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Trump calls for California to let Elon Musk open Tesla plant

Yahoo Finance’s Emily McCormick joins Yahoo Finance’s Seana Smith to discuss President Trump tweeting earlier for California to allow Tesla CEO Elon Musk open the electric automaker factory in the state.

Video Transcript

SEANA SMITH: Welcome back to Yahoo Finance's "The Ticker."

Let's talk about Tesla. Tesla CEO Elon Musk making headlines yet again this week. This time he's defying orders by resuming production at its California plant. Now President Trump also backed him today, backed his decision today to reopen that plant. He tweeted this morning, quote, "California should let Tesla and Elon Musk open the plant now. It can be done fast and safely."

For more on this, I want to bring in Emily McCormick. And, Emily, I mean, I guess my question to you is where do things stand at this point? Because there was even discussion when we were talking about this earlier in the day that, I mean, is there a possibility that Elon Musk could be arrested at this point?

EMILY MCCORMICK: Well, Seana, to take things back to where we started, we have to really remember that this really all began last week, and that's when California Governor Gavin Newsom said that the state would ease some of its lockdown orders for manufacturing and some other industries. However, he did leave the door open for individual counties to continue with more stringent stay-in-place measures for an extended period of time.

Alameda County was one such county. So they had previously extended their lockdown, along with several other counties in the San Francisco Bay Area where Tesla's Fremont facility is headquartered. They'd extended that through at least the end of May.

So that's something that Elon Musk and Tesla are contesting at this point. They filed a complaint with the US District Court for the Northern District of California seeking a permanent injunction to prevent enforcement of those county orders that are right now saying that Tesla can't return to operation.

And even though that case is still ongoing, we know that earlier today, according to a Bloomberg report, the lawsuit had been referred to a mediation process, although that doesn't necessarily mean that's how the case will be resolved. We know that Elon Musk said that he'd already reopen the facility. There have been employees streaming in and out of the factory as of yesterday and presumably today as well.

He did acknowledge that there was a possibility that he could be arrested for defying these county orders. But for now, this is something that is an ongoing case and is-- really, just the drama continues between California, the county, and Tesla and Elon Musk.

SEANA SMITH: Yeah, we know we've seen Musk-- he hasn't backed down before when he's been faced with-- I guess he defied SEC regulators. There's also a couple of other interactions or different times that he was aggressive.

But, Emily, I want to talk about Tesla, the impact that the company is having or the company seeing from COVID-19. We talked about earlier this week yesterday that sales in China fell in the month of March. Any indication about how sales here in the US have been doing over the last two months?

EMILY MCCORMICK: Well, that's something that does remain to be seen. We know for the first quarter at least, the first three months of the year, we had Tesla post year-over-year growth and better-than-expected delivery figures. But at the same time, that didn't capture the full impact of the coronavirus pandemic and both the supply-side and the demand-side impacts.

What we know about the Fremont factory in particular, though, is that's the only location that Tesla has in the United States to actually assemble those cars. So really imperative for the company in hitting its delivery goals to have this facility up and running. But at the same time, of course, with that legal battle with Alameda County, that's something that could potentially stand in the way in the short term.

SEANA SMITH: All right, Emily, thank you.

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