Hey, everybody Rob Mower here and today we were talking about a recent Elon Musk interview published today by Automotive News.

This is actually a three-part interview, so part one was today, and then part two and three will

be on Monday and Tuesday.

The full interview is about 24 minutes long and if you want to listen to the entire thing,

which I would always recommend, you can search Automotive News Daily Drive and any podcast

app.

I don't believe it's on YouTube.

While there wasn't a whole lot of earth-shattering news from the podcast. I did find it to be pretty informative. They began

talking about Tesla's workforce and just reflecting on how they started with five employees now up to

about 60,000. Elon says by the end of the year, Tesla will probably be at about 65,000 as I said on the conference call they are hiring a lot right now

Then Elon went into manufacturing a little bit and a lot of interesting comments around this he started off by reiterating in response to a question

about Tesla's long-term competitive advantage being manufacturing, essentially

saying, as he has in the past, that in 10 years probably almost all new cars will be fully autonomous.

So if Tesla has autonomy, other competitors are probably going to have autonomy whether they build

it themselves or get it from a supplier.

Then quote, they will also have autonomy.

We will have autonomy. We will just need to be better at manufacturing than that, end quote.

Elon added, quote, the reason I say the long-term sustainable advantage of Tesla will be manufacturing is that I think it's actually the hardest thing to do

manufacturing at scale effectively." End quote. One thing that I would add to that is that

naturally I think there is just less interest in manufacturing and Elon sort of alluded to this on the earnings call as well.

Software has just opened up so much digital opportunity that a lot of really talented and smart people

don't actually need to be involved in physical products anymore.

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