Cathie Wood Talks Elon Musk, Tesla

Tesla shares fell after Elon Musk announced he’s forming a new political party. Ark Investment Management CEO Cathie Wood speaks with Bloomberg's Jonathan Ferro and Lisa Abramowicz as some analysts call for the company's board to get involved to address Musk's politicking and whether its hurt Tesla's standing with car buyers.

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Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:02):
Bloomberg Audio Studios, podcasts, radio news.

Speaker 2 (00:07):
One of the biggest bulls on this stock for quite
a while. On the street, our convest CEO Kathy Wood. Kathy,
thanks for making time for us this morning. Let's just
talk about what Dan I've said to us yesterday that
he believes Elon Musk is crossing a line and that
the board needs to step in. Do you share that
for you?

Speaker 1 (00:23):
Well, I have to tell you we've been dealing with
controversy around Elon Musk in one form or another since
we first bought the stock when the company was founded
in twenty fourteen, and we owned Tesla in It's one
of the top holdings in three of our ETF so, arkk, W,
and Q. So we are watching this like a hawk,

(00:45):
no question about it. But with the experience over the
last eleven years, we turn around today and see Tesla
really not an EV manufacturer anymore. Moving into the robotaxi age,
we believe successful and we believe it will scale much
better than most of its competitors. We see SpaceX really

(01:07):
only ninety percent of all of the satellites out there
neurally transforming lives of paralyzed people, people with als and
probably most surprising of all XAI. Now we own all
of those again in our venture fund, following them very carefully.
Xai is on some benchmarks. It hit a point that

(01:32):
three pro hit in June, it hit it in February.
So you know, we are very focused on barriers to
entry technology moats and we believe that the moats that
Elon has built, And obviously this is not just Elon.
He's attracting the best and the brightest to help solve

(01:53):
some of the world's biggest problems. So again, we do
trust the board and the board's instincts here and we
stay out of politics.

Speaker 2 (02:05):
Well, we'd love your opinion on the current situation just
on Tesla specifically. You mentioned some phenomenal companies doing some
incredible things for Tesla, though, do you believe that Elon
can pursue his political ambitions at the same time pursuing
the best interest of TENSA shareholders.

Speaker 1 (02:21):
One of the announcements Elon made recently is that he
is going to oversee sales in the US and in Europe.
And when he puts his mind on something, he usually
gets the job done. So I think he's much less
distracted now than he was let's say in the White

(02:42):
House twenty four to seven, at what.

Speaker 3 (02:44):
Point do you see sort of the political landscape shifting
though not just for Tesla, but for the haves and
the have nots in some of the big tech space.
I know you've had a complicated relationship, say with Apple,
which seems uniquely pegged by some of these tariffs. Is
there anything that you could see that would make you
like that stock again or do you think that really
it is going to fall out of magnificent seven.

Speaker 1 (03:08):
Yes, we've been watching Apple for a long time with
an AI lens, and that started, I'm going to say
about seven years ago when it was becoming serious about
autonomous vehicles. If you think about the ultimate mobile device,
it's an autonomous vehicle, and that should have been Apples
to win. And what we've seen there is one turnover

(03:32):
of management teams after another, and it's all autonomous driving.
Is an AI project, just the largest AI project on Earth,
we believe, and so losing the talent that it has,
and as I understand it lost another one today to
Mark Zuckerberg's Top fifty. So they've had a lot of

(03:54):
trouble in this regard, and I think the burden of
proof is on them.

Speaker 3 (03:58):
Do you think that it is time to follow the talent,
that this is going to work the gamble that you're
seeing over at Meta, and that that's the path of
travel for the other big tech companies that are going
to just eat some of the companies from the inside
out take the talent unnecessarily by the company.

Speaker 1 (04:12):
You know, it's a very good question. We're trying to
figure out if what Mark Zuckerberg is doing today is
much like he did when he was pivoting hard to
the metaverse, which proved because he thought that was the
next big thing, and that was incorrect. AI is the

(04:34):
next big thing, no question about it, and you do
have to have the right DNA and you have to
move fast and break things, as he would say. So,
you know, it'll be interesting to see if he's able
to turn his open source strategy and we've admired that
quite a bit in terms of generative AI into a

(04:56):
leader again or as we were observing it, Apple's LAMA
three at the time was improving at a faster rate
than some of Openay's models, and that was true of
open source generally, and then that has stopped. So, yes,
he had to do something. Is this the right thing?

(05:17):
Why did that stop?

Speaker 2 (05:18):
I don't know, Kathy. Next time you're with us, we'll
have a longer conversation. Two leaders, incredible men doing incredible things.
I confessed the Kathy word.