Author: CNBC Online news

After an inside look at Tesla’s Model 3 factory, one analyst says producing 8,000 cars a week is possible

Mason Trinca | The Washington Post | Getty Images
Damien Boozer and Paul Jacob work on the general assembly of the Tesla Model 3 at the Tesla factory in Fremont, California, on Thursday, July 26, 2018.

Tesla is on track not only to churn out 5,000 Model 3s per week, but could even ramp production up to 8,000 with little impact on its spending.

“Tesla seems well on the way to achieving a steady weekly production rate of 5,000 to 6,000 units per week,” Evercore ISI analyst George Galliers said in a note following an inside tour of the company's facilities.

“We are incrementally positive on Tesla following our visit. We have confidence in their production. We did not see anything to suggest that Model 3 cannot reach 6,000 units per week, and 7,000 to 8,000 with very little incremental capital expenditure.”

The numbers appear so good, Galliers said, that the brokerage's current Model 3 production estimates for the second half of the year may be as much as 7 percent too low.

In a note entitled “Just Got Back from Tesla…,” the team of Evercore analysts detailed what they considered a number of optimistic signs at the company's Fremont, California facility. Among the operations the analysts visited, the team was most impressed with Tesla's general assembly and stamping segments, which “met or exceeded all the benchmarks which [they] had been for.”

A major component of the production process, stamping involves the molding of sheet metal into auto parts.

“From what we saw, it appeared that Tesla's Model 3 press is able to run two parts together (both right and left door),” Galliers explained. “While we were unable to determine hits per hour, when we asked an engineer, the response was a confident 'we're not telling you that but plenty.' Stamping seemingly has the capacity and capability to support all Model 3 targets and potentially future vehicle models as well.”

The analyst also commented on what's become known as “The Tent” at Tesla, a new assembly line sheltered under a tent in the company's parking lot.

In its race to both drive cash flow and pacify increasingly irate bondholders, the company quickly added the second assembly line, officially known as General Assembly 4. Musk has since confirmed that the line was making all of the high-spec Model 3s.

The upbeat comments from Galliers come amid a growing cloud for Tesla chief executive Elon Musk, who recently tweeted that he would be privatizing the electric automaker at $420 per share.

“Focusing on the fundamentals and setting aside talk of privatization, we are incrementally positive on Tesla following our visit,” the analyst said in the note Thursday.

Here's what seven experts are saying on Tesla potentially going private
12:36 PM ET Wed, 8 Aug 2018 | 02:37

The Securities and Exchange Commission has served Tesla with a subpoena, according to The New York Times, following Musk's claim that the funding to take the company off the public market has already been secured.

Evercore has an inline rating on Tesla's shares and a $301 price target; the stock closed Wednesday at $338.69 and was up down about 1 percent in early trading Thursday.

The analyst said he would consider moving his target price and earnings forecasts higher only after making material adjustments to his Model 3 revenue per unit (RpU) and gross margin assumptions. The “key questions” remaining are whether Tesla can sustain current RpU through 2019 and can hold a 25 percent gross margin.

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Tesla Model 3 is ‘military-grade tech years ahead of peers’ but still expected to lose money

Early Tesla employee's insight into working with Elon Musk
1:06 PM ET Thu, 16 Aug 2018 | 04:02

Tesla's Model 3 sedan is blowing engineers away, but it might be a big headache for folks in finance.

Analysts at UBS pulled apart three different electric cars to compare their technology and production costs: a new Tesla Model 3, a 2014 BMW i3 and a 2017 Chevy Bolt.

The engineers hired by UBS to examine a $49,000 2018 Model 3 were “crazy” about the powertrain, “highlighting next-gen, military-grade tech that's years ahead of peers,” said UBS analyst Colin Langan in a note dated Wednesday. But the costs were higher than expected, and the cars would lose about $6,000 each at Tesla's original plan to sell an entry model at $35,000, he said.

It is another sign Tesla may have trouble turning into the mass-market automaker it said it wants to become.

Plans to manufacture the lower-cost vehicle have been delayed since its announcement in 2016 as the electric car manufacturer struggled to meet demand. CEO Elon Musk said in May that manufacturing the Model 3 at that price “right away” would cause Tesla to “die.”

The company had originally billed the Model 3 as a sleek electric vehicle for the masses, and the car that would turn Tesla from a smaller maker of expensive electric cars to a volume manufacturer.

Instead, Tesla focused on higher-cost versions that yield better margins. The profit margin on the $49,000 version UBS tore apart was about 18 percent, for example.

UBS hired the engineers for a breakdown of each car's powertrain and battery, electronic controls, frame and body as well as interior and safety features. They evaluated each part's design, ease of manufacturing and cost.

Tesla beat its two competitors in cost, but the Model 3 didn't have has big a lead over the other automakers as UBS had expected. UBS based its estimates on consultations with engineers and industry research.

Tesla, Chevrolet and BMW were not immediately available for comment.

However, some of the Model 3's technology seems to be far ahead of Chevrolet and BMW. In particular, Tesla's electric powertrain stood out as exceptionally simple and flexible.

WATCH: Tesla whistleblower tweets details about allegedly flawed cars

Tesla whistleblower tweets details about allegedly flawed cars
4:55 PM ET Thu, 16 Aug 2018 | 01:21

A choked up Elon Musk says his health has suffered and that he believes ‘the worst is yet to come’

Here's what experts think of Elon Musk's interview with the New York Times
10:54 AM ET Sun, 19 Aug 2018 | 02:00

Elon Musk was at home in Los Angeles, struggling to maintain his composure. “This past year has been the most difficult and painful year of my career,” he said. “It was excruciating.”

The year has only gotten more intense for Mr. Musk, the chairman and chief executive of the electric-car maker Tesla, since he abruptly declared on Twitter last week that he hoped to convert the publicly traded company into a private one. The episode kicked off a furor in the markets and within Tesla itself, and he acknowledged on Thursday that he was fraying.

At multiple points in an hourlong interview with The New York Times, he choked up, noting that he nearly missed his brother's wedding this summer and spent his birthday holed up in Tesla's offices as the company raced to meet elusive production targets on a crucial new model.

Asked if the exhaustion was taking a toll on his physical health, Mr. Musk answered: “It's not been great, actually. I've had friends come by who are really concerned.”

More from The New York Times:

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A Tesla Take-Private Bid Would Be More of the Same for Silver Lake

Elon Musk's Effort to Take Tesla Private to Get Board Oversight

The events set in motion by Mr. Musk's tweet have ignited a federal investigation and have angered some board members, according to people familiar with the matter. Efforts are underway to find a No. 2 executive to help take some of the pressure off Mr. Musk, people briefed on the search said. And some board members have expressed concern not only about Mr. Musk's workload but also about his use of Ambien, two people familiar with the board said.

Pressure is starting to break Tesla's Elon Musk, says NYT's Kate Kelly
11:28 AM ET Fri, 17 Aug 2018 | 03:22

For two decades, Mr. Musk has been one of Silicon Valley's most brash and ambitious entrepreneurs, helping to found several influential technology companies. He has often carried himself with bravado, dismissing critics and relishing the spotlight that has come with his success and fortune. But in the interview, he demonstrated an extraordinary level of self-reflection and vulnerability, acknowledging that his myriad executive responsibilities are taking a steep personal toll.

In the interview, Mr. Musk provided a detailed timeline of the events leading up to the Twitter postings on Aug. 7 in which he said he was considering taking the company private at $420 a share. He asserted that he had “funding secured” for such a deal — a transaction likely to be worth well over $10 billion.

That morning, Mr. Musk woke up at home with his girlfriend, the musician known as Grimes, and had an early workout. Then he got in a Tesla Model S and drove himself to the airport. En route, Mr. Musk typed his fateful message.

Mr. Musk has said he saw the tweet as an attempt at transparency. He acknowledged Thursday that no one had seen or reviewed it before he posted it.

Tesla's shares soared. Investors, analysts and journalists puzzled over the tweet — published in the middle of the day's official market trading, an unusual time to release major news — including the price Mr. Musk cited. He said in the interview that he wanted to offer a roughly 20 percent premium over where the stock had been recently trading, which would have been about $419. He decided to round up to $420 — a number that has become code for marijuana in counterculture lore.

“It seemed like better karma at $420 than at $419,” he said in the interview. “But I was not on weed, to be clear. Weed is not helpful for productivity. There's a reason for the word 'stoned.' You just sit there like a stone on weed.”

Mr. Musk reached the airport and flew on a private plane to Nevada, where he spent the day visiting a Tesla battery plant known as the Gigafactory, including time meeting with managers and working on an assembly line. That evening, he flew to the San Francisco Bay Area, where he held Tesla meetings late into the night.

What Mr. Musk meant by “funding secured” has become an important question. Those two words helped propel Tesla's shares higher.

But that funding, it turned out, was far from secure.

Mr. Musk has said he was referring to a potential investment by Saudi Arabia's government investment fund. Mr. Musk had extensive talks with representatives of the $250 billion fund about possibly financing a transaction to take Tesla private — maybe even in a manner that would have resulted in the Saudis' owning most of the company. One of those sessions took place on July 31 at the Tesla factory in the Bay Area, according to a person familiar with the meeting. But the Saudi fund had not committed to provide any cash, two people briefed on the discussions said.

Another possibility under consideration is that SpaceX, Mr. Musk's rocket company, would help bankroll the Tesla privatization and would take an ownership stake in the carmaker, according to people familiar with the matter.

Mr. Musk's tweet kicked off a chain reaction.

An hour and 20 minutes after the tweet, with Tesla's shares up 7 percent, the Nasdaq stock exchange halted trading, and Tesla published a letter to employees from Mr. Musk explaining the rationale for possibly taking the company private. When the shares resumed trading, they continued their climb, ending the day with an 11 percent gain.

The next day, investigators in the San Francisco office of the Securities and Exchange Commission asked Tesla for explanations. Ordinarily, such material information about a public company's plans is laid out in detail after extensive internal preparation and issued through official channels. Board members, blindsided by the chief executive's market-moving statement, were angry that they had not been briefed, two people familiar with the matter said. They scrambled to cobble together a public statement trying to defuse a mounting uproar over the seemingly haphazard communication.

Mr. Musk said in the interview that board members had not complained to him about his tweet. “I don't recall getting any communications from the board at all,” he said. “I definitely did not get calls from irate directors.”

But shortly after the Times published its interview with Mr. Musk, he added through a Tesla spokeswoman that Antonio Gracias, Tesla's lead independent director, had indeed contacted him to discuss the Aug. 7 Twitter post, and that he had agreed not to tweet again about the possible privatization deal unless he had discussed it with the board.

Joshua Lott | Getty Images
Engineer and tech entrepreneur Elon Musk of The Boring Company talks about constructing a high speed transit tunnel at Block 37 during a news conference on June 14, 2018 in Chicago, Illinois.

In the interview, Mr. Musk added that he did not regret his Twitter post — “Why would I?” — and said he had no plans to stop using the social media platform. Some board members, however, have recently told Mr. Musk that he should lay off Twitter and focus on making cars and launching rockets, according to people familiar with the matter.

The S.E.C. investigation appears to be intensifying rapidly. Just days after the agency's request for information, Tesla's board and Mr. Musk received S.E.C. subpoenas, according to a person familiar with the matter. Board members and Mr. Musk are preparing to meet with S.E.C. officials as soon as next week, the person said.

In the interview on Thursday, Mr. Musk alternated between laughter and tears.

He said he had been working up to 120 hours a week recently — echoing the reason he cited in a recent public apology to an analyst whom he had berated. In the interview, Mr. Musk said he had not taken time off of more than a week since 2001, when he was bedridden with malaria.

“There were times when I didn't leave the factory for three or four days — days when I didn't go outside,” he said. “This has really come at the expense of seeing my kids. And seeing friends.”

Mr. Musk stopped talking, seemingly overcome by emotion.

He turned 47 on June 28, and he said he spent the full 24 hours of his birthday at work. “All night — no friends, nothing,” he said, struggling to get the words out.

Two days later, he was scheduled to be the best man at the wedding of his brother, Kimbal, in Catalonia. Mr. Musk said he flew directly there from the factory, arriving just two hours before the ceremony. Immediately afterward, he got back on the ..

With Elon Musk’s visibility ‘there is incredible isolation,’ leadership expert says

Many leaders feel like Elon Musk does, says expert
3:46 PM ET Fri, 17 Aug 2018 | 03:34

Tesla CEO Elon Musk's feelings of exhaustion “are not uncommon for leaders” in his position who face growing pressure, leadership wellness expert Lowinn Kibbey told CNBC on Friday.

“I think what Musk has done is illuminate an issue that many leaders feel,” Kibbey said on CNBC's “Closing Bell.”

Following months of bizarre behavior from Musk, The New York Times published an extended interview with the Tesla CEO in which he said the past year has been “excruciating” and “the most difficult and painful” of his career. In the emotional interview, Musk revealed he has been working as much as 120 hours per week, which caused him to work through his birthday and almost miss his brother's wedding. The CEO also revealed that when he gets a rare moment of shut-eye, it is often with the help of sleep aid Ambien.

Shares of Tesla tumbled 8.9 percent Friday after the interview was published.

Kibbey is global head of the Johnson & Johnson Human Performance Institute, which runs a program that works with athletes, the military and Fortune 500 CEOs to train them for high-pressure roles. He said the nature of the CEO role, as well as other high-level executive roles, has become more stressful with the advent of social media.

“The CEO role is an incredibly, highly visible role. There is tremendous stress in it. And over the last, say, five years, that stress has grown even greater, with complete visibility — from social media, pressure from activist shareholders, short sellers,” Kibbey said.

“With that visibility, though, there is incredible isolation. It is very difficult to share what's going on in a way where you feel that people can have empathy and that you can trust them,” he added.

It's Musk's erratic behavior, both on social media and off, that has invited much of the recent criticism of his character and management style. Most recently, his tweet that he would take Tesla private at $420 per share and had “funding secured” has invited scrutiny from the Securities and Exchange Commission.

In July, he took to Twitter to call a British cave diver who assisted in the rescue of a Thai boys soccer team a “pedo guy.” During Tesla's first-quarter earnings call in May, Musk dissed analysts, cutting off Sanford Bernstein's Toni Sacconaghi because of what he called a “boring, bonehead” question. Musk later apologized to Sacconaghi and to the diver, Vernon Unsworth, for his comments.

As executive roles change, companies should change their approaches to training those executives, Kibbey said.

“There has to be a whole-person approach to this. No one has talked about this before; it's always been about what results have you driven in Q3 or Q4,” Kibbey said. “But the truth is, if that leader is not showing up physically well … if the mental, emotional resilience is not there, if the character-driven leadership is not there, that creates risk.”

The stakes may be high, but Kibbey said that doesn't mean Musk should step down as CEO and chairman. Instead, he applauded the entrepreneur for his transparency.

“This problem is common, and what Elon has done today is courageously talked about the pressure of that role,” Kibbey said.

Elon Musk’s stunning interview was a $1 billion gift to the short sellers he loathes

VCG | Getty Images
Elon Musk, Tesla CEO, addresses a press conference in October 2015.

The investors betting against Tesla just got a gift from the company's chief executive, Elon Musk.

Mr. Musk opened up on Thursday in an emotional interview with The New York Times about the toll the past year has taken on him, blaming those so-called short-sellers for much of his stress. It followed his cryptic tweet last week about converting the publicly traded company into a private one, which created a frenzy in the market.

The day after the interview, the stock of the electric-car maker tumbled 9 percent to $306.

Those losses were gains for the short-sellers. The slide in Tesla's shares generated more than $1 billion in profits for short-sellers, according to S3 Partners, a financial technology and analytics firm, which tracks the positions held by those investors.

The stock drop helped them recover much of their losses that came on Aug. 7, the day Mr. Musk tweeted he was considering taking Tesla private at a stock price of $420. Short-sellers lost $1.3 billion that day after Tesla's shares jumped 11 percent on the news.

Read more from The New York Times:

Elon Musk Details 'Excruciating' Personal Toll of Tesla Turmoil

Tesla Directors, in Damage Control Mode, Want Elon Musk to Stop Tweeting

Did Elon Musk Violate Securities Laws With Tweet About Taking Tesla Private?

Mr. Musk had long sparred with investors who make money when the company's stock falls. And he is bracing for the fight to get worse. Mr. Musk told The New York Times that he was expecting ''at least a few months of extreme torture from the short-sellers, who are desperately pushing a narrative that will possibly result in Tesla's destruction.''

Tesla is among the most shorted stocks in the United States. More than a quarter of its stock valued at more than $11 billion is being shorted, according to S3 Partners.

Short-sellers have increased their bets against Tesla this year as its struggles have mounted. The company has continued to lose money. Its Model 3, crucial to the company becoming profitable, has faced glitches and delays.

In March, a driver was killed after a Model X crashed into a concrete highway divider while Autopilot, Tesla's driver-assistance feature, was in use.

That same month, Moody's Investors Service downgraded the company's credit rating, concerned that the company was burning through cash.

It has made for a bumpy ride for Tesla investors — on either side of the trade.

Through it all, Mr. Musk's public attacks on shorts have only intensified.

In May, he took to Twitter and warned of the ''short burn of the century comin soon.'' A month later, he predicted that those wagering on the stock's decline ''had three weeks before their short position explodes.'' He even taunted David Einhorn, whose Greenlight Capital hedge fund has performed poorly this year in part because of its short bet on Tesla.

Mr. Musk has pointed to short-sellers as a reason he is considering taking Tesla private. In a message to employees explaining his thinking, he wrote: ''As the most shorted stock in the history of the stock market, being public means that there are large numbers of people who have the incentive to attack the company.''

He isn't exactly right on his history of short-sellers. At various points in the past 10 years, the value of bets against Procter & Gamble, General Electric, Pfizer and Johnson & Johnson exceeded Tesla's high of roughly $13 billion, according to IHS Markit.

The value of short bets against Alibaba currently stands at $25 billion.

Even by the percentage of shares being shorted, it is not the highest. It's not even the biggest of 2018. So far this year, 26 companies have had a higher percentage of their stock shorted than Tesla did at its peak of 33 percent in May.

But he does have a point about the persistence of short-sellers trying to profit on Tesla's troubles. The short position in Tesla's shares has remained above $10 billion for nearly five months. In the past decade, short-sellers have not held a position valued at more than $10 billion in any other American company for more than three months, according to IHS Markit.

Betting against Tesla has been expensive. Since 2016, short-sellers collectively have lost $5 billion, as the company's shares rose 27 percent.

Even this year, amid all of Tesla's woes, betting on a decline in the company's share price has not been a winner. Its short-sellers remain down $650 million this year.

TSLA

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Tesla’s slashing of expenses may be costly as Elon Musk pushes a take-private deal

Getty Images | Diego Donamaria
Tesla CEO Elon Musk.

As questions swirl about whether Tesla will go private — and the well-being of its chief executive, Elon Musk — one crucial factor looms large over the fate of the electric car company: Tesla's own financial health.

The company has undertaken drastic measures as it seeks profitability, cutting costs and even erecting a tent-covered third assembly line at its manufacturing plant. But many of those tactics may not be sustainable for long, and some could even hurt the company down the road.

The state of Tesla's balance sheet, and particularly its near-term cash position, are important to the company's future, perhaps even more so since Mr. Musk's surprise declaration on Aug. 7 that he would explore taking the company private.

In an emotional interview with The New York Times last week in which he discussed the ''excruciating'' year he has had, Mr. Musk said Tesla would soon be in the black.

''Tesla is going to be profitable and cash flow positive,'' Mr. Musk said. ''From a Tesla standpoint, I think it is a good place.''

His remarks echo what he said on the company's most recent earnings call, when he predicted the company would turn a profit in the next quarter.

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Mr. Musk is under intense pressure from Wall Street to make good on that promise, and Tesla has been plagued by manufacturing issues while ramping up production of its mass-market Model 3.

Meanwhile, short-sellers continue to target the stock, injecting a destabilizing element to the company's share price. Good financial results would be bad news for the hedge funds betting Tesla will fail, and serve as vindication for Mr. Musk.

And Tesla's financial position will have a significant impact on any potential effort to take Tesla private. Investors evaluating a potential take-private deal will be assessing not only Tesla's long-term prospects, but its current cash on hand and debts.

To achieve that profitability, Tesla is scrambling to slash spending in almost all areas of it operations.

In June, it announced it would lay off about 3,500 employees, about 9 percent of its work force, in a cost-cutting move. It has approached some suppliers about refunding some money Tesla has paid for projects that are still underway.

Tesla has said it is working to reduce costs by delivering completed vehicles faster. At the end of second quarter, it held inventory valued at $579 million, a figure the company said was ''a substantial increase'' from previous quarters.

And Tesla has even more drastic cost cutting plans in store. It has said it plans to cut capital expenditures by a fourth this year — to about $2.5 billion from $3.4 billion in 2017.

''There are a lot of levers they are pulling to be cash-flow neutral or positive in the second half, but there's trade-offs,'' said Toni Sacconaghi of Sanford C. Bernstein.

Tesla declined to comment for this story.

But while analysts say Tesla may very well achieve profitability soon, the spending cuts necessary to do so could be costly, delaying the introduction of new models that could help boost revenues.

''Those are not necessarily the best for the long-term growth of the company,'' Mr. Sacconaghi said. ''Cutting back on capex is not sustainable,'' he said, referring to capital expenditures. ''Cutting inventories is not sustainable.''

What's more, Tesla's push to conserve cash will soon be complicated by two bond payments that come due in the next several months.

It is scheduled to pay off a $230 million convertible bond in November, and a payment of $920 million on a second convertible bond is due next February. Tesla could pay the second bond in stock instead of cash, if its share price is above $360. It has traded above that level in recent weeks, but on Friday it closed at $305.50.

Tesla has slipped into financial difficulties, in part because of how much cash it has been using up — nearly $1 billion every three months. It ended the second quarter with $2.2 billion, down from $3.3 billion at the beginning of the year.

The company's precarious cash position prompted Moody's Investors Service to downgrade Tesla's debt in March, citing ''the likelihood that Tesla will have to undertake a large, near-term capital raise in order to refund maturing obligations and avoid a liquidity shortfall.''

Mr. Musk has said no such capital raise would be necessary, because Tesla will soon be profitable. But Bruce Clark of Moody's said he still expected the company may have to tap the capital markets.

''The company has made some important progress with the Model 3 production and has reduced capital expenditures, but I still think they are going to need additional capital,'' Mr. Clark said. ''It's not as tight as it had been, but they have to stay on the track they've been on recently.''

Mr. Musk has said that the production issues that bedeviled Tesla earlier this year are being resolved.

In June, the company hastily built an assembly line in a gigantic tent outside the walls of its plant in Fremont, Calif., in an effort to speed up production of the Model 3. That extra assembly line — along with the removing of bottlenecks in the two indoor lines — has enabled Tesla to put the output level to 5,000 per week, up from fewer than 3,000 cars per week in May.

Those gains have required round-the-clock production, however, which may not be possible for Tesla to sustain. Other automakers have found 24-hour production is untenable in the long run because workers become burned out and machinery tends to break down more frequently.

Further complicating Tesla's financial future is a Securities and Exchange Commission inquiry into Mr. Musk's tweet announcing that he was considering taking the company private. The commission is expected to begin meeting with Tesla executives this week.

To deal with the investigation, the Tesla board and the special committee of the board evaluating a potential buyout, have each retained law firms. Additionally, the special committee has retained a crisis communications firm, and other public relations firms are angling for assignments.

Those legal fees will add up, and the threat of lengthy legal proceedings could also complicate Tesla's efforts to raise more cash should it need to.

Early Sunday morning, Mr. Musk took to Twitter and reminded his followers just how hard he is working as he struggles to make Tesla profitable.

Responding to a post from Arianna Huffington, the Huffington Post founder and member of Uber's board of directors, who suggested he take a vacation and focus on his physical and mental health, Mr. Musk said: ''I just got home from the factory. You think this is an option. It is not.''

TSLA

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Elon Musk should consider working with distributors, delegating more, ex-Toyota exec says

Musk treated well now and maybe better if Tesla doesn't go private: Former auto exec
4 Hours Ago | 03:54

Tesla CEO Elon Musk needs to delegate more and work with an outside distributor if he's going to make the electric car maker “sustainable,” Jim Press, former COO and president of Toyota Motor Sales U.S.A., told CNBC on Monday.

“You need to have a marketing organization, have to have sales, you have to have an active distribution channel, and you really do need day-to-day management operation. You can't sit by the plant and spend the night there to run everything. You can't funnel everything through one person,” Press said on CNBC's “Closing Bell.”

Tesla has battled widespread criticism since Musk's Aug. 7 tweet that he was planning to take Tesla public and had “funding secured,” which may have violated Securities and Exchange Commission rules. In a blog post, Musk attempted to clarify that his claim about secured funding was based on repeated and ongoing conversations with Saudi Arabia's sovereign wealth fund, which was cast into doubt when it surfaced on Sunday that the fund is in talks to invest in a Tesla rival.

Going private is one way to avoid close scrutiny by the public market, which Tesla has faced in recent months as it fought to meet Model 3 production goals. Some analysts speculate Musk has wanted to take Tesla private for a while, and the press and shareholder hype surrounding Model 3 production goals hastened his ambitions.

Despite Musk's concerns, Press, who was also the deputy CEO of Chrysler, said the market has been pretty fair to Tesla so far, especially when compared with legacy motor companies, such as Ford. But now, he said, “There's some reality coming into it,” meaning Tesla will have to get profitable or face ongoing market adjustment.

“The reality is, the market treats him very well. If you look at the market cap of Tesla, $50 billion, compared to Ford, that makes a profit — the stock is about $9 — it shows the disconnect, and there is an adjustment that's occurring,” Press said.

Tesla shares closed out the day up 0.96 percent at $308.44.

To get profitable, Press added, Musk needs to learn to delegate, both within the company and without.

“I always have a saying, and that is, you don't have stress, you should give it. And [Musk] doesn't have anyone to give it to,” Press said.

Press said Musk should hire someone to “run day-to-day” operations while he works at “30,000 feet” and should look outside of the company for independent distribution channels, such as third-party dealerships.

“He is the only one that's trying to run the distribution channel and capitalize that at the same time. There's a whole opportunity there for an independent distribution channel to take half the work load off and create the sales,” Press said.

And as for going private, Press said it may be best for the carmaker to stay put, rather than risk the unknown pressures from the private market.

“I understand the frustration, but going private may not be the best. You know, the devil that you know — versus the devil you don't — may actually treat him better,” Press said.

Tesla did not immediately respond to CNBC's request for comment.

Tesla investor: There couldn’t be a better time for Apple to invest in Tesla

Bull and bear debate the trade in Apple
7 Hours Ago | 04:25

Apple should buy a stake in Tesla now for the sake of both companies, Tesla investor Ross Gerber told CNBC on Monday.

“This is [Apple CEO] Tim Cook's gift of all gifts,” Gerber said on CNBC's “Squawk Alley.”

Gerber, co-founder & CEO of Gerber Kawasaki, said a potential investment from Apple in Tesla could be hugely beneficial to both companies.

Tesla has faced extensive scrutiny in the past year for a wide array of issues, including a push to meet Model 3 production goals. CEO Elon Musk, who on Friday admitted the past year has been “excruciating” and “the most difficult and painful” of his career, has come under fire for erratic behavior. Most recently, Musk rattled markets after tweeting he was planning to take Tesla public when the stock reached $420 per share and that he had “funding secured.” The tweet hasinvited scrutiny from the Securities and Exchange Commission.

“If you look at actually what Elon's problems are every day, they are operational, which is why Tim Cook was hired by Steve Jobs back in the day. Cook is perfect for this role,” Gerber said. “In the past Apple and Tesla probably wouldn't have gotten along because Musk didn't need Apple, but it is clear he needs help [now].”

And what Tesla lacks in scaling and operations, it makes up for in innovation — which Gerber says is what Apple desperately needs long-term.

With a giant cash hoard and deep-running consumer loyalty, Apple became the first publicly traded U.S. company to hit a valuation of $1 trillion in early August. It has since continued its trajectory, hitting a fresh all-time high in intraday trading on Monday. Despite Apple's recent success, however, it has its own share of pressures. Some investors worry stagnating iPhone sales could spell trouble for the company in the future.

“My biggest fear with Apple is that they have fallen so far behind in the innovation curve, I don't see where they will be five years from now,” Gerber said. “I don't think phones are going to be the primary device in a decade,” he added.

Ivan Feinseth, chief investment officer at Tigress Financial Partners, agreed Tesla could present a decent investment opportunity for Apple but said the investment wouldn't make or break the tech giant.

“I don't think Apple is on the decline. It is still on the ascent,” Feinseth said.

He said wearables and Apple's voice assistant, Siri, still present big areas for growth and innovation.

But an investment in Tesla could present a unique opportunity for Apple to “get a foothold in the development” of Tesla technology, which it usually keeps in-house.

“Apple does have enough cash, with the $240 billion they now have. With that they could buy Tesla, Ford, Fiat, Ferrari, Harley Davidson — they could buy everything,” Feinseth said.

“Why would they want to tie themselves down with owning an automobile manufacturer? If they want to be involved with the manufacturing, especially the integration of technology, taking a financial interest in Tesla would make sense,” he added.

Gerber agreed mobility could be a huge opportunity for Apple in the future. And he said the iPhone maker's secretive self-driving car project, “Project Titan,” is “going nowhere,” so Tesla would be a surer bet. If Apple were to strike a deal with Tesla that put its operating system and app store in Tesla cars, that would open up a whole new avenue for Apple to market its services and applications to customers, he said.

“Apple should buy 5, 10 percent of Tesla just to get the iOS onto that Tesla screen. Part of the Tesla story is that screen in the middle of the car, and not having Apple on that screen is going to be a huge problem for them,” he said.

Whether or not Tesla ends up private, Apple should act now, while Musk is actively searching for partners, Gerber said.

Shares of Tesla closed up 0.96 percent at $308.44. Shares of Apple closed down 0.97 percent at $215.46, after briefly touching an all-time high of $219.18 in intraday trading on Monday.

Apple and Tesla did not immediately respond to CNBC's requests for comment.

After fatal accident, Uber’s vision of self-driving cars begins to blur

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An Uber self-driving car drives down 5th Street on March 28, 2017 in San Francisco, California.

SAN FRANCISCO — After Dara Khosrowshahi took over as Uber's chief executive last August, he considered shutting the company's money-losing autonomous vehicle division. A visit to Pittsburgh this spring changed that.

In town for a leadership summit, Mr. Khosrowshahi and other Uber executives were briefed on the state of the company's self-driving vehicle research, which is based in Pittsburgh. The group was impressed by the progress its autonomous division had made in testing driverless cars in Pittsburgh and in Arizona, according to three people familiar with the ride-hailing company, who were not authorized to speak publicly. They left the meeting energized, convinced that Uber needed to forge ahead with self-driving cars, the people said.

But days after the summit, one of Uber's autonomous cars struck and killed a woman who was pushing a bicycle across a street in Tempe, Ariz. Video from the March 18 collision showed a distracted safety driver failing to react in time as the vehicle barreled into the pedestrian, Elaine Herzberg.

The accident threw Uber's autonomous vehicle efforts into flux, immediately forcing the suspension of its self-driving car tests in cities including Tempe, Pittsburgh and Toronto. Months later, Uber's executives are divided over what to do with the autonomous business, according to the people familiar with the company. While one camp is pushing Mr. Khosrowshahi to seek partnerships or even a potential sale of the unit, known as the Advanced Technologies Group, a rival contingent is arguing that developing self-driving technology is crucial to Uber's future, the people said.

Mr. Khosrowshahi remains undecided, the people said, though he has expressed a desire to partner with other companies on autonomous technologies. In recent months, Uber has started talking with a few auto manufacturers about potential partnerships, including supplying Uber's autonomous driving technology for use in Toyota's minivans, according to one person familiar with the talks. Toyota declined to comment.

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The internal debates are unfolding at a time when many companies can ill afford to pause on autonomous technology given stiff competition from carmakers and other tech companies. In recent months, top engineers have left Uber's self-driving project for lucrative opportunities elsewhere. Uber's self-driving cars recently returned to the road in Pittsburgh but with human drivers at the wheel, meaning employees are driving around like any other motorist — except their vehicles are carrying hundreds of thousands of dollars in technology.

The issue of whether to retain or sell A.T.G. is complicated by Uber's stated intention to go public by the end of 2019. The company, valued at $62 billion, has racked up billions of dollars in losses since it was founded in 2009 and needs to persuade investors that it can eventually create a sustainably profitable business. The self-driving efforts, which have been losing $100 million to $200 million a quarter, do little to help that case. And Mr. Khosrowshahi has been shedding money-losing businesses since he joined Uber.

At a meeting in Pittsburgh on Aug. 8, according to a person briefed on the event, Mr. Khosrowshahi did not address what he would do with the self-driving efforts but told employees there that it ''is a big-time hardware manufacturing, software problem at scale. Lots of tech companies out there are going after this problem, but I think there are very few companies who are taking this on end-to-end at scale the way we are.''

In a statement, Uber said: ''Right now the entire team is focused on safely and responsibly returning to the road in autonomous mode. That's our No. 1 objective, and we have every confidence in the work they are doing to get us there.''

Uber first made its interest in self-driving cars public when it hired about 40 researchers and scientists from the National Robotics Engineering Center at Carnegie Mellon University in 2015. At the time, the company's chief executive was one of the founders of Uber, Travis Kalanick, who had decided to bet big on self-driving vehicles. He wanted to prepare Uber for a future when fleets of driverless cars could move passengers efficiently and safely around the clock.

In 2016, Uber acquired Otto, a self-driving truck start-up whose founders had decamped from Google. The deal later spurred a trade-secrets-theft lawsuit from Google's onetime self-driving car unit, Waymo. The case briefly went to trial this year, generating headlines and embarrassing revelations, before Uber settled with Waymo in February.

In its rush to get on the road with driverless cars, Uber also ran afoul of regulators. The company started testing its autonomous vehicles in San Francisco in 2016, without a permit from California's Division of Motor Vehicles. The state agency ordered Uber to apply for a permit, but the company refused, saying permits were not necessary since safety drivers were monitoring the cars. The D.M.V. ultimately revoked the registrations for the 16 self-driving cars that Uber was testing in the city.

By early this year, Uber's self-driving division was preparing to ramp up development, pushing its testing cars in Arizona to tally more miles. The goal, according to internal documents reviewed by The New York Times, was for Uber to win regulatory approval to start testing a self-driving car service in Arizona before the end of this year.

But the crash in March — the first known fatality involving a pedestrian and an autonomous car — altered everything. Since then, Uber has steadily narrowed the scope of its autonomous vehicle operations.

In May, Uber announced that it was shutting its driverless testing hub in Arizona and laying off 300 employees. A day later, preliminary findings from federal regulators investigating the crash confirmed what many self-driving car experts suspected: Uber's self-driving car should have detected a pedestrian with enough time to stop, but it failed to do so. Uber has begun a safety review and plans to publish its assessment in the coming months.

Mr. Khosrowshahi has started to subtly de-emphasize the company's role in developing driverless technology.

At a conference last year, he said it was a ''huge advantage'' for Uber to have its own autonomous technology while operating a global ride-sharing network. But this May, Mr. Khosrowshahi said that while Uber needed to have access to autonomous technology, it aimed to be ''neutral.'' He said Uber would be open to licensing its own technology or building around alternatives from other companies — a stark contrast to the company's previous approach of owning and operating the entire self-driving ''stack'' of technology and hardware.

And in July, Uber announced that it was closing its autonomous trucking business. The company instead said it would focus exclusively on building self-driving cars.

''For now, we need the focus of one team, with one clear objective,'' Eric Meyhofer, who leads Uber's driverless car efforts, wrote in an email to employees.

In the preceding months, some senior engineers and executives with expertise in self-driving vehicles had already left. One of those was Don Burnette, one of Otto's founders, who became the chief executive of a new self-driving company called Kodiak, which focuses on long-haul trucking.

''I really wanted to focus on the trucking problem, and there was not as much focus on that at Uber,'' Mr. Burnette said.

He added that Uber would most likely continue to pursue its vision of driverless cars because it and other companies ''have been working on it for so long, promising this for so long, and they have a tremendous amount of money behind them.''

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Tesla pares losses in volatile trading after falling below $300

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Elon Musk

Tesla's stock price fell below $300 per share at one point on Monday as investors in the electric car maker continued to doubt the validity of a privatization proposal by founder Elon Musk.

Shares of the Palo Alto, California-based company fell as low as $288.20 before rebounding shortly after the open of trading. The stock was down 0.6 percent at $303 as of 10:43 am ET.

Earlier Monday, J.P. Morgan slashed its projections for the carmaker, telling clients that while it originally took chief executive Elon Musk's proposal to take the company private at $420 per share seriously, the funding to do so “appears to not have been secured.”

The firm pared its year-end price target for Tesla shares back to $195 from $308, representing 36 percent downside to Friday's close.

But while the bearish J.P. Morgan note may have weighed on the stock Monday, investors have had plenty of reason to question the CEO over the past few weeks.

Shares also fell after news broke that PIF, the Saudi Arabian sovereign wealth fund that Musk has said could help him fund an offer to take the car company private, is in talks to invest in rival Lucid Motors, Reuters reported cited sources.

The Securities and Exchange Commission, meanwhile, reportedly served Tesla with a subpoena early last week after Musk's now-infamous privatization tweet.

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Earlier reports said the SEC had intensified scrutiny of the automaker after the Aug. 7 tweet. A subpoena would be one of the first steps in a formal inquiry.

The SEC declined CNBC's request for comment on the subpoena.

Musk admitted last Thursday in an emotional interview with The New York Times that the past year has been taxing for him, blaming so-called short-sellers — investors betting against the company — for much of his stress.

He told the newspaper he's overwhelmed by the job, has been working up to 120 hours per week and takes Ambien to fall asleep on occasion.

Tesla shares tumbled 9 percent to $306 the day following the interview.

Columnist and businesswoman Arianna Huffington later called on Musk to adopt a healthier work-life balance in light of the interview, but he said that's not a viable option.

Musk told the Huffington Post founder in a tweet Sunday morning that his car company and Ford are the only two American automakers that have avoided bankruptcy. He then added, in an apparent reference to his long workweek: “You think this is an option. It's not.”

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5:20 PM ET Fri, 17 Aug 2018 | 07:59