00:00 Speaker A
Now time for some of today’s trending tickers. Julie Hyman and Thomas Hayes is here with me to discuss and some of the names we are watching are Tesla and Stellantis. I’m going to start off here with Tesla, which is seeing big gains today after the unveiling of the company’s robo taxi service yesterday. Electric vehicle manufacturer launching the program with 20 cars that will still be occupied by employees to monitor with each ride costing a flat fee of $4.20. CEO Elon Musk says that Tesla will likely expand the service based on its performance. Tom, what do you make of it?
00:46 Tom Hayes
Well, it’s like a magician. Look over here. It’s the illusion. I mean, the car business has deteriorated uh since his involvement in politics. Uh however, if he’s right, I I just saw a quote from him, uh, we expect hundreds of thousands of robo taxis if not millions by the end of the year. That is a bold statement. If he gets anywhere close to it, uh maybe today’s move is an underestimation. However, uh if we look at the car business, uh that’s another story and uh and I think it’s it’s a trade-off. You’re always betting when you pay the valuation that you do for Tesla, you’re always betting on the man and he’s delivered for many, many years and and the followers want to continue to bet on him. So this is a step in the right direction. Uh robo taxis could be game changing, but it remains to be seen. If you have drivers in the car, it’s not a robo taxi.
02:22 Speaker A
Julie, bring you in here. I mean as Tom says, you bet on the man, right? Uh and this is what Must says. Must has said this. If you if you own my stock, it’s because you are a long-term believer in my vision for autonomy and robots, Julie.
02:42 Julie Hyman
Right. Of course. I’ve said this for a long time. Tesla is a faith faith-based stock, right? People are not buying it because of what is happening today or what happened yesterday. They’re buying it because what they think is going to happen, what they believe is going to happen tomorrow and in the years to come. I mean, our friend Dan Ives over at Wedbush is a prime example of that. He was there, him being a big Tesla booster, no surprise. He was there uh over the weekend and he talked again about the trillion dollar autonomous uh possibility, the journey as he calls it, that is not just to do with the robo taxis, but to do with the AI uh sort of thesis that he has around the stock overall. I thought it was interesting our friend Jordan Klein over at Mizuho, he’s a desk analyst over there and he said, you know, the people that they sent to do this test were people that they knew were Tesla supporters. And even given that, Bloomberg is reporting that some of those influencers, some of those Tesla folks did point out that the tests didn’t go without flaws, right? They pointed out that, you know, some of the cars went above the speed limit, which maybe isn’t a big deal, but they pointed out uh maybe some turns that didn’t make sense. There was one uh group of folks in a car reportedly that tried to push the button to ask it to stop. And I guess eventually it stopped in middle of the road. So there are still some bugs that they’re working out. It’s not like that this thing is, you know, flawless and they’re going to be rolling it out to a bigger area and to other cities right away. That said, a lot of analysts did say that this went a little bit better than expected. It was at least neutral.
05:14 Speaker A
Yeah. Not not to mention the competition as well. You got Waymo, you got Amazon Zoox, but to the Tom’s point, stocks tacking on about 8% in today’s trade. All right, here’s another one we got to check out. Stellantis is new CEO Antonio Filosa stepping into his role today by avoiding any major changes to the senior management team. Analyst at Jeffries saying that revamping Stellantis may not be a full-time job for Filosa, who is also still maintaining his role as head of the North American market. Shares of that automaker have been dropping since the market open. Stock prices overall down about 10% since announcing Filosa’s appointment as CEO. This one is interesting, Tom. You did have, all right, so we reorganize management, um, the CEO is part of this 13 member senior leadership team at the company. You know, Bloomberg does note, the new CEO here, he he’s got a lot on his plate. I mean, halting a sales line in the US, they talk about an aging lineup, a model delays, pricing blunders, but what do you make of it?
06:44 Tom Hayes
I think rule number one is they should probably get rid of the other 12 managers. Uh, then they could be lean and and more efficient. Look, that’s a tough business. We are in the uh, we have a business uh that supplies the ceiling systems around the windows, the fluid transfer systems. I’d rather be an arms dealer because what’s going to happen uh is uh Bes is going to be successful with bringing rates down modestly this summer. That’s going to bring down financing rates for cars, but it’s going to be a race to the bottom. There’s going to be a huge amount of supply. Their margins are going to continue to go down. The OEMs, the suppliers of the parts are going to want be the ones that do well because we’ve got average car on the road is 13.5 years. There’s a huge pent up replacement cycle. We just need to see the incentives and we need to see the financing rates come down and they’re going to start to do huge, huge volumes. The question is, what are the margins of the stellantis, the Ford and the GM going to be? I don’t want to be in that business.
08:14 Speaker A
All right. Uh Julie, bring you back in here. I hope Tom is right that those rates are coming down because I would be certainly interested in making a purchase, as you well know, my friend, if they did. But Stellantis, your thoughts.
08:31 Julie Hyman
Oh, I know. I know. I mean, if you look at how Stellantis has done over the past 12 months, I’m just looking at the numbers here. They’re down like 55%, the US shares. Um, and we know that the car business overall has been challenged as of late, right? But compare that with GM, little changed over the past year. Ford is down about 12%. So we see there obviously that Stellantis has been underperforming its peers. It’s not just sort of struggling in what is a difficult car market. It’s doing worse. And I don’t know that we know yet uh from Filosa what those steps are going to be to turn it around.
09:30 Speaker A
We do not.
09:32 Speaker B
P
