Tesla Cybertruck towing range, Elon Musk's control issue, Ford F-150 Lightning Switchgear
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We are live for a new episode of the Electric Podcast. I am Fred Lambert, your host, and as usual, I'm joined by Seth Wintraub. How are you doing today, Seth? I'm good.

All right. Glad to hear that. I want to give a quick thank you to today's episode sponsor, Upway, a leading online e-bike provider carrying the broadest selection of brand new and certified pre-owned e-bikes models. We're going to have a little bit more to say about them later on the show, so stay tuned for that. But we're going to jump in right into the news as we usually do.

And maybe we can, what do we have on the docket today? Yeah, we're going to start with a little update to, if you weren't on the last special episode earlier this week of the Electric Podcast, a new bonus episode that we released on Tuesday, I think it was.

Did we post the audio now? Can people go back and listen to the audio? Yeah, it actually hit the screen. Okay, so yeah, people could see the video and all that, but we actually forgot to post the audio. So the audio is now available if one of you listened to that, where we go into a lot more details. But as we discussed on that episode, we're going to say, all right, we're going to leave this for a few days and see if we can get an update on the podcast on Friday, which is now...

Depending on when you're listening to this. And basically, there's not much of any updates. Quick recap of the situation. Elon, people talking about Tesla, especially Tesla investors, Elon fans talking about a new compensation plans for the CEO compensation plan for Elon.

Tesla fans pushing for it, which makes sense. It doesn't have a competition plan right now. Apparently, the holdup is that there's the case for the old competition plan that was trialed last year or no, even the year before that, in 2022. And the judge has yet to give it her judgment. I think it's a female judge. Her judgment on the case of

Tesla shareholders saying that the compensation plan was excessive. So he might have to give some money back, which happened on the board compensation plan last year, now in 2023. So there's a chance that the judge could rule the same way on that case.

So the board is waiting for that to give Elon a new compensation plan. Anyway, amid those talk of these people pushing hard for the richest man on earth to get even more money, Elon commented that

Out of the blue, really, that he wants more control over Tesla. So he said that he wanted 25% voting control. Right now, he has about 13%. He has about another 7% that would come through Tesla.

on exercise stock option from the previous plan. So he hasn't exercised all his option for the last plan, the trenches that have come. So you could get around 20% right now, not even because after exercising those option, he would have to sell some for tax purposes.

Unless he has other ways to pay that, but I don't think he's flush on cash right now. He doesn't talk like someone who's flush on cash at least. No, he doesn't. He's asking for 25% voting shares, which would require the board to approve a new, very generous compensation plan. Now, Elon has framed it that it's not about money. He said it's about the voting control. He even said that he would be open to...

The second class of shares that give him more voting rights and not actual value, which is a nice thought, but in practice, a post IPO, that's basically impossible to do. So it's not there. It's more money. He's going to get more money and more voting control. Where things get a little bit tricky because you're perfectly allowed to ask for more money as the CEO of companies and negotiation and everything. You can decide it on yourself if it's excessive. But regardless...

Regardless, where things get trippy is that Elon said that he feels uncomfortable building AI products at Tesla without having that running control due to some kind of possible threat of a hostile takeover of the company that would give

the control to an unnamed, unmentioned entity, the super powerful Tesla AI, and then do bad with it. That's his logic behind it. Then he had on top of that, that he would prefer not to build AI product at Tesla unless that happens. So basically saying that he's going to build

AI product and XAI rather than Tesla. So on the podcast last week, we kept an open mind. I re-listened to some parts of it. And of course, we're being called Elonators and Teslaters and all that for it. But

For the most part, our point is that this sounds like a breach of his fiduciary duty because he's saying that unless you give me more money, I'm not going to build products at Tesla. And I'm going to divert those products to another company that he owns and he has more control over. And he's going to do that, again, unless he doesn't have a 25% voting shares. Right.

We asked on the podcast, is there a credible argument from the Elon fans, the Elon defenders, against this being a breach of fiduciary duty, against this being a conflict of interest? And honestly, over the last three or four days since then, I have not seen that. I have not seen that at all. The only thing that I've seen that...

Could make some sense, but I didn't exactly get that from Elon's comment is that some Elon fans are claiming that it's not a conflict of interest, not a breach of fiduciary duty, because he didn't say that if he doesn't get the 25%, he's not going to do that at Tesla. He's saying that if he doesn't get a 25%, he's going to quit as CEO of Tesla, and then that's going to be okay. Yeah.

That's an extrapolation from what he's saying. And I don't think he said that he's going to quit being CEO at Tesla. But yes, technically, if he were to do that, then I guess that would be fine. It's just that it's not what I got from his comment. Do you see that possible based on his comment? Yeah, I mean, that's technically true. We probably should read the comment really closely, but...

I don't think that's what he meant. It really doesn't sound like... Really, the bulk of it is, I am uncomfortable growing Tesla to be a leader in AI and robotics without having 25% voting control. Enough to be influential, but not so much that I can be overturned. Unless that is the case, I would prefer to build products outside of Tesla. Okay. Yeah, I guess that is... Saying that you would prefer to build products outside of Tesla is not saying that you're going to quit. It's saying that around the AI...

on the AI product environment, which he says that Tesla is an AI and robotic company, by the way, he's not going to participate in that as CEO of Tesla so far. He didn't say like, unless there's a case I will provide to build other product of Tesla, and that's what I'm going to do and going to quit Tesla. Like the quitting Tesla part is not clear from that comment. Yeah, I mean, that's interesting. So like if that was the case, if that is the case,

The board basically has an ultimatum. Give him a lot of resources, like a lot, a lot. I think I read somewhere – I may have pasted it in Slack, but he made something like six times the next 200 most well-paid executives on earth.

In 2021, which was the year that he got the biggest chunk of his exercise shares from that original stock. The top 200 global combined times six. So six years worth of the top 200 he got in one year. It's like a order of magnitude, two order of magnitudes combined.

bigger compensation package than anybody's ever gotten ever anywhere. Yeah. Which kind of makes sense why he wasted some on Twitter after that. Like, it's like so much money. He's like, all right, like I can afford buying a social media platform. Like, let's do it. And then he screws up and instead of like, oh, all right, let me regroup and everything. He's like, give me more shares. Yeah. And, you know, I was thinking about this. What if he got all the, you know, all the shares he's asking for

And then he just plowed more money into, you know, sold a bunch of them and then plowed more money into keeping Twitter alive. Yeah, that would be... It's not impossible. I mean, you could make the new plan with some kind of restriction in terms of share sales and all that. But...

There has to be limits on those because he's going to have to pay taxes when those shares exercise. Right. Yeah. So speaking of those quotes that you sent me on Slack, I mean, it's interesting because, I mean, that's just us. Like we on the last podcast, we thought it was important enough to do a special episode because we felt strongly that,

He was in breach of fiduciary duties or at the very least a clear conflict of interest. So we thought it was worth discussing. But we are just a bunch of bozos on the Internet. We're not law professors. So it's nice to see that the law professor seems to agree with us. So Mr. No, Mrs. Ann Lipton, a professor at Tulane Law School.

He said that the problem in his tweet suggests that his capacity now as CEO and director is not only turning down profitable Tesla opportunities based on his personal preference, so that the personal preference part is like, it's more in reference of what he says that the risk of AI, he wants to be in control of that risk of AI here.

But also redirecting them, them being the profitable opportunities for Tesla, to his private companies, XAI. That's a conflict of interest that suggests a violation of his fiduciary duties to Tesla. So pretty strong words here.

Then we also have a research analyst at CFRA, Garrett Nelson, saying Musk is attempting to reconvert control that has been lost from his stock sales to found Twitter. We view Musk's demand as posturing ahead of the Delaware court ruling regarding his prior compensation package. This is, I found an interesting point because I,

I've noticed that from Elon over the years. He is extremely proactive when it comes to that stuff. When he sees something happening, he's very opportunistic. He's very like, all right, let's get ahead of this. He's very good at that. A good example is that stock sell from 2021. He knew that was coming. He knew that he needed to sell a bunch of Tesla stocks. And

because there was a big trenches of his stock option that had the exercise limit coming. And so he was not able to pay the taxes on those. So he was going to have to sell part of those in order to cover what was going to be the biggest tax bill of all time, no matter what, because of what you just mentioned. It was the biggest payday in history, basically.

By a huge margin. By a huge margin. And instead of just saying straight, like say it like that, which is problematic for a few reasons. Like before that you had big stock option happens, but now,

He was actually borrowing money from banks against his existing Tesla stock, his existing stake in Tesla and SpaceX to pay for the taxes on those stock options so he wouldn't have to sell any Tesla shares, which is good for Tesla shareholders, obviously. And just from...

a market perspective, but also on just for it's good look. When the CEO sells shares, it's not a good look for a company. So the fact that he was doing that now, he couldn't do that anymore. And if you remember that when I shut down that Tesla podcast that he went on because the Twitter account run by Omar at the time was like,

going crazy about me saying that he's going to have to sell some shares. That was all about that. The Tesla super fans, they didn't want that to happen badly. So they were even lying about him needing to sell shares. So Elon is smart. What he does, he reframes the whole situation instead. Around that time, if you don't remember, 2021, 2022,

Lots of talk, especially from the Democrats, from the left wings, political commentator, politicians. They were talking a lot about taxing unrealized gains, which is a pretty wild idea, to be honest. But anyway.

They were saying that you need to tax the rich more, you need to tax unrealized gains. And they were using Elon as an example and everything. And Elon was talking about that. So at the time, what he said instead, all right, let's reframe this. I'm going to say that I'm going to sell 10% of my Tesla share if a Twitter poll agrees with it, which obviously it did.

And then he basically framed it. You see, okay, you want me to sell my share? It's on you. You guys want me to sell my share? And I'm going to do it. I'm going to voluntarily pay the biggest tax bill of all time.

which he was going to have to do anyway, because again, those exercise option was coming. So he's very good at reframing the situation like that. And it's probably what he's doing right now. So I don't know if he's concerned about the result of that court case. He probably should be because of the board ended up having to settle. And so I assume that the board was seeing the writing on the wall and that the judgment was coming against them.

So maybe the same thing is going to happen there, which would require him to give back shares to Tesla, which would make him even further away from his goal of winning 25% voting control. So maybe now he's trying to use this AI threat, this apocalyptic threat as an opportunity.

A way to rally his fans behind him getting control back over the company, which again, no one has more control over Tesla right now than Elon Musk. He's a CEO. Nobody has as much control as Tesla or he has over Tesla. No CEO has as much control as he has.

Well, to his point, and that's Elon says, Zuckerberg, even though it doesn't have that big of ownership of Meta, he does have voting shares, the old class voting shares, which give him a lot of control.

So there's that. Elon, to his credit, was able to retain an excessive amount of ownership over Tesla, even as a massive company, which is extremely rare to do. Then he screwed it up through the Twitter acquisition. It's as simple as that. He doesn't have anybody else to blame. Maybe you could make the argument that Twitter is to blame and Twitter was really lying about the bots and all that. And they will...

They screwed him over selling it $44 billion. You can make that argument, but at the end of the day, it's Elon's fault for falling for it. Throughout the whole time, we were not expert. We're not billionaire. We're not social media expert, financial expert. And we were all saying, is he crazy buying Twitter $44 billion? We were all...

So it's fault for falling for it. So yeah, I like this guy's argument, Garrett Nelson, about Elon probably posturing up, setting the stage for what's going to happen after that and the negotiation with the compensation plan. It's going to be interesting to see. Even with – he was going to be at 23% with all of his options. He was pretty close to that 25%.

You know, already, like when when he exercises options, he would have to pay taxes on those. And the only way he can pay those taxes is probably selling shares of something. So maybe he wasn't going to end up with 23 percent, but he was going to be pretty close at 23 percent to the 25 percent threshold.

I might be mistaken, but I think it would be over if no sell share for Twitter at all. I think it would be over 25% with the current exercise stock options. No, I'm saying he has some Tesla options that are coming due that will give him 23% share of the company.

Yeah, I think it's about 7% right now that he would boost his stakes from 13 to 7. And he had to sell a 5% inch point just for Twitter. So he would have been over 25, just over, I think.

Right. He would have been with Twitter, but I'm saying he has options and his shares after the options, regardless of Twitter, was pretty close to 25%. Yeah. But I think maybe he's saying this because he may be hearing some things from the Delaware court like, hey, you got to give up 5% of your shares or something like that.

where it would put him farther away from 25%. Yeah. Yeah. Gary Black, who's a Tesla shareholder and like some, a bit of a, I don't know if you can say activist investor. No, he's kind of a Stan investor. Stan investor. But I mean, he's not all in on the Elon bandwagon. He does push back sometimes, but yeah, he's not also the biggest critic.

But he did have an interesting breakdown of a solution for it, which probably is the best case scenario possible for this, for Elon fan. If you can get over the fact that Elon threatened to break his fiduciary duties to Tesla shareholders, if he can get over that, this would be the solution. If I can find it.

So he said that the board could package together a path for Elon to get 25% wording control over a multi-year buyback plan. So he's been pushing for a buyback plan at Tesla and kind of his opportunity to do it. He says that...

So Elon has an existing 13.4% stake in Tesla. He says he can exercise his 8.6% option stakes to pay the taxes, which will leave him with a 4.6% on top of it. So yes, it's 4.6% really that you can get on top.

So now you end up at 18%. Then you give them the new compensation plan that would provide for another trench of option at 5% net of taxes. So it would still be a pretty, it would be almost like 10% net.

the 10% of Tesla, the whole company as a whole, which is like $60 billion compensation plan you're talking about. So you're still talking about a pretty crazy compensation plan, though a little bit less crazy than the last one. So I'll give that to Gary.

And then to complete the last few percentage points, Tesla can buy back 8% of its share over five years at an $80 billion cost, which would be 13.4% plus 4.6 plus 5 divided by 92%, which equals to 25% of the shares of the company. So the logic holds up, but it's pretty wild. So...

Last time, the last podcast, if you missed it, I said that this might be the thing that I'm like, all right, I'm not on board anymore with Elon being CEO of Tesla. I don't think... I think he's a net negative for the company over a positive. If you do that plan instead...

The only thing where I could get on board is if the board finds their pants, like they put their pants on and their big buck pants and they're like, all right, Elon, if we give you a roughly $60 billion competition plan on top of this, you have to sign this contract, this CEO contract that includes you...

Not doing anything at XAI that has anything to do with Tesla. Stop recruiting Tesla engineers for your other ventures at XAI, Twitter, and all that. And spend a dedicated amount of time at Tesla because there's rumors right now that he's time spent. I mean, let's be honest. You can be Elon's biggest fan and you can be a Tesla fan and you can still admit that...

he's probably spending less time as than any other major automaker CEO at Tesla. Even if he's doing 80 hours a week total, the guy is CEO of Tesla, sort of CEO of Twitter, let's admit it. Come on, let's not be idiots. CEO of SpaceX. He does work for the Boring Company. He is behind Neuralink.

He is behind, I don't know if you see UXAI, but he's definitely like working at UXAI. I'm forgetting probably one or two.

Yeah. I mean, Boring Company and Neuralink. Boring Company, Neuralink, XCI, X, SpaceX. That's five other companies. Five other companies on top of Tesla. It's kind of a joke. You cannot tell me that he's doing 120 hours a week, so he's doing 40 hours a week at Tesla. I cannot believe that. I think Tesla deserves...

deserves a full-time CEO dedicated to the company that is not blackmailing the company for more control. And more money. Yep. I agree. All right. I think Elon Musk should get all the credit in the world for advancing Tesla to where it is now. And I would be perfectly okay eating my words if he were to agree to a contract like I just said. I just don't see him agree to anything like that. He's king of the world right now. Right.

All right, we should move on, though. Yeah, yeah, let's move on. Cybertruck, we got two interesting range tests, range towing tests for the Cybertruck this week. We got this one here, some conditions. 6,000-pound tow of a bubble. Why, interestingly? So this one, I had to do some work on it because the person doing the test here, I'm going to credit him if you want to go see the full video of it. It's...

It's called Voyage ATX. He's a new Cybertruck owner in Austin and he posted

What it looks like, a UOL car carrier that is, I check on UOL's website, it's about 2,200 pounds. And then you have a Model Y, which is about 4,000 pounds. So just over 6,000 pound tow with a fairly aerodynamic tow because you have a Model Y on it, which is a very aerodynamic car. And they did a full test on the highway. So it's mostly a highway driving test.

And they managed to drive 110 miles and they went both ways. So against the wind and with the wind, just to be sure. 110 miles consume 83 kilowatt hours for an average of 749 watt hour per mile. So if you do the math based on that with 123 kilowatt hour batch pack, you end up with about 160 miles of range towing about 6,000 pounds in like very normal condition because this is Texas in the winter. So it's not.

like super harsh climate or anything like that. To be honest, it's probably about what I would expect

around those conditions uh to be fair uh the tonneau cover was open he wanted to keep it open because he had like new tags in the in the back window so you couldn't see the new tags you didn't want to be stopped by the police so it makes sense i don't know how much that would help while you're towing i obviously talked about like a 10 increase in range in towing if you um

10% increase in range without towing if you have the tonneau cover down. With towing, I'm not so sure. Could be also some improvement with the 19-inch wheels. Tesla is now only delivering, as far as I know, only delivering a Cybertruck with 20-inch wheels. So the 19-inch wheels would be a little helpful. But yeah, that's it for that. Now, we got another range test.

That is showing basically the performance in the worst conditions possible. A little bit of an asterisk, maybe. That's coming from Zach from JerryRigEverything. That's a great YouTube channel. You should look it up. He borrowed someone's Cybertruck and did a range test where he's towing, again, with like a car trailer, a Hummer.

And combined, he says it's about 11,000 pounds, which ends up being the towing limit of the Cybertruck. So you have like the... In terms of weight, at least. In terms of aerodynamic performance...

Well, obviously, the Hummer is a lot less aerodynamic than the Model Y, but it still has to be a lot more aerodynamic than a box trailer, right, Seth? I would imagine, yeah. Yeah, so it's maybe not the worst, worst condition, but it's freezing condition, so it's cold. I think he's in Utah, if I remember correctly, Jerry, and the max towing capacity. So what performance did he get with that?

It got 90 miles of range going from 100% to 2%, using 108 kilowatt hour for an average of 1,193 watt hour per mile. I mean, I don't know about you, Seb, but I've been driving EVs for a long time, and I always like to look at the most efficient EVs possible. I like to drive them the most efficiently possible, and I've never seen four digits for an efficiency. Yeah, I mean, that's like...

- Tesla semi type of kilowatts per mile. - Yeah. I think you can get the Tesla semi under four digits too. I think you can get it for like 900 or something like that. - Yeah. - So this is pretty crazy. So if you extrapolate that, like we did for the other, you end up about 103 miles of range if you go for the full 123 kilowatt hour. Now, a few good points, and thanks to a commentator for putting that out.

Zach said that he garaged the vehicle before doing the test. So the vehicle was in the warm, in the garage, just before he hooked it up and then went with a Cybertruck. So that probably mitigated a lot of the range difference. So if you, for example, if you start out at 100% from a supercharger outside and then you leave right away, it's going to be probably a little bit harder. Or if your car is just parked outside and you start, it's going to be a little bit harder.

Also, I think it's fair to point out some kind of more practical use case. If you're trying to do a long distance with a towing capacity at the worst case scenario, I like this idea of worst case scenario because it only gets better from there, really.

It would make more sense that you start at about 90% state of charge, and then you want to arrive... Let's say you're trying to do a long distance, you arrive at a supercharger, you want to arrive normally at 10% or over, around the 10% mark. So if you do that, garage or no garage, you're probably going to end up with 70, 80 miles of range. So at the best case scenario...

Best case scenario, I mean, for these conditions, like full max capacity to wing in the cold, you can expect about that before you need to stop, do another charge and keep going. So it's not ideal, to say the least. There is a use case for it. It could work. But right now, I think it's not ideal, especially for colder climates.

What do you think, Seth? Yeah, I mean, as long as you need to go far, like if you're only towing a boat to the water and it's, you know, 50 miles away, it's not a big deal. So, you know, if you're doing long distance cross-country towing, you know, that's not great. Also, it should be noted that the Rivian R1T did a little bit better than that. I can't remember exactly what that was, but...

Oh, I thought he said the Rivian did better. Maybe it was marginally better. Well, I mean, yeah, it did better. Because it has a bigger battery. Oh, yeah. I think it got to 100 miles, but it got it to like 2% also. Yeah. So, yeah, I guess it did like 10 miles better. Yeah.

Because it did not do the extrapolation that I did to get like the full battery. If you empty the full battery pack, which you shouldn't do, by the way. You shouldn't empty the full battery pack in those tests. I'm not encouraging testers to empty the battery pack to zero. Yeah. But the Rivian has a bigger battery and it's a little bit more aerodynamic. So it makes sense. Yeah. What's the battery size on the Rivian? The big one? 140, I think. Yeah. Yeah.

So yeah, I mean, there's the hope with the range extender battery pack. You could boost that quite a bit, like maybe get that closer to 140, 150 in those conditions again, which is a lot more useful.

And then if you have better conditions, so not freezing temperature, and maybe you don't go 11,000 pounds, you go 8,000 pounds or something, which is just plenty of use cases with that, you end up with probably closer to 200 miles of range with the extended battery pack and closer to 150, 160 without it, 150 maybe.

So it's starting to be a lot more useful. Again, I like to focus on like the worst case condition because then like it removes your range anxieties. I'm not going to do worse than that. All right. Today's episode is sponsored by Upway, a leading online e-bike provider carrying the broadest selection of brand new and certified pre-owned models.

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All right, moving on for the Cybertruck. Interesting situation in your hometown set of New York. There's a very difficult situation right now with the superchargers around the city. And it's apparently due to Uber and Lyft drivers. So the city last year announced like a big new initiative to...

convert the ride sharing fleet in the city to electric vehicles. And they said that they made 2000 new EV license available, but apparently the program had to pause before they did the entirety. So from what I heard from two different sources,

It's not clear, but about 5,000 or 6,000 of them have been issued. And apparently most of them are Tesla vehicles. New Uber and Lyft using Tesla vehicles. Yeah. And actually also because it's New York City, not many people have chargers at home. They use the supercharger network. Yeah. So they rely on the supercharger network. And also important to note,

This in the in Manhattan and also part of Brooklyn and other boroughs.

A lot of the superchargers are behind a big paywall of like a valet parking. So it's like 30 to 50, sometimes I think 60 bucks just to get your car to the supercharger. After that, you need to pay for the supercharging. So a lot of these superchargers are just not being used by Uber drivers for that reason because they just cut into their profits and not used by a lot of other people. So they just don't want to pay that. So it's more used by like very rich New Yorkers that own Tesla vehicles.

And also on top of that, a lot of those urban chargers are only like 75 kilowatts. Yeah, actually all of them. I think those that are behind Valley and those big garages, I think they're all capped at 72. There are others in Brooklyn specifically.

And in New Jersey, and I think the biggest problem right now is GFK because GFK makes sense. A lot of Uber drivers, they pick up people in Manhattan, other boroughs, bring them to GFK, and then they use that time to charge. You're seeing some massive wait times like we saw on X, people posting pictures of like 15, 20 cars waiting to charge, not getting to the chargers, just waiting to get to the chargers.

A lot of those are, you can see them everywhere. We have a Revel who operates its own Tesla fleet for ride sharing in...

In New York, we reported before that they built their own super hubs of charging station. They told Electric that they saw a 4x increase in the public use because they use them themselves, but also it's open to the public. A 4x increase in public use over the last two months. So basically since this new initiative because of those wait times now at Tesla superchargers. So earlier this week on Wednesday, Tesla implemented its congestion fee, which we discussed a few months ago when it was first unveiled.

It's basically a $1 per minute fee if the supercharger station is full, if you charge over 90%. So basically, Tesla is encouraging shorter charging session because the last 10% takes a lot more time than the first. You can probably get the first 40% faster than you get the last 10%. Just general rule of thumb.

So Tesla implemented that and it looks a little bit better. Yesterday, it looked a little bit better. Today is also okay, but I still see some wait time, especially at those two main ones in Brooklyn and at JFK. Also some other one like in New Jersey, there's also a bunch of wait time. Basically, every station around New York that doesn't have a valley parking or big parking fees.

are seeing some wait times. So you see when you see this little clock here, that means there's wait time. When there's a number, that means the number of stations that are available. So you see four and four on the Upper West Side here in Midtown. There's only four stalls there. There's no one there, basically, because they charge so much just to get to the station. So we'll see how the...

The story evolves. If Tesla is planning two new stations in New York, it's not clear if it's going to be another like Valley station or it's going to be like a bigger. I think they need to do what Revel is doing basically. They need to do like super hubs and have like big station that people use because otherwise it's going to be a problem that's going to keep growing, especially if they unpause everything.

That green initiative for ride sharing and you have more vehicles coming into the fleet. And on top of that, Tesla is opening the supercharged network to other vehicles. It can get pretty nasty pretty quick. So it's something that we had a concern for a while and we need to see Tesla just keep up with the demand there. And they've done that in other cities. Like in Los Angeles, they've built some big hubs.

and they're doing that drive-in movie theater thing. Yeah. But Los Angeles is so much more car-friendly than New York. Yeah, I mean, I have to say, like, you really don't need a car in New York. In fact, you probably shouldn't have a car in New York, but that's just my...

But the ride sharing is not owning the car. So they are the ones that own the car. And that's part of it. It's people that don't own cars. Because, yeah, probably everyone that did own a car in New York and had a good situation for it, like a parking garage, if they can get charging there, they're fine. So a lot...

Some Uber driver also reached out to me and they said like they drove electric before this initiative and he said that all the EV drivers that do ride sharing before that were people that had situation where they could charge overnight at their home while a lot of the other people are like, especially a lot of immigrants that take these Uber driving jobs.

And they arrive here and they normally don't have a living situation that can afford them charging at home. So they take those opportunities that Uber gives them to like, if you have good credits, you can get probably pretty easy to an electric Uber. But then the charging situation happens. And that's what we're seeing right now. Oh, the GM says he keeps losing the connection. Probably on my side. I think we've been good on our side unless maybe you're on X. Maybe it's X the problem.

It's not a slight at Elon right now. I'm just saying like the video feature is not the best. Usually we'll get a lot of messages if there's a problem. Yeah.

All right. This was a Tesla electric exclusive already this week. We got some updates on the pay situation at Tesla. So it's pretty ironic with Elon starting his own weird negotiation about his compensation. But there's also a lot of negotiation going on at Tesla about pay. We reported more over the last few months regarding the factory workers due to the

The situation with the UAW, the United Auto Workers, that got the big wins against the big three automakers in Detroit, got a 25% pay increase. That doesn't affect Tesla directly because they are not unionized in the US. But indirectly, it does affect them because if wages across the industry are going up, normally that increased wages at non-union places too, right?

And Tesla announced pay bombs for the factory workers. They announced some pay bombs too for non-factory workers, both hourly and salaried employees. For the salaried employees, for the stock options, the employees that got stock options, we reported last month that Tesla stopped giving a normal stock compensation plan after the annual reviews last year. So that pissed off a lot of people. We got some people that were really not happy about that. We had the Tesla engineers telling us that

that had a severe impact on morale at the company and that a lot of people are discussing at the bar that the compensation they've seen in the past is not, you don't see that happening again at Tesla. Obviously, that's part of like the stock performance too at Tesla because the stock options are linked to the stock performance and that's not been great.

So on January 1st, last month, they were given their performance review and they were given their pay bombs for the year. But a lot of employees were not happy with their pay bombs. Even those that were given good annual reviews, they said that it didn't match with the inflation. Obviously, we're in a very strong inflation environment right now. So they were not happy about it.

And so on January 1st, Tesla, we obtained an email that Tesla sent to an employee in which they thanked the employee for the feedback on the pay adjustment. And they said that they value the feedback and they're going to do another review. And they promised that by January 15, they were going to

give them an update on a new pay adjustment because people apparently were not happy with the first one. However, on January 15, Tesla sent an email that didn't include the pay adjustment. They said that they needed another two weeks to do a market review before they do another pay adjustment. So by the end of the month, Tesla workers should get another pay adjustment.

It's a bit worrying for me because I think one of the big reasons that this has been so successful is its capacity to attract talent, which has always been very good, and its capacity to retain talent. And if that is eroding right now, there's a problem. Because if you look at all the factors that contributed to this attraction of talent and this retention of talent, it's...

Elon has been a big part of that, very inspiring leader for the most part for decades that got a lot of people hooked on Tesla. And obviously his reputation now, regardless on where you stand on that, you can admit that overall his reputation has been eroded. Then there's also the mission. Tesla is a big mission-driven company. But if the CEO is like doing five other things and then also...

The mission was the EV revolution and the mission was sort of achieved to a degree. Like we know that now it's happening. And so it may be a little bit less excited to go into that.

And then you have the money, obviously, is a big factor, whether you like it or not. It can be all mission driven. And if you don't put bread on the table, what are you going to do? And the stock performance made a lot of people very rich, a lot of employees very rich at Tesla. And maybe the new generation of Tesla employees, they don't see that happening due to the stock performance. And they don't see necessarily another 10x in stock performance that would make their stock option very valuable if they get any stock option as we saw last month.

So, yeah, I think it's a potentially worrying situation. What do you think, Seth? Yeah, absolutely. And, you know, there's a lot of things coming up. Like it sounds like the United Auto Workers is going to target Tesla. You know, obviously Elon's gotten a little bit more polarizing, a lot more polarizing. So the, you know, maybe the liberal people in the

you know bay area may not be as excited about working for uh a right-wing uh person so there's a you know just a lot of like uh interesting headwinds like and and it's all like it seems kind of like uh doesn't need to exist it's just yeah because tesla is so successful right now and their product is so you know the with the supercharging network and the

you know being able to build evs for such a low cost and being able to build them in the us you know versus like the the chinese ones that you know are going to take huge um uh taxes i i just think that tesla is almost like eating itself rather than getting beat by its competitors yeah i i can i can agree with that

all right we have a few more news items that we're going to discuss then we're going to jump into you guys as comments so if you have any question for us about any topic that we discussed today or any other subject in the ev space you can jump into the comment section right now when i get to them in a few minutes um jeep and dodge unveiled their new ev platform from stelantis

And nothing too crazy, obviously. It's just like it's the usual skateboard platform and all that. There's nothing to go crazy about. But it does give us some details about the upcoming long-awaited EVs from Stellantis and specifically from these brands of Dodge and Jeep. And so what do they say about the STLA large platform? It will serve between 85 and 118 kilowatt-hour battery packs.

So interesting because I think the Dodge, so the Dodge Ram is not included in that? I mean, the Ram is going to be 200 something, right? Yeah. So it's the large platformer. There's a larger one apparently. Yeah.

With a target to up to 500 miles, 800 kilometers for large sedans. Okay. So yeah, they warned that the SUVs are probably not going to get that much, I guess, by that. Yeah. And Stellantis is late in the US to the EV space, but like in Europe, they're one of the bigger EV brands. Are they? I thought, I mean, isn't, they have a bunch of sub-brands underneath them. And I believe those guys are big EVs. Or maybe I'm thinking of something else. Because it was like PSA merged with...

Oh, yeah. Yeah. You have the, so the, yeah, the Peugeot is in there. The Peugeot is in there? Yeah. Because the Peugeot, yeah, they have a decent number of cars. But I'm not, I'm not too familiar with the European market. They said that the platform supports, supports 400 volts and 800 volt system. Yeah.

You can go to the article to get exactly what kind of range of dimension they can support with the platform. But that's pretty much it for what they release in terms of battery capacity performance for those vehicles. We got this quick sneak peek at the electric Dodge Charger that's supposed to come. This week, there was a few images that were officially leaked by the company. I'm down for it. It looks pretty good.

Yeah, I mean, they've shown non-working models at the CES show and stuff. It's pretty cool because it looks like it has a front end that's like the Charger, but it's actually just like a front aero wing, and it's quite aerodynamic. Yeah, so there's no stealth camouflage on this. It's like...

Yeah, and I believe, I know some of them are from Dodge, but I think there's actually one running around that's actually being driven. Yeah, I think that's the one that's being driven, but I don't know if it's like, I think the hood is a bit weird and the fender here, like this might be some like stealth camouflage on it. I'm not so sure.

All right, we got some news from Ford and the 1.5-liter Lightning, which they announced that they are going to lower the production again of the Ford and 1.5-liter Lightning due to lower demand. So they said that...

Around 1,400 employees at the RooGV plant will be impacted as Ford transitioned to one shift instead of two and it's transitioning around 700 of its Michigan employee assembly plant while there will be reposition outside of Southeast Michigan. So apparently just a few dozen employees will be impacted because they're being moved around. So I guess impacted, there's more than a few dozen, but I guess...

A few dozen will be terminated. Is that what you're saying? I guess, or maybe a few dozen man hours or whatever, man weeks. Because cutting one shift is a big deal. It's a lot of people normally. Yeah, I wonder how much of this is due to Tesla's Cybertruck and obviously Ruby and R1T and Dodge coming up and the Chevy. The Ford F-150 was the only game in town for a little while, but Ford hasn't really...

You know, we'll talk about the Raptor thing coming, but like they haven't really done much besides like double the price of the F1. But the Flash, when I heard this news, I thought it was like a bit premature because the Flash just came out. Like they are not seeing enough orders for the Flash yet.

You know, I guess not. It just doesn't seem like they're doing a really good job of selling these things. I mean, most of the people who have them, like if you go to the F-150 Lightning groups, they all love them. So I don't know why that these aren't doing as well as they should be. Yeah. I mean, they see the order books. They see it coming. So I guess...

I guess we have to trust them. The Flash was not as popular as we thought it was going to be because we thought it was going to be a great solution. And then on the higher end of the market, Seth just hinted at it, but what we thought for a second might be the Ford F-150 Lightning Raptor. It's not. It's called the Switchgear. The F-150... Sorry. Sorry.

Sorry, the F-150 switchgear and its performance version. It's from Ford Performance of the F-150 Lightning. And you have the only allowance, a few of the upgrades. So you get a better suspension. So very much like the Raptor. So specifically, you see 37-inch tires.

A new Fox 3-inch diameter internal bypass shock absorbers. So that's the suspension upgrade. New front and rear bumpers. So the body has been changed with different angles for off-roading. I don't know if those seats are going to be in production because this is...

This was on Ville announced, but there's no actual detail on pricing, availability, and all that. We might get that at the end of the month because they're going to bring the car at the King of Amers off-road racing event. So we might get more detail. But in the meantime, we got just those few details and those pictures that are available on the electric's website right now. I mean, it looks pretty nice. It looks like a really fun vehicle. And it looks like it will probably be a six-figure at least price tag. Oh, yeah.

Oh, yeah. I mean, that's not what's going to solve the volume problem for F-150 Lightning. That's for sure. All right. Let's jump into you guys' comments. All right, guys. If you have any comments, please leave them now. We'll start at the top. Glad to be here. So Matt Fisher says that Elon's first salvo is just the beginning of the negotiations. And he's... Weird beginning. Starting very high. Starting very strong.

I'm worth $100 billion. Yes. Dr. Evil style. Stated with plausible demiability. Legally, it will be a challenge to stop a work stream and move it over to another company. I mean, legally, yeah.

But that's not even the issue. I think the issue is more like as soon as he says it, it's like, all right, we got to assume that if Elon has a great AI idea, instead of bringing it to Tesla, it's going to bring it to XAI. And if Tesla is an AI and robotic company, that's a breach of fiduciary duty. That's it.

Yeah, I mean, we discussed this on the dedicated podcast to this, but like the fact that he even owns an AI company outside of Tesla is like that's a big problem because if somebody at Tesla comes up with a really cool idea, he'd just be like, oh, I like that idea. Or, you know, like, oh, you figured out AGI. Yeah, I'm just going to take this laptop with me and see you guys later.

And how many people Tesla sued for exactly that? Right, exactly. Are they going to sue Elon now? Right. EB1888 sounds like an Elon fan. He's going to get compensation. How much did he get? $1? I pay him because he's worth it. He can do what he wants with his earnings. Okay.

Well, that's true. He can do what he wants with his earnings. Nobody's... Yeah. Nobody's going to play with that. We can laugh at what he does with his earnings, like buying Twitter for $44 billion. Yeah. And he can also ask for crazy amounts of money. That's not a problem. But the problem is saying, you know, threatening to do other things that are, you know... Yeah. You know what I thought was funny? I got super over the last week. Obviously, I poked the Elon fans with my reporting on that. But...

I got so much hate for saying that he wasted billions on buying Twitter and he bought Twitter was overpriced when he bought it. When he himself willingly admits that, that he paid too much for Twitter and it should have been a half that or something like that. Yeah, and he tried as hard as he could to get out of it. Yeah, he tried to get – until the court, it was obvious that the court was going to force him to do it. He was trying to back out.

So I didn't invent that. He agrees to that. The investor that he brought on board, Fidelity also agreed with that. They reviewed the valuation at $12 billion, I think now. So like a fourth of what he paid for it. So don't get mad at me for that. Maybe Elon can use that as a big tax write-off for his next size of stock option at Tesla. Right.

All right. Maybe he is purposely suppressing Tesla's share price to make it cheaper to get him to 25%. Well, that would be a breach of his fiduciary duty. Yeah, they were talking about stock buybacks as well as a means to get to that weird. Yeah, well, that's what Gary is pushing for. Well, I mean, Elon himself also talked about a $5 billion buyback plan at one point, but never happened. Tesla is sitting on like what, like close to $30 billion right now?

It's a lot of money. All right. Thinking about it, 25% with him and his brother and friends would put him over 50% voting shares. I don't know if that's true. I totally believe he's blackmailing the board. It's now clear conflict of interest between Tesla and XAI. Quit ragging on Elon. He's our raison d'etre. Easy. That's sad, dude. Yeah, that's a bit sad. I was going to say that.

All right. Bela says, we were all talking about quality issues on Cybertruck, but now we were talking about Elon's 25% demand. It's a masterstroke of genius. He turned the conversation from Cybertruck problems. Maybe that's his intention so he can buy some time to fix the quality issues of Cybertruck. Sometimes we get distracted, but the intention could be something else. I don't know. I think it's more about setting the stage for the quote ruling and all that.

All right, Joe, our colleague is in, and he says if you assume he's spending 20 hours a week at Tesla, which he'd argue seems high. I would agree. What would his proposed comp plan work out to hourly? It would be in the billions, probably billions hourly, which seems reasonable. All right, we got some math guy, 13% plus 7, 20, then minus 4. I don't know if that works exactly.

Elon did not see the Cybertruck prototype until after it was finished. Is that true? I don't think so. Yeah, I don't know. It might be referring to something from the book, but I don't know if that's entirely true. All right. Jerry did a zero to 60 launch uphill on a ramp. That sucks at a lot of range. That's true. Yeah, but like what? That's just once.

and yeah but half a kilowatt hour at worse like it's it's still just like less than a quarter mile or something i just watched the video very good with the crazy result uh yeah he did ravine was second and ford was first in his test and yeah but it was all pretty close to be to be fair enough yep all right uh we got the

FYI, no Tesla safety report for any of the 2023. Still, despite Tesla tweeting on 12-11, referencing it, saying more detailed information will be publicly available in the near future. Yeah, we discussed that a lot. And we think that Tesla is being extremely weird about releasing full self-driving autopilot data, including that safety report that they stopped publishing. They're just not a good look. Not a good look when you want to hide that.

Yeah. Not renew Elon comp plan, this time scaling market cap to $4 trillion. Yeah. I mean, the idea is not crazy. It's just personally as a Tesla shareholders, it feels weird for me to agree to that the way that Elon asked for it. Basically, he told us, he's written shareholders

I'm going to breach my fiduciary duty as CEO if you don't give me that crazy competition plan. It's a weird way to ask and it put us in a situation where like, yeah, maybe you're not the best person to be CEO then. Yeah.

I mean, look at Tim Cook. He got Apple from under a trillion to $3 trillion. He got a ton of money in the tens, maybe even hundreds of millions of dollars. But that's a very small percentage of what Elon got in the billions.

And also it's a good example of like maybe we need a Tim Cook now. Like maybe like Steve Jobs has done his work at Tesla and now you need a Tim Cook. I had one of the craziest like Tesla supporters on Twitter, on X, whatever, reached out to me and she was like – he was like – I'm not sure. Oh, Tommy. Tommy was his name. So he was like –

It's going to be like when Elon Musk now leaves, Tesla is dead and it's going to be what happened with Apple when Steve Jobs left. So first of all, I was like, that makes no sense. Tesla now at a $600 billion company, very profitable, is not Apple in 1985 when Steve Jobs left.

And then he came back. It's like, no, I'm not saying in 1995. I'm saying when he went bankrupt in 97. But that's two completely different situations. And it makes more sense. That's after 10 years that he was not there. And then he came back and it was very successful. Maybe we get that. Maybe we get Elon leaves for a while, gets his mind straight, and then come back. I don't know. Yeah.

Yeah, I think if they put somebody in who actually knows Tesla pretty well, J.B. Straubel. J.B. Straubel. Yeah, I mean, come on, guys. It's not that hard. All right, let's move on. The geniuses behind Tesla are the original founders. Okay. Martin Eberhard and Mark Tarpenning. They did come up with the...

master plan so i guess that's part of it well not the master plan the master plan came later in 2006 with elon he's the one who wrote that that master plan oh really i thought well i i think the genesis i think that was the original plan was to build the expensive one and then yeah there was i i you can still find the original tesla business plan out there from like 2004 when the first like the first pitch deck to uh

to VCs. And it was not as fleshed out as Elon's master plan blog in 2006. Now, a lot of people, there's two camps on that. You have the camp that was like, Elon did everything, screwed tarponing and Eberhard. And you have the plan of like, Elon just stole Tesla from Eberhard and tarponing. I'm more in the middle. I mean, I like Eberhard and tarponing a lot. I follow them

since early on. And I always thought that they were like some of the greatest communicators for how electric vehicles can revolutionize the transport industry. Like if you look at a lot of the early talks, it's very good. Especially for that time, it holds up to this day. And also I would give them, especially I would give them credit for

being the first to or being the biggest advocate for bringing lithium ion battery cells into electric vehicles, which was a game changer, obviously. So they were pushing hard for that. Elon Musk,

got the idea from them and JB Straubel, which was one of the first employees at Tesla, and then supported that. So great for Elon. And then Elon put a ton of money in Tesla early on. And when Eberhard proved not to be able to lead the company as CEO, he took over. And Elon obviously did awesome by taking over. And I think he deserves being credited as a founder of the company because I don't think the company would be anywhere like it is today without him. But

That doesn't completely discredit Eberhard and Tarpon too. They did an amazing job also. Why we cannot just like be happy with it? Like what everyone does? Why are we asked to be like Elon did everything or like Elon stole everything? Maybe it can be like a nice little middle ground in between. Yeah. I mean, you can't have Tesla without the, you know, Tarpon and Eberhard. Like it wouldn't exist. And then you wouldn't also have Tesla without Elon. So they're all important. All right.

Any word on version 12 FSD? Oh, we haven't talked about FSD much recently. Improvements are basically non-existent. No, because V12 is super delayed. And basically non-existent compared to pace of change last year. Envision only features still not at parity. I wish they would focus on level 3, not level 5. Yeah, I thought I saw something mentioned about version 12 in that app update or something.

Yeah, that was just a new version of Visual 12 going to Tesla employees. So not much updated release notes on that. So it looks like it's still stuck at the level of testing, of internal testing with Tesla employees. Not just with engineering testing, but overall, like Tesla has a big fleet of like 15,000 or so employees that there's a feature for them before it goes to the beta fleet.

which V12 is not supposed to. I think Elon shot himself in the foot with that, like saying that V12 was like, come out and not be better. And now it's like, oh shit, like it's... The only way it would come out, it would be better. I mean, it's a totally new, like it's like a new company, you know, like a new product. Because they got rid of what? 300,000 lines of C code that was, and now it's all...

So it's like they just started over, which is kind of crazy to think about and also kind of scary because it seems like something went wrong. Sorry. Yeah. All right. Let's move on. Why not renew previous comp plan and scale market cap quote to $4 trillion? Elon said he can eclipse Apple and Saudi Arab code. We basically – that's the same question as earlier. Yeah. I see that.

It's Martin Heberhard and Mark Tarpening who came up with Tesla's master plan. I think part of it. Also the same question. Yeah, I know you guys won't talk, don't want to talk much about it until it breaks ground, but what do you think?

about the Oklahoma lithium refinery news in Muskogee, Oklahoma? Yeah, we did an article on this. It's good news for Oklahoma. Oklahoma's been begging for EV investment for a while and haven't been too lucky with it with Tesla and then with Panasonic both considering it and then changing their minds. So good for them to get a nice money printing machine, as Elon would say, lithium refinery.

All right. Regarding the laptop comment, maybe Elon should be forced to sign a non-compete agreement just like all of their employees? Yeah, that's what I've been saying basically. Elon hasn't had a good idea since he decided to invest in Martin and Mark's firms. You see, you lose me on that stuff. Elon is not like everything or nothing. He's somewhere in the middle and probably somewhere closer to everything than nothing but still not perfect and worthy of criticism.

All right. We have a lot about the non-competes. If my job is design electric cars and if I leave, do they expect me to go unemployed? Or if I go back to college and learn something else, that's ridiculous.

That's why non-competes aren't really enforceable in California and some other places, but they are in New York and probably Texas. The blind following of Musk and how he can do no wrong by some people is a little scary to watch. I agree. Stoked to hear more about Scout Motors. Any updates from them? Scout Motors is the Volkswagen new subsidiary, and I think they're breaking ground on their factory, and Scooter might be going out to that.

Yeah. When that is, but that's coming soon. Soon, soon. Yeah. So like you don't expect too much from Scout until probably like 2026, I would expect. Like it's going to take a while for things to get moving, but I would expect like next year we're going to see some cars or trucks rather. Like it's...

mainly set up for pickup trucks and SUVs. And then probably 2026, we'll start seeing some things on the road. But it's going to take a while. They're basically like launching a new company, even though it existed before. Anything interesting at the DC Auto Show starting today? I don't think we heard anything. No. The Cybertruck, if you want to go see a Cybertruck in person, though now you can see them at Tesla stores and whatnot. Yeah. There's one too at the Montreal. The Montreal Auto Show is there and now the Cybertruck is there.

All right. Question, does Elon's current percentage include his stock options? I don't think they count until they are exercised. Yeah, that's it. He's at 13 point something right now. There's like 8%, I think, extra with the exercise one, but you got to assume that he's going to pay taxes on that. So he's probably around like 18% total.

Yeah, sorry about the effects of, like, I feel like I'm disappearing, like, on Back to the Future. But something's going on with the thing here.

All right. Unfortunately, let's see. I think we're pretty much done with the comments. Elon had all of Martin Eberhard's and Tarpenning's interviews deleted from YouTube. Those interviews were really good. Can you prove that Elon is the one behind deleting those? I don't know. Yeah, they're two smart guys for sure. I don't know if I would go that conspiracy theorist on it. Yeah, I doubt it.

But now I'm curious of going and looking for those interviews because they were, especially those presentations that they gave at schools, like lectures at schools, they were very interesting. Anyway,

That's it for us this week, everyone. I appreciate every single one of you that's been listening to the show. If you do enjoy the show, you can give us a like, a subscribe, all those things help the podcast. They're free to do. They take a second. If you're listening on your podcast app right now and you want to give us a five-star review, it takes a second to do. It's free and helps the show more than you think. So that's it for us. We're going to see you same time, same place next week. Have a good one.