impact to the China sales of that company as well as many others. We expect more to come. And again, that's where as active managers, hopefully we can help navigate some of that by talking to people in Washington and getting a sense of where this might end up in terms of not just the risk, but also the opportunity. As active managers, you have to navigate the volatility that has been present in this stock. How much do you think you are in for the long term when you're seeing some questions around the longevity of the demand and supply side?

Yeah, and that's where owning a stock is very different to being a technologist. We're thinking about what are the expectations of the market over the next few years, and are those reasonable? And is the price being paid for that earnings power reasonable as well? So it's not just about the franchise of NVIDIA or how well they're doing, but just thinking about is the market being reasonable about pricing that opportunity into the stock today? And I think that's where

Having a cost of capital is actually good because actually I think we've seen a lot more rationality around NVIDIA as well as many other stocks related to this opportunity, very different to 2020. And also why the stock has been in a digestion mode since June of last year. And I think as we start rolling forward into Blackwell and then into GCC next month when they talk about the longer term roadmap and the longer term development of this technology, that's going to give us a much better sense as to from here where this stock can go.

That's Richard Klued from Janice Henderson. Thanks for joining us. Now let's get a look at Tesla as sales are plunging in some of the world's biggest EV markets. Protesters and vandals are targeting the company's stores following Musk's polarizing behavior.

Bloomberg's Craig Trudell joins us now for more. Craig, this was an incredible story that really looks at the correlation between where Tesla is seeing lackluster sales and where Musk has really been inserting himself in politics. What examples did you find?

Yeah, I think there's absolutely correlation here. The question, of course, will be causation, and that will take us some time to sort through. I think, to your question, we're seeing, as you mentioned, protests. We're seeing polls in countries that have quite a lot of EV demand where Musk is not doing well, and the Tesla brand also is not doing well. I think

When people think Elon Musk, they think Tesla before they think of virtually anything else. And this is a case not necessarily of just politics for politics' sake. When you think about what Tesla is about and what their sort of values are, some of the parties that Musk is aligning himself with are very controversial.

Contrary to that, when you think about Trump's attacks on EVs, sort of oddly going after EV chargers at federal buildings for seemingly no reason other than to stick it in the eye of EVs, this is a case where he's kind of going against his own consumer base.

We're expecting him to join a cabinet meeting today, where we'll perhaps hear more of a political aligning at the moment between Trump and Elon. Craig, in your story that you helped edit, it says, "I don't know if there's ever been a greater destruction of brand equity." Now, where is this in particular happening? We've seen so many pictures of the protests. Where exactly is this occurring?

Yeah, I mean, you're seeing protests across the country. And we're also seeing, as was mentioned earlier, Jackie mentioned, vandalism. We have seen stores damaged all over the U.S., in some pockets over here in Europe. We have seen a stunt where activists projected footage of Musk at an inauguration event for President Trump onto the Tesla factory in Germany.

And we're seeing also on social media even billboards here in London attacking Musk and attacking Tesla. So this is pretty widespread. I think it will take us some time to get a sense of just how much this is really hitting Tesla sales because I think there are other things at play here, of course, the Model Y.

is in the midst of being updated and the plants need some time to change over to this new design. And so, you know, the company will get some lift from that. The question is, you know, will consumers be interested in that vehicle once these changeovers at the factories take place?

Craig, what do investors have to say about this? If you look at some of the comments that you quoted in the story, it seems like at least some are starting to come around to the fact that they're not really loving what this means for the company's business. Elon's kind of growing political extracurriculars, if you will.

Yeah, it's a great question. I think we do have a quote from a major investor in today's story. I would say, though, that we should acknowledge institutional investors haven't said a whole lot or spoken up a whole lot about Musk's politics. And I think that is something to watch for. And whether that changes, it would be one thing if a CEO was aligning

with Trump in ways that were more consistent with other CEOs, this is really emphatic. And he's much more charged than, say, a Tim Cook or a Mark Zuckerberg in terms of how much he's getting behind Trump.

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