How serious is the situation for Tesla and Elon Musk?
>> Yeah, hi Francine, so yeah, I think this is a pretty serious situation.
I mean, running a publicly listed company is a serious thing.
Elon has, what, close to 25 million people following his Twitter account?
And people will potentially be making investment decisions off the back of what
he tweets.
And quite clearly the first tweet that he posted said that they were gonna
make a half a million cars and that's never been their intention publicly.
They said they might be at a run rate of half a million by the end of 2019.
So the reality's about 20% different, so some people may have thought,
actually this is not great.
So even though a correction came about four and a half hours later,
that's still quite a window for people to perhaps get at the wrong end of the stick.
And the SEC takes its role seriously, and
will be wanting to kinda push this quite hard for the company, I think.
>> And what will be the implications of that be Matt?
>> It's a good question and, obviously, nothing in law is black and white.
Obviously, with the first transgression we saw Elon Musk have to pay
a $20 million fine, and Tesla another $20 million.
Perhaps there could be more fines,
perhaps he could be barred from serving as an Executive Officer, in an extreme case.
Perhaps they'll even ask him to take down his Twitter account,
which would be a big disappointment to Twitter and all of his followers.
So I think there's still quite a wide range of options, and
I think it will play out quite quickly though.
>> Matthew, how's the business doing?
How's Tesla itself?
>> See, they got into 2019 in pretty good shape.
But it's hard to overstate how important 2019 is for them.
It's the year that they have to make a breakthrough of the Model 3.
So it's in Europe, and they got their factory in China ramping up production.
So they need to get that production towards a half a million a year
run rate by the end of the year.
And they need to demonstrate that quality of the Model 3 is up there with
the premier vehicles they're going against.
And obviously recently there's been some bigger question marks about
Model 3 quality.
So really, really important year for the company to kinda really
establish its credentials as a proper premium volume manufacture.