Musk pay package vote is the real test of Tesla as a meme stock, says Elevation Partners' McNamee

To talk about the road ahead, Elevation Partners founder early Facebook and Google investor Rodger McNamee. All right, Rodger, I bet I know. But where do you come down on putting this back to shareholders for a vote on stock? Obviously that was promised to him but not delivered because of this court decision overturning the will of shareholders originally who voted in favor of it back in 2018. It was my assumption shareholders will vote for it again. But I think this is the real test of Tesla as a meme stock because it has been so tightly associated with Elon Musk. Musk’s brand has taken huge hits over the past year and it’s 50 plus billion dollars, which you know in the context of shareholders, that’s a that’s a real number and but I do assume they’re going to go for it. It would seem as though you know it, it does become a referendum on Musk himself, doesn’t it? In the sense of at least there have been some Well, if I don’t get this, I might leave. That’s I think that’s precisely correct. And, you know, that’s why, I mean, it’s a test of Tesla as a meme stock. Because if if Musk is no longer viewed as central to the story going forward, then I think Tesla starts to trade like a car company as opposed to, you know, an extension of Elon Musk. And this vote is the test that investors get to say which way they want to go. Yeah. And overall, I mean, you say it starts to trade more like a car company. Obviously, the stock is down dramatically. It’s below 1/2 a trillion. That said, it’s about 10 times the market value of the likes of GM or Ford. Yeah, it isn’t it roughly equal to the rest of the industry put together? I mean, you know, to me that the issue with Tesla is that the valuation has been suey generous for years and years and years, and there’s just no telling what The thing is that brings it down. But higher interest rates are a bad thing for stocks in general and for this one in particular. And you know, Musk’s behavior is a terrible thing. The problems with the cyber truck are real and the manufacturing issues just in general I think are an overhang for the stocks. There’s a lot of bad news and you know, let’s face it, there’s a different mania going on on Wall Street right now around generative AI and Tesla’s not part of that. And so I think it’s lost a lot of are they not part of it though, Roger? I mean in fact their their self driving is going on I think be a big part of that potentially in terms of what they’re using now to power it and their hopes for it. I mean I can remember you know we talked about so many years ago valuation on Amazon because people were like well sells books. It’s bigger than the entire book market. Of course they lacked imagination here. As you well know, investors are not focused on cars. They’re folk in part they’re focused on robo taxis, on robots themselves, on so many of the things that Musk uniquely seems able to get a company to do that others can’t. David, I would push back in two ways. One, the the technology that they’re using is the earlier generation of predictive AI as opposed to generative which is where the media is today. The second thing is robotaxis. In fact, self driving cars are a solution to a problem that doesn’t exist. You know what, We don’t really need cars that cost half, $1,000,000 each in the marketplace today. And the notion that you can get a car to make all the right decisions in a crowded and situation where the the training set doesn’t represent all the things that come up. I just think that we’re maybe decades away from self driving cars being real and by then decades Rodger, come on. I mean, my understanding by the way is they’re training the cars differently now. They actually have made a significant change in terms of that, Tesla, in terms of the underlying data sets, so to speak. They have more data than anybody but decades. What are you talking about, David? I’m talking about the situation of just putting them out into traffic. Obviously, if you were putting them on specific routes with beacons on anything, it could run into, which is exactly what you do with airplanes and what you do with large ships. In that scenario, you could do it today. But as a country, we’re not willing to invest in special highways, and the people running these companies aren’t willing to wait while that infrastructure investment gets made. And so I just think that it’s mean come to San Francisco, be a pedestrian for a while, and see what it’s like with these things riding around. It’s terrifying.