Hey guys, it's sasha, elon musk just gave an interview to the wall street journal and in that interview he revealed some massive gems that are really important for tesla shareholders. In this video, i will show you some of the most interesting bits of that interview and give you some additional context that makes it even more interesting. If you want to watch the full interview, it is 37 minutes long and i'm going to put the link to it in the description below, but i'll cover the most interesting bits. I'm going to cut it right down, including elon's view on how important the cyber truck is for tesla.

First up, i want to touch on something really really interesting, because elon spent about half of the interview not talking about tesla and in fact, in the first half of the interview he didn't even talk about spacex neuralink or the boring company. Instead, the first half of the interview was elon talking about the ev industry overall and he took some direct shots at the us government say tomorrow you get a phone call from joe biden and he says i think that's unlikely, but true, okay, you know he. He just gives you a call, and he says you know i haven't been talking a lot about tesla lately, but you know what do you? What do you need from this bill? What are your needs? What do you answer him um? Well, i i i mean to be totally frank, i'm i i i don't know if we at least no one in tesla has actually just brought up whether they they care about this will or not. I i think if this will happen or doesn't happen, i i don't know we don't think about it at all, really, okay, it might be better honestly, it might be better if the bill doesn't pass to open up.

Elon musk makes the obvious point that there are major major issues with the current infrastructure bill. It is going to spend a huge amount of money for very questionable levels of gain. Companies with worker unions that have helped elect joe biden are going to get the biggest credit on their electric vehicles because of very evident nepotism, and the issue is that adoption of electric vehicles is not exactly going slowly. We don't have any problems there.

There is a massive wait list for every single type of ev out there. The problem is not in the demand. The problem is very much on the supply side of things, so the us government seems to be misunderstanding. The fundamentals of where the bottleneck is because, as soon as the criticism of tesla is like, hey tesla gets all these subsidies, but it's worth noting that for the the vehicle purchase tax credit, the seventy five hundred dollars tesla stopped getting that like two years ago.

So we've uh, whereas um uh, everyone else, i think, except for gm, still gets the 7 500 tax credit. So all of our you know, sales this year and last year were uh had nothing to do with the the tax credit, because we were no longer eligible because we'd made so many electric cars uh tesla's made roughly two-thirds of all the electric cars in the united States, you know, i'm not sure most people are aware of that um, so yeah, so tesla's made basically twice as many electric vehicles as the rest of industry, combined and naturally enough later on. In the interview, elon calls this exact point out: tesla hasn't had any credits whatsoever on their vehicles for two years and that hasn't exactly slowed down the demand for their cars in the united states. In fact, the credits that were available to other manufacturers have done absolutely nothing to help those other manufacturers establish any sort of uv production, despite having years to do so, but that was just the start.

Elon was just warming up. Listen to this. What do you think? The role of government should be um. I i think the role of government should be that of like a referee, um and you know like uh and and uh, but not a player on the field um.

So um generally, you know government should, i think, just try to get out of the way and and not uh impede progress. So pretty early on in this interview, elon is beginning to throw some serious, punches and right in the middle of the conversation about the infrastructure bill and all of those automotive credits. He slips this one in clearly, elon is referencing the fact that the us government has decided that, instead of doing his job, as you know, the government, they want to go and please the buddies that finance their election campaigns. Instead, the white house hosts a major event dedicated to ev companies and forgets to invite the one american company that sells more than twice as many cars as the rest of them put together.

Biden then makes a complete fall out of himself by telling the general motors ceo mary barra, that she is leading the world an electric vehicles in front of everyone, a reminder in case you weren't aware, but gm right now is manufacturing exactly zero electric vehicles, because the Only one that they used to manufacture in very small quantities. The chevy bolt happened to catch fire. So much that you are now not allowed to park it in your garage, in fact not allowed to park it in pretty much any public garage or even anywhere near a building. And now the infrastructure bill has clauses that favor some manufacturers over others based on whether or not they have worker unions, which is absurd, because work unions have literally nothing to do with switching to greener models of transport.

But wait. Elon has more to say, while he is in savage mode, if we don't cut government spending, something really bad is going to happen. This is crazy. Our spending is so far in excess of revenue.

It's insane um, like you, could zero out all billionaires in the country. This is almost like anti-billionaire bs, well uh. If you zeroed out all the billionaires, you still wouldn't solve the deficit. A number of prominent us politicians, like bernie sanders, have recently been repeating the mantra that the root of all evil are billionaires like elon musk, and that every economic problem in the united states in the whole world can be solved super easily by just making sure that Billionaires are taxed appropriately and pay their fair share.

The problem is that these politicians have absolutely no idea what a fair share is. I mean first of all, i pay a lot of tax. I mean my marginal tax rate is like 53, so that's not trivial. Now.

Should it be 80, or maybe even 90 percent hell? Why don't we go for a hundred percent, which clearly would be incredibly smart? And it would also dissuade anyone from ever wanting to set up a company united states leading to an imminent demise of the silicon valley and a huge reduction of the tax bill, which would do exactly the opposite of what these politicians want to do. And unfortunately, the people in power have very limited understanding of basic mass, which elon keeps repeating. Billionaires are rich, but they are very few in number and even if you took every single dollar that every single billionaire theoretically has aside from probably crashing the stock market and other interesting consequences. Aside from that, that money would be a drop in the ocean compared to the trillions of dollars in government deficits that are going to be accrued over the next decade.

It does not make sense to take uh the job of capital allocation away from people who have demonstrated great skill in capital allocation and give it to uh. You know an entity that has demonstrated very poor skill in in capital allocation, which is the government. I mean you can think of the government, essentially uh as a corporation in the limit it is, it is a the government is simply the biggest corporation, with a monopoly on violence and with and where you have no recourse. So how much money you want to give that entity? Why would you want to give a corporation with no competition that that can't even really go bankrupt, um more money um? Now it's not as though i think the government shouldn't exist or that they're not good things that the government can do or things that are necessary for the government to do so.

So i want somebody who is sort of an extreme, libertarian uh and thinks the government should not do anything. I just think we should um minimize what the government does, because the government's efficiency at spending is is just going to be lower than a a competitive commercial company, but by a lot this segment is really interesting. Elon is repeating a point he has made before, but once again it is really incredibly important. Tax is a way to allow the government to fund spending.

It needs to do on programs on providing welfare health care in some countries, education, etc, etc. But there is a limit to the government's power to allocate funds in a better way for every single purpose. We have seen a lot of examples where governments tried to run actual enterprise and you know, run actual businesses and having grown up in what was back then the soviet union. I concur with elon that some things are better left out of the hugely wasteful and very often poorly managed central government management.

You can go and raid the capital of entrepreneurs for inventing new stupid taxes like the tax on unrealized capital gains or in some other way, trying to get capital out of businesses, because remember the capital tied up in shares is not cash sitting in someone's bank account. It literally is money that doesn't actually currently exist. It has not yet been realized, but the outcome will not be what many supporters of this rubbish think the outcome will be a rate on the capital that companies like tesla, used to build huge new factories. Like you know, the one in austin hire tens of thousands of people in those factories generate billions of dollars in revenue, pay a million different property taxes to the government from those factories pay huge numbers of different types of income, taxes from the jobs that they have Created pay corporation taxes on the profits that the corporations are generating, so there is definitely an element of short-sightedness.

Shall we put it here that elon is talking about, and that is really clearly evident, but i'm not poking fun at age, i'm just saying um, you know if we've got uh people in uh, very important positions that have to make decisions that are critical to the Security of the country, then they need to have sufficient uh presence of mind and cognitive ability to to make those decisions well, um, because the whole country's depending on them and to complete elon's view on the us government. He says the obvious and it might seem funny in a way, but on a serious point: why do we have a retirement age if age is not a factor that precludes someone from being fully capable of working effectively? Why do many countries have laws that restrict other people from driving or at least make regular testing mandatory? Why do we think that old age is a factor that affects your ability to think clearly in almost every situation except running the country when it comes to you know, being elected senator for the 40th year running or becoming president apparently age is not a factor at All and age in no way whatsoever affects cognitive ability. What's gon na happen on twelve nine, can you tell me what's gon na happen on twelve nine? As far as i know, i i don't know where this came from um. I think this is just one of those memes that i don't know it came out of nowhere, but as far as i know nothing, but maybe something will happen that i'm not aware of so.

This persistent rumor of something very big happening on december 9th has been quashed and it seems like it was just one of those things that people on twitter got too excited about. Although there were a lot of indicators i'll give them that that something was going to happen, but something maybe was actually going to happen, maybe elon or tesla changed their mind. Maybe things just didn't work out. Maybe it was too early.

Maybe it was just elon having a bit of fun, we shall never know 60 seconds and cyber truck cyber truck uh subatrox is gon na, be an incredible product. I think it's it may it may it may be our our best product ever and i think it probably will be um uh. It has a lot of new technology. So it's it's a hard car to make um.

I bet it will be awesome, uh and um. I think i've said before that you know we're aiming for volume production in 2023 um and i will provide a more detailed product update at the tesla earnings. Call that you know early next year. It'll be something really special.

You know like just one of those kind of rare products that happens once in a while. That's that's really special and there you have it. Elon tells you everything you need to know about the cyber trucker later on in the interview, but the context is where this message is really important. A lot of analysts have been pointing to the fact that rivien and ford have beaten tesla to the pickup truck market and tesla is now going to be arriving very late to this party and might miss out as a result.

But here is some context around that. Rivien have publicly announced that they have started deliveries. They've made a massive deal out of it. There's been a lot of media attention.

Their share price has gone to the moon, but the reality is that outside of the trucks that have been publicly displayed, delivered for media coverage and for publicity, it appears that all actual ravine production has been delayed for several months. Customers are getting a lot of emails with new dates that are later and later, and media reports at the moment are indicating that we're looking at may to july at the earliest instead of two months ago, which is odd, because that is a five to seven month. Delay as it stands, that was announced right when people were expecting to receive their trucks. That certainly doesn't sound good and it points to major production issues early on in that production, uh process.

Remember that making a few handmade prototypes is relatively easy, but scaling that to genuine volume production is where it actually gets hard, and there have been a number of reports also that ford lightning deliveries have already been delayed in reality until q3 or possibly even q4. 2022. Although ford has not yet provided any official confirmation, i am guessing that, if that is the case, if there are delays, we're only going to get ford admitting it in spring, when the first deliveries are going to become due, because that's what they're all doing they're only Telling you there's going to be a delay literally the day that people expected to receive their cars. Elon is saying that the cyber truck will hit mass production in 2023.

But if we look at the timeline of any other teslas, that should mean that if elon is feeling confident, the cyber truck will start some level of production at that scale in 2023 that they should start doing some production at some point next year and at the Moment i would not put it past tesla to look at their competition and steal a march by getting the cyber truck production going before either ford or riviera actually figure it out and getting anything out of their factories themselves, and the cyber truck is pretty unique. Not only in its design and technology, it is also a one-size-fits-all truck that appeals both to pickup buyers and to suv buyers, and those are both huge markets that have grown massively in recent years, and that is going to be a massive opportunity for tesla to expand Its reach, so if you're a tesla shareholder like me next year, promises to be incredibly exciting. If you found this video useful, please don't forget to smash the like button for the youtube algorithm. Thank you so much for watching.

I really appreciate it and, as always i'll see you guys later, you.