Toni Sacconaghi (29:02):
Thank you for taking the question. I was just wondering if you can elaborate a little bit more on kind of the new vehicles that you talked about today. Are these like tweaks on existing models given that they’re going to be running on the same lines? Or are these like new models? And how should we think about them in the context of like the Model 3 Highland update? What will these models be like relative to that? And given the quick time frame, Model 3 Highland has required a lot of work and a lot of retooling. Maybe you can help put that all in context. Thank you. And I have a follow-up, please.
Elon Musk (29:48):I think we’ve said we were on that front. So, what’s your follow-up?
Toni Sacconaghi (29:56):
It’s a more personal one for you, Elon, which is that you’re leading many important companies right now. Maybe you can just talk about where your heart is at in terms of your interests. And do you expect to lessen your involvement with Tesla at any point over the next three years?
Elon Musk (30:15):
Well, as it constitutes a majority of my work time, and I work pretty much every day of the week, it’s rare for me to take a Sunday afternoon off. So I’m going to make sure Tesla is quite prosperous. Like it is prosperous, and it will be very much so in the future.
Martin Viecha (30:45):Okay. Thank you. Let’s go to Adam Jonas from Morgan Stanley. Adam, please go ahead and unmute.
Adam Jonas (30:53):Okay, great. Hey, Elon. So, you and your team on volume expect a 2024 growth rate, notably lower than that achieved in 2023. But what’s your team’s degree of confidence on growth above 0%? Or, in other words, does that statement leave room for potentially lower sales year-on-year?
Elon Musk (31:17):No, I think we’ll have higher sales this year than last year.
Adam Jonas (31:21):
Okay. My follow-up, Elon, on future products. If you had nailed execution, assuming that you nail execution on your next-gen cheaper vehicles, more aggressive giga castings, I don’t want to say one piece, but getting closer to one-piece structural pack, unboxed, 300-mile range, $25,000 price point, putting aside robotaxi, those features unique to you. How long would it take your best Chinese competitors to copy a cheaper and better vehicle that you could offer a couple of years from now? How long would it take your best Chinese competitors to copy that? Thanks.
Elon Musk (32:02):
I mean, I don’t know what our competitors can do, except we’ve done relatively better than they have because if you look at the drop in our competitors in China sales versus our drop in sales, our drop was less than theirs. So, we’re doing well. But I think Cathie Wood said it best. Like really, we should be thought of as an AI or robotics company.
If you value Tesla as just like an auto company, fundamentally, it’s just the wrong framework and if you ask the wrong question, then the right answer is impossible. So, I mean, if somebody doesn’t believe Tesla is going to solve autonomy, I think they should not be an investor in the company. Like that is, but we will and we are and then you have a car that goes from 10 hours of use a week, like an hour and a half a day to probably 50, but it costs the same.
Vaibhav Taneja (33:18):I think that’s the key thing to remember, especially if you look at FSD Supervised, if you didn’t believe in autonomy, this should give you a review that this is coming. It’s actually getting better day by day.
Elon Musk (33:34):
Yeah. If you’ve not tried the FSD 12.3, and like I said, 12.4 is going to be significantly better and 12.5 even better than that. And we have visibility into those things. Then you really don’t understand what’s going on. It’s not possible.
Vaibhav Taneja (33:53):Yeah. And that’s why we can’t just look at just as a car company because a car company would just have a car. But here, we have more than a car company, because the cars can be autonomous. And like I said, it’s happening.
Ashok Elluswamy (34:05):Yeah. This is all in addition to Tesla. The overall AI community is just increasing, improving rapidly.
Elon Musk (34:13):Yeah, we’re putting the actual auto in automobile, so well tell us about future horse carriages you’re making. I’m like, well actually it doesn’t need a horse. That’s the whole point. That’s really the whole point.
Martin Viecha (34:33):Okay, thank you. The next question comes from Alex Potter from Piper Sandler. Alex, please go ahead and unmute.
Alex Potter (34:43):
Great, thanks. Yeah, so couldn’t agree more. The thesis hinges completely on AI, the future of AI, full self-driving, neural net training, all of these things. In that context, Elon, you’ve spoken about your desire to obtain 25% voting control of the company, and I understand completely why that would be, so I’m not necessarily asking about that. I’m asking if you’ve come up with any mechanism by which you can ensure that you’ll obtain that level of voting control, because if not, then the core part of the thesis could potentially be at risk. So any additional commentary you might have on that topic?
Elon Musk (35:29):
Well, I think no matter what, Tesla, even if I got kidnapped by aliens tomorrow, Tesla will solve autonomy, maybe a little slower, but it would solve autonomy for vehicles at least. I don’t know if it would win with respect to Optimus or with respect to future products, but there’s enough momentum for Tesla to solve autonomy even if I disappeared, for vehicles.
Now, there’s a whole range of things we can do in the future. Beyond that, I’d be more reticent with respect to Optimus. If we have a super sentient humanoid robot that can follow you indoors and that you can escape, we’re talking Terminator level risk, then yeah, I’d be uncomfortable if there’s not some meaningful level of influence over how that is deployed. And if shareholders have an opportunity to ratify or re-ratify the competition, I guess I can’t say that, but that is a fact. They have an opportunity.
Alex Potter (36:47):Okay, very good.
Elon Musk (36:51):And yeah, we’ll see. If the company generates a lot of positive cash flow, we could obviously buy back shares.
Alex Potter (36:58):
All right, that’s actually all very helpful context. Thank you. Maybe one final question then I’ll pass it on. OPEX reductions, thank you for quantifying the impact there. I’d be interested also in potentially more qualitative discussion of what the implications are for these headcount reductions. What are the types of activities that you’re presumably sacrificing as a result of parting ways with these folks? Thanks very much.
Vaibhav Taneja (37:29):
So like we said, we’ve done these headcount reductions across the board, and as companies grow over time, there are certain redundancies, there’s some duplication of efforts which happens in certain areas. So you need to go back and look at where all these pockets are, get rid of it. So we’re basically going through that exercise wherein we’re like, Hey, how do we set this company right for the next phase of growth? And the way to think about it is any tree which grows, it needs pruning. This is the pruning exercise which we went through, and at the end of it we’ll be much stronger and much more resilient to deal with the future. Because the future is really bright, like I said in my opening remarks, we just have to get through this period and get there.
Elon Musk (38:25):
Yeah, we’re not giving up anything that is significant that I’m aware of. So we’ve had a long period of prosperity from 2019 to now. So if a company organizationally is 5% wrong per year, that accumulates to 25, 30% of inefficiency. We’ve made some corrections along the way, but it is time to reorganize the company for the next phase of growth.
And you really need to reorganize it. Just like a human when we start off with one cell and zygote and blastocyst and you start growing arms and legs and then briefly you have a tail, and so-
Alex Potter (39:18):But you shed the tail.
Elon Musk (39:19):
You shed the tail, hopefully, and then you’re a baby and basically, you have to be … A company is kind of like a creature growing and if you don’t reorganize it for different phases of growth, it will fail. You can’t have the same organizational structure if you’re 10 cells versus a hundred versus a million versus a billion versus a trillion. Where humans are around 35 trillion cells, it doesn’t feel like it, it feels for one person, but you’re basically a walking cell colony of roughly 35 trillion depending on your body mass, and about three times that number in bacteria. So anyway, you’ve got to reorganize the company for a new phase of growth or it will fail to achieve that growth.
Martin Viecha (40:23):Thank you. Let’s go to Mark Delaney from Goldman Sachs. Mark, please go ahead and unmute.
Mark Delaney (40:30):
Yes, good afternoon. Thanks very much for taking the question. The company had previously characterized potential FSD licensing discussions as in the early phase, and some of OEMs had not really been believing in it. Can you elaborate on how much the licensing business opportunity you mentioned today has progressed? And is there anything Tesla needs to achieve with the technology in terms of product milestones in order to be successful at reaching the licensing agreement in your view?
Elon Musk (40:54):
Well, I think it just needs to be obvious that our approach is the right approach. And I think we’ve now with 12.3, if you just have the car drive you around, it is obvious that our solution with a relatively low cost inference computer and standard cameras, can achieve self-driving. No LiDARs, no radars, no ultrasonic, nothing, just-
Vaibhav Taneja (41:23):No heavy integration work for vehicle manufacturers.
Elon Musk (41:26):
Yeah, it will really just be a case of having them use the same cameras and inference computer and licensing our software. But once it becomes obvious that if you don’t have this in a car, nobody wants your car. It’s a smart car. I mean, I just remember back when Nokia was king of the hill cell phone and then I saw come out with a smartphone that was basically a brick, with limited functionality and then the iPhone and Android, but people still did not understand that all the phones are going to be that way. There’s not going to be any flip phones if there’ll be a niche product, or home phones. Yeah, not even. Exactly. When was the last time you saw a home phone?
Ashok Elluswamy (42:24):I have no idea.
Lars Moravy (42:25):I guess it might be an acronym.
Vaibhav Taneja (42:26):In a hotel, sometimes in a hotel.
Elon Musk (42:29):
Yeah, the hotels have them. Yeah. So the people don’t understand all cars will need to be smart cars or you will not sell, nobody will buy it. Once that becomes obvious, I think licensing becomes not optional.
Lars Moravy (42:50):It becomes a method of survival.
Elon Musk (42:52):Yeah, it’s license it or nobody will buy your car.
Vaibhav Taneja (42:57):
I mean one other thing which I’ll add is in the conversations which we’ve had with some of these OEMs, I just want to also point out that they take a lot of time in their product lifecycle. They’re talking about years before they will put it in their product. We might have a licensing deal earlier than that, but it takes a while. So this is where the big difference between us and them are.
Elon Musk (43:23):Yeah, I mean, really a deal signed now would result in it being in a car in probably three years. Something like that.
Vaibhav Taneja (43:31):That would be early.
Elon Musk (43:32):Yeah, that’s like lightning basically.
Vaibhav Taneja (43:35):That’s being an eager OEM.
Elon Musk (43:38):
Yeah, So I wouldn’t be surprised if we do sign a deal, I think a good chance we do sign a deal this year, maybe more than one, but yeah, it would be probably three years before it’s integrated with a car. Even though all you need is cameras and our inference computer. So it’s not a massive design change.
Vaibhav Taneja (44:03):And again, just to clarify, it’s not that work which we have to do, it’s the work which they have to do, which take the time.
Martin Viecha (44:09):Okay, Mark, do you have a follow-up?
Mark Delaney (44:16):
Yeah, very helpful. Thank you. My follow-up was to better understand Tesla’s approach to pricing going forward. Previously the company had said that the price reductions were driving incremental demand with how affordable the cars have become, especially for vehicles that have access to IRA credits and some of the leasing offers that Tesla has in place. Do you still see meaningful incremental price reductions as making sense from here for the existing products? And can the company immediately lower prices from here and also stay free cash flow positive on an annual basis with the current product set? Thanks.
Elon Musk (44:47):Yeah, I think we can be free cash flow positive meaningfully. Yeah.
Lars Moravy (44:59):The things Vaibhav said in his opening remarks, our cost down efforts, we basically were offsetting the price cut.
Vaibhav Taneja (45:05):That’s what I was going to go say.
Lars Moravy (45:06):We’re trying to give it back to the customers.
Elon Musk (45:11):
Yeah. I mean, at the end of the day, for any given company, if you sell a great product at a great price… If you have a great product at a great price, the sales will be excellent. That’s true of any arena. So over time we do need to keep making sure that it’s a great product at a great price. Moreover, that price is accessible to people. So you have to solve both the value for money and the fundamental affordability question. The fundamental affordability question is sometimes overlooked. If somebody’s earning several hundred thousand dollars a year, they don’t think of a car from a fundamental affordability standpoint. But the vast majority of people are living paycheck to paycheck. So it actually makes difference if the cost per month for lease or financing is $10 one way or the other. So it is important to keep improving the affordability and to keep making the price-
Martin Viecha (46:11):More accessible.
Elon Musk (46:12):Yeah, exactly. Make the price more accessible, the value for money better, and to keep improving that over time.
Lars Moravy (46:18):But also make a kick-ass coach that people want to buy.
Elon Musk (46:21):
Yeah, it’s got to be a great product, a great price, and the standards for what constitutes great product at a great price, keep increasing. So you can’t just be static. You have to keep making the car better, improving the price of it, improving the cost of production. And that’s what we’re doing.
Vaibhav Taneja (46:42):
And in fact, like I said in my opening remarks also, the device, the updated model 3 is a fantastic car. I don’t think people fully even understand that one of engineering effort, which has gone and Lars and team have actually put out videos explaining how much the car is different when it looks and feels different. Not only it looks and feels different, we’ve added so much value to it, but you can lease it for as low as 299 a month.
Lars Moravy (47:09):Yeah, without gas.
Vaibhav Taneja (47:12):Yeah.
Martin Viecha (47:15):All right, the next question comes from George from Canaccord. George, please go on unmute.
George Nabbs (47:23):
Hi, thank you for taking my question. First, could you please help us understand maybe some of the timing of launching FSD and additional geographies including maybe clarifying your recent comment about China? Thank you.
Elon Musk (47:38):
You mean like new markets? Yeah, there are a bunch of markets where we don’t currently sell cars that we should be selling cars in. We’ll see some acceleration of that.
George Nabbs (47:57):And FSD new markets?
Elon Musk (47:59):
Yeah, so the thing about the end-to-end neuralnet based autonomy is that just like a human, it actually works pretty well without modification in almost any market. So we plan on, with the approval of the regulators, releasing it as a supervised autonomy system in any market where we can get regulatory approval for that, which we think includes China. So yes, just like a human, you can go rent a car in a foreign country and you can drive pretty well. Obviously, if you live in that country you’ll drive better. And so we will make the car drive better in these other countries with country-specific training, but it can drive quite well almost everywhere.
Vaibhav Taneja (48:58):
The basics of driving are basically the same everywhere. Like a car is a car, traffic light, a road is a road.
Elon Musk (49:04):It understands that it shouldn’t hit things no matter where it is.
Ashok Elluswamy (49:06):
Exactly, there are some road rules that you need to follow. In China it’s you shouldn’t cross over a solid line to do a lane change. In U.S. it’s a recommendation, I think. In China you get fined heavily if you do that. We have to do some reductions, but it’s mostly smaller reductions, not like entire change of stack or something like that.
Martin Viecha (49:32):Hey George, do you have a follow-up?
George Nabbs (49:33):
Yep. So my follow-up has to do with the first quarter deliveries. And I’m curious as to whether or not you feel that supply constraints that you mentioned throughout the release, impacted the results and maybe can you help us quantify that and is that why you have some confidence in unit growth in 2024?
Vaibhav Taneja (49:53):
Yeah. I think we did cover this a little bit in the opening remarks too. Q1 had a lot of different things which were happening. Seasonality was a big one. Continued pressure from the macroeconomic environment. We had attacks at our factory, we had Red Sea attacks. We were ramping model 3, we were ramping the cyber truck. All these things are happening. I mean, it almost feels like a culmination of all those activities in a constrained period, and that gives us that confidence that, hey, we don’t expect these things to recur.
Elon Musk (50:35):Yeah, we think Q2 will be a lot better.
Lars Moravy (50:37):Yeah. It’s just one thing after another. Our cyber attacks are crazy.
Elon Musk (50:42):
Yeah, exactly. It’s just if you’ve got cars that are sitting on ships, they obviously cannot be delivered to people. And if you’ve got excess demand for model 3 or model Y in one market, but you don’t have it there, it’s
quite a… It’s an extremely complex logistics situation. So I’d say also, we did over complicate the sales process, which we’ve just in the past a week or so, have greatly simplified. So it became far too complex to buy a Tesla, whereas it should just be you can buy the car and under a minute. So we’re getting back to the you can buy a Tesla and under a minute interface from what was quite complex.
Martin Viecha (51:42):Okay, thank you. Let’s go to Colin Rusch from Oppenheimer. Colin, go ahead and unmute, please.
Colin Rusch (51:49):
Thanks so much, guys. Given the pursuit of Tesla really as a leader in AI for the physical world and your comments around distributed inference, can you talk about what that approach is unlocking beyond what’s happening in the vehicle right now?
Elon Musk (52:10):Do you want to say something?
Ashok (52:13):Yeah, you mentioned the car even when it’s a full robot actually that’s probably going to be used on 50 hours a week.
Elon Musk (52:20):That’s my guess, a third of the hours of the week.
Ashok (52:22):
Yeah, it could be more or less, but then there’s certainly going to be some hours left for charging and cleaning and maintenance in that world. It can do a lot of other workloads.
Even right now, we are seeing, for example, these [inaudible 00:52:34] companies have these batch workloads where they send a bunch of documents and those are run through pretty large neural networks and take a lot of compute to chunk through those workloads.
And now that we already paid for this compute in these cars, it might be wise to use them and not let them be buying a lot of expensive machinery and letting them be idle. If you don’t want that, we want to use the computer as much as possible and close to basically 100% of the time make use of it.
Elon Musk (53:04):
That’s why I think it’s analogous to Amazon Web Services where people didn’t expect that AWS would be the most valuable part of Amazon when it started out as a bookstore. So that was on nobody’s radar, but they found that they had excess compute because the compute needs would spike to extreme levels for brief periods of the year. And then they had idle compute for the rest of the year. So then what should they do with all that excess compute for the rest of the year? That’s kind of. Huh?
Colin Rusch (53:37):Monetize it.
Elon Musk (53:38):
Yeah, monetize it. So it seems like a no-brainer to say, okay, if we’ve got millions and then tens of millions of vehicles out there where the computers are idle most of the time, that we might as well have them do something useful.
Ashok (53:55):Yeah, exactly.
Elon Musk (53:58):
If you get to the 100 million vehicle level, which I think we will at some point get to, and you’ve got a kilowatt of usable compute and maybe you’re on hardware six or seven by that time, then I think you could have on the order of 100 gigawatts of usable compute, which might be more than anyone, more than any company. Probably more than any company.
Ashok (54:25):
Yeah, probably because it takes a lot of intelligence to drive the car anyway. And when it’s not driving the car, you just put this intelligence to other users to solving the scientific problems.
Elon Musk (54:34):It’s like a human
Ashok (54:35):Or answering them for someone else.
Elon Musk (54:39):We’ve already learned a lot about deploying workloads to these compute nodes and [inaudible 00:54:46].
Ashok (54:45):And unlike laptops and our cell phones, it is totally under testers control. So it’s easier to distribute the work product across different nodes as opposed to asking users for permission on their own cell phones to be very tedious.
Elon Musk (54:57):Well, you just drain the battery on the phone.
Ashok (54:59):Yeah, exactly. The battery’s also limited.
Elon Musk (55:00):
So technically, I suppose Apple would have the most amount of distributed compute, but you can’t use it because you can’t just run the phone in full power and drain the battery. So whereas for the car, even if you’re a kilowatt level inference computer, which is crazy power compared to a phone, if you’ve got after your 60 kilowatt-hour pack, it’s still not a big deal to run whether you’re plugged in or not.
It could be plugged in or not plugged in. You could run for 10 hours and use 10 kilowatt-hours of your kilowatt of compute.
Colin Rusch (55:42):[inaudible 00:55:44].
Elon Musk (55:43):Yeah, [inaudible 00:55:44] together built-in liquid cold thermal management.
Colin Rusch (55:46):Yeah, it’s exactly-
Elon Musk (55:47):[inaudible 00:55:47] expense for data centers. So it’s already there in the car.
Colin Rusch (55:49):Exactly.
Elon Musk (55:50):So it’s distributed power generation. Distributed access to power and distributed cooling and it’s already [inaudible 00:56:00].
Speaker 2 (56:00):I mean, that distributed power and cooling, people underestimate that costs a lot of money.
Colin Rusch (56:06):It does.
Ashok (56:07):And the Capex is shared by the entire world. Everyone owns a small chunk and they get a small profit out of it maybe.
Elon Musk (56:13):Yeah.
Colin Rusch (56:15):
Thanks so much guys. And just my follow-up is a little bit more mundane. Looking at the 4680 ramp, can you talk about how close you are to target yields and when you might start to accelerate incremental capacity expansions on that technology?
Elon Musk (56:34):
We’re making good progress on that, but I don’t think it’s super important for at least the near term. As Laura said, we think it’ll exceed the competitiveness of suppliers by the end of this year and then we’ll continue to improve it.
Speaker 1 (56:58):
Yeah, I mean, I think it’s important to note also that the ramp right now is relevant to the Cybertruck ramp and so we’re not going to just randomly build 4680s unless we have a place to put them.
And so we’re going to make sure we’re prudent about that. But we also have a lot of investments with all our cell suppliers and vendors. They’re great partners and they’ve done great development work with us. And a lot of the advancements in technology and chemistry we found in 4680, they’re also putting into their cells.
Elon Musk (57:26):
Yeah. And big part of the 4680, it [inaudible 00:57:30] during internal sales was a hedge against what would happen with our suppliers. Because for a while there, it was very difficult because every big car maker put in massive battery orders. And so the price per kilowatt-hour of lithium-ion batteries went to crazy numbers, crazy levels.
Speaker 1 (57:49):Bonkers.
Elon Musk (57:49):
Yeah. Just bonkers. So okay, we’ve got to have some hedge here to deal with cost per kilowatt-hours. Numbers that were double what we anticipated. If we have an internal cell production, then we have that hedge against a demand shocks with too much demand.
That’s really the way to think about it. It’s not like we want to take on a whole bunch of problems just for the hell of it. We did this whole program in order to address the crazy increase in cost per kilowatt-hour from our suppliers due to gigantic orders placed by every car maker on earth.
Martin Viecha (58:41):Okay, thank you. And the last question comes from Ben Kallo from Baird. Ben, go ahead and unmute. Ben, you’re still muted.
Elon Musk (58:57):Well, I want to say again, would just like to strongly recommend that anyone who is, I guess, thinking about the Tesla stock should really drive FSD 12.3. You can’t… It is impossible to understand the company if you do not do this.
Martin Viecha (59:17):All right, so since Ben is not unmuting, let’s try Shreyas Patel from Wolf Research. Final question.
Shreyas Patel (59:33):
Oh hey, thanks so much. Just Elon, during the investor day last year, you mentioned that auto cogs per unit for the next gen vehicle would decline by 50% versus the current three and why. Think that was implying something around $20,000 of cogs.
About a third of that was coming from the unbox manufacturing process. But I’m curious if you see an opportunity that some of the other drivers around powertrain cost reduction or material cost savings, would those be largely transferable to some of the new products that you’re now talking about introducing?
Speaker 1 (01:00:11):
Yeah, sure. I mean, in short, yes. Unboxed manufacturing method is certainly great and revolutionary, but with it, comes some risk because it’s new production lines [inaudible 01:00:20]. But all the subsystems we developed, whether it was power trains drive units, battery improvements in manufacturing and automation, thermal systems, seating, integration of interior components and reduction of LV controllers.
All that’s transferable and that’s what we’re doing, trying to get it in our products as fast as possible. And so yeah, that engineering work, we’re not trying to just throw it away and put it in a coffin. We’re going to take it and utilize it and utilize it to the best advantage of the cars we make and the future cars we make.
Shreyas Patel (01:00:55):
Okay, great. And then just on that topic of 4680 cells, I know you mentioned it, you really thought of it more as a hedge against rising battery costs from other OEMs. But it seems even today, it seems like you would have a cost advantage against some of those other automakers.
And I’m wondering, given the rationalizing of your vehicle manufacturing plans that you’re talking about now, if there’s an opportunity to maybe convert the 4680 cells and maybe sell those to other automakers and really generate an additional revenue stream. I’m just curious if you have any thoughts about that.
Elon Musk (01:01:36):
Great. What seems to be happening is that, unless I’m missing something, the orders for batteries from other automakers have declined dramatically. So we’re seeing much more competitive prices for cells from our suppliers, dramatically more competitive than in the past. It is clear that a lot of our suppliers have excess capacity.
Speaker 3 (01:02:06):
And in addition to what Elon… This is [inaudible 01:02:08] by the way, in addition to what Elon said about 4680, what 4680 did for us from a supply chain perspective was help us understand the supply chain that’s upstream of our cell suppliers.
So a lot of the deals that we had struck for 4680, we can also supply those materials to our partners, reducing the overall cost back to Tesla. So we’re basically inserting ourselves in the upstream supply chain by doing that. So that’s also been beneficial in reducing the overall pricing in addition to the excess capacity that these suppliers have.
Elon Musk (01:02:40):
Yeah, I mean, this is going to wax and wane obviously, so there’s going to be a boom and bust in battery cell production where production exceeds supply and then supply exceeds production and back and forth kind of like, I don’t know, DRAM or something. So it’s like what is true today will not be true in the future. There’s going to be somewhat of a boom and bust cycle here. And then there are additional complications with governance incentives like the Inflation Reduction Act, the IRA, which I always found a funny name for us.
Speaker 3 (01:03:21):Comical name.
Elon Musk (01:03:22):Yeah, is it like the Irish Republican Army, the Internet Research Agency from Russia.
Speaker 3 (01:03:27):Independent Retirement Account?
Elon Musk (01:03:28):
Yeah, exactly. Roth IRA. There’s like four Spider-Man situations, which IRA wins, but it does complicate the incentive structure. And so there’s stronger demand for cells that are produced in the US than outside the U.S. But then how long does the IRA last? I don’t know.
Speaker 3 (01:04:04):
Which is why it’s important that we have both [inaudible 01:04:06] cells and the results are hedging against all of this.
Elon Musk (01:04:09):Yeah.
Martin Viecha (01:04:12):
Okay. Thank you very much. That’s all the time we have today. But at the same time, I would like to make a short announcement and I wanted to let the investment community know that about a month ago, I met up with Elon and [inaudible 01:04:26] and announced that I’ll be moving on from the world of investor relations. I’ll be hanging around for another couple of months or so. So feel free to reach out any time. But after the seven-year sprint, I’m going to be taking a break and spending some good quality time with my family. And I wanted to say that the seven years have been the greatest privilege of my professional life.
I’ll never forget the memories from… I started literally at the beginning of production hell and just watching the company from the inside to see what it’s become today. And I’m especially super thankful to the people in this room and dozens of people outside of this room that I’ve worked for over the years.
I think the team strength and teamwork at Tesla is unlike anything else I’ve seen in my career. Elon, thank you very much for this opportunity that I got back in 2017. Thank you for seeking investor feedback and regularly and debating it with me.
Elon Musk (01:05:24):Yeah, well, I mean, the reason I reached out to you was because I thought your analysis of Tesla was the best that I’d seen.
Martin Viecha (01:05:30):Thank you.
Elon Musk (01:05:30):So thank you for helping Tesla get to where it is today over seven years. It’s been a pleasure working with you.
Martin Viecha (01:05:37):
Thank you so much. And yeah, thank you for all the thousands of shareholders that we’ve met over the years and walked around factories and loved all the interactions, even the tough ones. And yeah, looking forward to the call in the next three months, but I’ll be on the other side listening in. Thank you very much.
Elon Musk (01:05:57):Thanks.