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Despite reporting a 13% decline in sales from year ago Tesla shares, surged on Wednesday and it could have something to do with the report that Elon Musk will soon leave his role in the Trump administration to focus on the electric vehicle company. Once again joining us now to talk about all this Steven Jengaro, Stifel, Next Gen Transport Analyst. Stephen, it's always great to see you and have you on the show. Let's start with this this report, Stephen, that Trump is telling his inner circle Musk will soon leave. Uh, I'm curious what you make of that, Stephen. You know, we did have Dan Ives from Wedbush on the show recently. I'll tell you, Stephen, this is what Ives has been pounding the table on. He's telling me this is what I want. I want Musk out of politics. I want him back focusing on his businesses. Is that what you want to see, Stephen?

Yeah, I would agree. Josh, it's good to see you as well. The I mean clearly, you've seen the hate, right? I mean you've seen, you've seen all over the news what's going on at Tesla dealerships, people burning cars, etc. and Elon's involvement in in the government is is largely driving that that hatred towards the company. So, I do believe from a Tesla perspective, he would clearly be better off going back running Tesla and stepping away from his role on the government side.

Yes, Stephen, question. I see the the valuations. I see your note. Is there a way to price in reputational damage into a stock like this? We know this stock has been through so much if you just look over the past several years. But is there a way to price that in or you just have to look at unit sales, at fundamentals and what the prospects for growth look like?

Yeah, it's it's a very good question. So, when when we thought about the first quarter delivery numbers and we we lowered our our number to about 353,000 deliveries in the first quarter, part of that was the backlash around around Elon, part of that was just the Model Y switch over of production, which is the best-selling vehicle in the world and that clearly was going to have an impact. As far as trying to look at the the impact of, you know, on sales, on valuation, I think it's really hard to kind of compartmentalize the the specific valuation impact. Now you you obviously saw volatility in the stock around it. We have a we have a group at Stifel, Stifel think tank group that does outstanding work on data analytics and and we've published some reports which have shown, you know, the significant drop off in favorability ratings and net purchase considerations by Democrats on Teslas. And that's that's clearly matters because there's more Democrats buy EVs than Republicans at this point. Uh, and we saw this massive shift all of a sudden Republicans love Tesla and Democrats hate Tesla. So, you know, all of that probably gets reflected in the stock to some extent, but to really kind of compartmentalize it down on a valuation number is very difficult.