Could Musk's recent comments hurt Tesla sales?

Yahoo Finance's Myles Udland, Jennifer Rogers, Dan Roberts, and Melody Hahm discuss Tesla CEO Elon Musk's latest comments and tweets about the reopening of California, and whether that could hurt Tesla in the long run.

Video Transcript

MYLES UDLAND: To our favorite friend here on Yahoo Finance, that is Elon Musk. Of course, why not? Why wouldn't President Donald Trump get involved in Musk's latest efforts to open his factory out in California? That happened yesterday. One analyst estimates that about half of Tesla's workers showed up to work yesterday.

Jen, I don't know about you, but I was not surprised when I saw this morning that Trump had come out and said, yeah, you know, open the factories. Elon Musk, doing great things. It's been too long in coming that these two would find themselves on the same side of an issue.

JENNIFER ROGERS: Yeah, I mean, I'm definitely not surprised. I'm kind of curious and trying to think through the business implications. I mean, I think for the brand of Musk himself, the cult that he's setting out, I'm not sure that this is a knock to that, you know, the people that are going to sit and listen to him talk for two hours on "Joe Rogan."

But for the people that are buying cars, does this bleed into that at all? I will be curious to see, because he is taking a very controversial stand right now, and I'm not sure that all people that are in line to buy Teslas are people that agree with the stand that he is taking, and I do wonder if there'll be any knock at all on the business.

MYLES UDLAND: I'm not sure that that's as true as people want to think. I'm very skeptical of this idea that the Tesla buyer is not all the way in on Musk's view and that the marriage of-- its now polite to marry, I think, some of those politics around the issue of kind of how we've treated the virus. I don't know. Dan, what say you?

DAN ROBERTS: Well, I'm with you, Myles, or at least I tend to err on this thinking that more Tesla drivers than not are also Musk fans. That's not to say all of them are kind of fully in the Elon cult, but I think that if you are a big, big Tesla fan, you follow and are aware of and are likely a fan of Elon Musk, and that's not just the product he's created and the company he's running, but his whole kind of aura.

And so the same goes for the stockholders, you know, and the people who are responsible for Tesla stock and Tesla's pulls on [INAUDIBLE], so all that said, he says, I want to open the factory, and then he also has the president saying, yeah, let him open the factory.

I tend to think that more Tesla people than not say, yeah, that's right. Come on, let him open the factory. Which, you know, we know the risks here. We know that in some ways medically and based on the stats and news he looks a little reckless, but I think pre-existing Tesla fans are fans of almost anything he does and says.

MELODY HAHM: If the Trump administration has shown me one thing, it's that there's no such thing as strange bedfellows anymore. I think the tie-ups, and the mashups, and the collaborations, and Kanye, and Kim, and Elon. Like anything is possible at this point, so kind of to your earlier discussion, Jen and Myles, I do feel like, yeah, of course Trump is going to be champion anyone who kind of is a mouthpiece right now for getting the economic situation back on track, but I do want to point out larger picture, and Jen, to your question about what this means for production and what this means for the business.

And we discussed this yesterday, Myles, just thinking about tens of thousands of workers filing back into these manufacturing plants. I understand that this analyst went and saw that it's only about 50% capacity, but I can't imagine that everyone has been tested, everyone has gotten their antibodies tested, everyone will be fine, right?

So if that means they do have to close if there is a little bit of an outbreak, or if there is the spread of COVID-19, which is still very much at play, what does that mean overall? And Myles, you cannot renege on your bet that Elon is planning to move to Texas. So I still stand by the fact that--

JENNIFER ROGERS: Yeah.

MYLES UDLAND: I doubt-- I think you're--

MELODY HAHM: Anything.

MYLES UDLAND: --I think this makes it more likely.

MELODY HAHM: Wow.

MYLES UDLAND: That's just my opinions.

DAN ROBERTS: But now that he's reopened, why move the headquarters?

MELODY HAHM: But Alameda County came out yesterday and said in a statement, today we learned that the Tesla factory has opened beyond minimum basic operations. We have notified that they can only maintain MBO until we have an approved plan. I mean, it wasn't such a harsh statement, I think, that would deter Musk, who is seemingly not afraid of anything anyway.

DAN ROBERTS: Right. He's going to get away with it.

JENNIFER ROGERS: I just want to say about my point that it is future Tesla buyers that I'm talking about. Not people that have bought it, I agree that they're on board, but you know what? They need to sell a lot more cars to make this whole thing work.

MYLES UDLAND: What did Michael Jordan say? Republicans drive electric cars too, so maybe that's the world that we're headed towards. I don't know.