The transcript from this week’s, MiB: Peter Rawlinson, Lucid CEO/CTO, is below.
You can stream and download our full conversation, including any podcast extras, on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, YouTube, and Bloomberg. All of our earlier podcasts on your favorite pod hosts can be found here.
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Bloomberg Audio Studios, podcasts, radio News. This is Masters in Business with Barry Ritholtz on Bloomberg Radio.
Barry Ritholtz: This week on the podcast. What can I say about Peter Rollinson? Not only is he the guy who developed the model s from a clean sheet of paper for Tesla, but he’s the man behind Lucid. He joined as Chief Technology Officer and eventually became CEO and drove the launch of the Lucid Air, probably the most awarded car in the modern era. It has sucked up every single accolade that you can have for either an electric or traditional car, 500 miles of range, 1200 horsepower on the top of the line. Not only that, they have a mid tier car that’s about half the price of the six-figure one. They’re aiming to release an SUV towards the end of this year and a low-cost car in the 40,000 to $50,000 range in the coming years. This is a, a fascinating company. Rollinson has an amazing history in the industry, Lotus, Jaguar, Tesla, and now Lucid. I thought this conversation was absolutely fascinating, and I think
you will also, with no further ado, my conversation with Peter Rollinson.
Peter Rawlinson: Great to be here, Barry.
Barry Ritholtz: Great to have you. So let’s start a little bit with your background. You went to Imperial College at the University of London. Was the career plan always automotive engineering or what were you thinking?
Peter Rawlinson: I didn’t know what I was gonna do. I considered art school or something creative. I, I knew I wanted to design things and I, in the end I did, I did aa mechanical engineering course because it gave me the, the greatest optionality.
Barry Ritholtz: Imperial College has some amazing alumni, sir William Crooks, who invented the vacuum tube HD Wells Peter Higgs of Higgs Bozen or Alexander Fleming and penicillin. What, was your experience like at Imperial College?
Peter Rawlinson: Well, it was, it was quite an experience, the, a kid from Wales in the big city.
Barry Ritholtz: So let’s talk a little bit about your automotive background, chief engineer at Lotus Cars, principal engineer Jaguar two storied, marquees. Tell us a little bit about your experience with both of those.
Peter Rawlinson: Yeah, I mean, it was a wealth of experience. I think if we, if we look at my days at Jaguar, it was a fascinating period because it was the d dawn of the use of computers to design cars. Up to that time, cars had been designed on drawing boards
Barry Ritholtz: Manually. Pencil paper…
Peter Rawlinson: Yeah, absolutely. We’re talking in 1980s, and I was very fortunate that Jaguar made a big investment and a big push to pioneering the use of computer to digitally design a car. And it had never been done before. Seriously, I was one of the first people in the UK to use CAD computer aided design prior to Jaguar, but it was at Jaguar that we really started using it in earnest, and we used it in a joined up way with CAE computer aided engineering. So we could do the stress analysis by finite element analysis, which was all new stuff. It was cutting edge, and we found a way of transferring files from colleague to colleague, from their computer, from terminal to terminal. And effectively we developed our own intranet, which is known as an intranet now. Right. Well, this is long before the internet, right? We didn’t even have a name for it, and we were just transferring files. And we created this methodology of a digital process to design a car, which was totally revolutionary in terms of how all the systems were designed, the parts, how the designs were shared digitally, and how they were analyzed computationally for stress and crash performance.
Barry Ritholtz: So technology has been a core part of your process for bringing cars from a clean sheet to actually a sellable product?
Peter Rawlinson: Totally. And, and I, I’ve been fortunate, I’ve always worked until more recent years at the cutting edge in advanced engineering. I was responsible for advanced engineering at, at, at Lotus and at Jaguar was responsible for advanced body structure design. And it’s that sort of technological advancement that is really central to my, my career and my being really, and, and also trying to do kind of the impossible with very small teams of people, super smart people, very joined up, everyone knowing what’s going on, and the power of kind of an elite team of really capable people, kinda like special forces.
Barry Ritholtz: I love that analogy. So you go from Jaguar, Lotus in 2010 to Tesla as VP of vehicle engineering and, and chief engineer of the Tesla Model S, when, when you arrived, that was a clean sheet piece of paper, right?
Peter Rawlinson: Yeah, well, I actually, I joined in February oh nine, way before 09, 2009, 2010. I, it was formally announced quite a lot later after that. Yes. But I actually spoke to a guy called Elon Musk, who called me in in England in January and went out and met him in, in January oh nine. And I was, I was there in the company in, in February 09, long before there was a conceptual prototype of Model S
Barry Ritholtz: So back in those days, it was a little lotus alone where they took out the engine and dropped in a bunch of batteries and electric motors. Yeah. It, it’s hard to imagine that that beginning eventually led to the Model S and while the Model S is certainly long in the tooth, it’s been around a while, mm. When that car came out, it was pretty innovative and and unique in the world. Tell us about your experience helping to develop the model s the car that arguably changed the entire automotive world totally
Peter Rawlinson: Well, it was a labor of love. I, I was working crazy hours, I working regular a hundred hours a week to achieve that against all odds. And so when I joined the company, a a start had already been made. They’d been working on it for about a year, and it was a false dawn. It was never gonna work. So I had a difficult decision to make. The first week I was there, I had to go and tell my boss, my new boss that really need to start again with a clean sheet. And, and he had the, the, the wisdom to agree with me. And, and, and so we started afresh on model S from the ground up. So that, and that was probably second week of February 09
Barry Ritholtz: And then the car comes out in 2012. That’s incredibly rapid.
Peter Rawlinson: So it was record time and it was just, it was a crazy because I mean, I actually had a, a team of about six people to start with. Everyone had left, and it was obvious I had to start from scratch from a clean computer screen. So I had to hire the team, attract people to this company that no one had heard of, which no one gave a, a shot of being successful at.
Barry Ritholtz: There was certainly a lot of skepticism in the early years.
Peter Rawlinson: Totally. And there was this misconception, there wasn’t a sufficient expertise and experience to do, to do a car, let alone something which was really cutting edge. But actually having that clean sheet and having the authority, the go ahead to recruit my team and handpick my team, that’s what changed everything, because I could actually handpick an elite team of the best engineers in the world. And I called it everyone I’d worked from with before. That’s why a lot of Brits came out and designed Model S. It was a very much an international effort, but a lot of British people, because there’s people I knew right, from my, from my past, from Jaguar and Lotus, of course. {Exactly] And really we sat up Tesla engineering. There wasn’t a place to do it. And I was actually working in SpaceX, huh? I had my SpaceX security pass, and I found that the, the second floor of SpaceX was unused. It was early days at SpaceX, and it was just concrete floor. And I said, can I have this? Let’s set up Tesla engineering upstairs in SpaceX. Wow. And we rolled some gray carpet down, put some desks there, and about probably about 20 of us actually designed the model S from the ground up through 2009. And then eventually I grew the team to about 150 people through that three year period. But it, it, it was a, a fascinating time. It was when Tesla was at the cutting edge. And an interesting thing was the, the, the person who drove me the most was myself. Because here I had this incredible opportunity in life to show what was possible and show what I could do. And really, I, one of the, the main weapons I had was digital engineering, huh? To take everything I’d learned about cutting edge computational engineering and simulation, digital wind tunnel, digital, everything. So therefore, we could actually go late on prototypes and, and, and effectively go for computational prototypes, tens of thousands of times to get things right. So when we actually built a proper prototype, and the first proper prototype was late 2010, relatively late. And this was a core philosophy of my engineering process to not to, to, to really turn, turn things on. Its the head, normally, there’s an emphasis on getting an early prototype so you can learn early with your mistakes. My process was the absolute antithesis, make all new mistakes on the computer, test it a thousand times, 10,000 times, and then cut the metal when you’re damn sure relatively late. And that prototype
will be really good. And that’s what we did, and that’s how we reduced the timescale. And that car was in production three and a half years from the day I said, right, let’s design it from scratch back in February, 2009.
Barry Ritholtz: We’re gonna talk a little bit more about Tesla later, but you said something that caught my ear at the time, that oh nine to 12 era Tesla was at the cutting edge. You’re implying they’re no longer at the cutting edge. Is is that the case?
Peter Rawlinson: I think that the, the mantle has has passed to Lucid. I think Lucid is now at the cutting edge, huh? I think we are the company with a true sense of mission. This week. I was proud to announce that we’d created a landmark number in the development of the ev, which is gonna have a profound impact upon the planet. And that is achieving five miles of range per kilowatt hour of energy.
Barry Ritholtz: That’s a giant efficiency.
Peter Rawlinson: This is a giant leap forward.
Barry Ritholtz: Like a lot of the cars out there are two-ish, if they’re lucky. Two, twoish, Threeish
Peter Rawlinson: You’re very well versed in this, Barry. You, you know, your stuff.
Barry Ritholtz: I’m a car guy, so I know this stuff
Peter Rawlinson: And, andwhy this is important is that we need to address the barriers to widespread adoption of electric cars. And the first barrier was range anxiety. When we launched Lucid Air in the autumn, in the fall of 21, we had a range of 520 miles with our very first product. Nobody believed it was possible. And we did that with a modest
battery size. It wasn’t a humongous, it wasn’t dumb range with just stuffing loads of batteries in Missouri. Anyone can do that. And you know, this, this is, this is cutting edge stuff. And why this is important is the next barrier to widespread adoption is the cost of ownership, the cost of an EV. Why, why not everybody jumping to EVs now? It’s because of cost, clearly. And, and, and if you look at the breakdown of the cost of building the bill of materials, of all the parts that you put into an EV for a high-end, ev, about 37% of that value is the battery pack.
But for a more affordable family car, it’s over 40%. There is no gasoline engine car equivalent to this imbalance of cost. So what we are doing at Lucid is addressing the cost of the batteries. And we are doing it in an unorthodox way, rather than saying, right, can we make batteries cheaper? Through an economy of scale, we’re actually saying, do we need that many batteries in the first place? Can we go further with higher technology? We’ve reinvented the electric motor. We have reinvented the inverter to go further with less batteries in the first place. And so if you look at our products today, if you look at the Lucid Air Pure, we’re able to do the car that’s in production right now for any journey you take from A to B, whether it’s from home to the office, down the shops on your vacation, you will use less electricity to go from A to B than any other car on the market today, bar none. And because it’s the most efficient and because you’re able to use less electricity, not only will it cost you less as a user, but it means you don’t have to carry such a large battery pack around. And that means better use of the world’s precious resources, less mines for lithium, nickel, cobalt, less dependence geopolitically in this world for the us. And this is of a profound significance. We can go further with less through technology.
Barry Ritholtz: Let’s talk a little bit about what led you to join Lucid. You helped bring out the Model S, you were chief engineer of the Model S project when you were at Tesla. So let’s start with that car. Not only did you bring it to market incredibly quick, it won multiple awards, Automobile Magazine, Automobile of the Year, MotorTrend Car of the Year, all sorts of big wins. What made the Model S so successful?
Peter Rawlinson: I think it was the big picture thinking and right down to detail execution. I think you need to have both. I think you need to have a strategic oversight of joined up thinking of how systems interact relative to each other as a complete ecosystem. And then you need to have that loving attention to detail at, I mean, there was a, there was a, there was, I’m well known for my mantra that every millimeter counts, and I felt that every gram counts, particularly with electric car, where every, every dual of the energy is a precious commodity. So it was really a very interesting intellectual puzzle because when I arrived at Tesla in February oh nine, prior to my arrival, Franz v Halt, Hasen, who was the design chief, arrived around, I think it was about Au autumn, oh eight, may, may no, August 08. And before I’d arrived, the exterior styling design, the shape of Model S had been signed off and approved by between France and Elon.
And that was pretty well predetermined before I arrived. Now that setting stone effectively the outer shape constraint, the parameters that I as an engineer could work to. Now that’s very different from how we approach lucid air, and I can go onto that later. But this presented a very interesting and compelling intellectual puzzle, a 3D puzzle. How was I gonna fit all the battery cells in to give that car to endow that car with sufficient range? How was I gonna fit in motors, transmission, drive, shaft, suspension, people package, leg room, crumple zones, cooling, just space for luggage. All of that within that predetermined outer shape, because it’d been signed off. And I realized within a millisecond that that, that it would, that, that that wasn’t gonna change much. So it was a fascinating three dimens puzzle. It was like a Tetris on steroids, Tetris on, on, on steroids to solve how we were gonna fit all these parts in the car. And I can give you, I can give you a very interesting example. We wanted to have a flat floor in the car to differentiate no transmission tunnel meaning Right, exactly. Inside the cabin. And a traditional car’s got a, a transmission tunnel at the rear. And ’cause that is an obstruction to comfort for the occupants we went to have,
Barry Ritholtz: especially that middle seat in the back.
Peter Rawlinson: Absolutely. Exactly. And so there was a desire to have a fully flat floor, but one of the big loads that you have to design for structurally in a car are the seatbelt, seatbelt pull tests, particularly the lower anchor points which go through the seat and through the seat mountings into the floor. And so flat sheet metal floor wouldn’t have been strong enough. So it was very clear we’d have to link the battery pack structure under the floor through and make the battery pack contribute to the seatbelt strength. The, the, the mount the structural rigid agility. Yeah, yeah, exactly. Exactly. So the seatbelt loads would go through the floor through a long bolt through the crossmember, which is in the
battery pack. Huh. And these had to go in a specific location where the people fitted. And so that starts determining where you can put the cross members in the battery pack.
Barry Ritholtz: So when I started laying out the architecture of all the cells fitted in that battery pack, I noticed that we could actually divide that into seven elements along the, the rocker section, and we’d be able to get the, the, these, these cross members in precisely the right point. And why this is a, a very interesting example of joined up thinking is that then led to the design of the module of the battery pack. And we ended up with 16 modules of 450 cells on, on, on, on, on the model S. And actually it had a determining factor upon the voltage that the car ran at. Can you believe that the seatbelt anchorage structural loads start splitting up the, the, the pack into discrete modules, which influenced the electrical voltage. one thing that’s cruelly joined up thinking
Barry Ritholtz: One thing leads to the next, which leads to the next, and every decision you make has ramifications totally. For everything else.
Peter Rawlinson: Totally. And it’s not the only thing, because we knew we were, we didn’t have silicon carbide switching technology in those days. So we were using insulated ga bipolar transistors, which was limiting us to, you know, a a around four 20 to 4, 4 34 volts. So we, we knew what sort of range of, of, of, of, and we, and we knew that could be some peak overloads that voltage spikes that we had to cover for. So we knew roughly the voltage range that we could, we could hit, but it was sort of absolutely consistent with the, the, how many cells could we fit, because each cell had amount of energy. And so the number of cells would determine the range of the vehicles you wanted to get us
maximize that as well. And even the gaps between the cells. And I was able to do that without changing the wheel base of the car from the original design. Hmm. Which was quite an achievement, I can tell you.
Barry Ritholtz: So, so now let me pull you back from the engineering wonkiness. Hmm. You come off of the giant success of the model S. What made you decide, Hey, that was fun. Let me go elsewhere and start with a clean sheet rather than stay at Tesla and work on whatever their next vehicle was gonna be.
Peter Rawlinson: Well, I’m glad you asked me that because there’s a, actually, there’s a, there’s an, there’s a sort of interlude between the two. So, so while I was doing all this, my mom, my mother was living in England, and she’s a widow, and, and she was in her nineties and her health was failing, and I just had to go back. So I resigned my position at Tesla in January, 2020. It was, I, I went home for Christmas end of 2011, and it was clear that mum needed me. And so I crazy, I, I gave up my job at Tesla, flying around with Elon, his jet, and I went home and I was literally cooking dinner and, and, and washing the dishes for mum. And then her felt, it’s only when she passed that I really came out and, and, and, and, and joined little company and set up lucid from it.
Barry Ritholtz: So were there any regrets after not going back to Tesla? What did Elon say to you? You were a key person for the success of the model S he recruited you. How did he feel when you said, I’m gonna do something else?
Peter Rawlinson: Well, He did have the good grace to ring me up and ask me to come back, but it was my decision with to remaine.
Barry Ritholtz: So what was it like working for Musk? He’s got a little bit of a reputation. How was your relationship? How did he affect what the model S turned out to be? So
Peter Rawlinson: So it’s very interesting. I think there is a common narrative that he pushes everyone, his subordinates really hard. True. I, I never had that experience really because I pushed myself so crazy how to do it, that there was someone pushing me harder than he ever could. And it was me because I, I’d had years and years of wanting to do something like a model S and I could never have done it at say, Jagi or Lotus, but what I had was the freedom of picking handpicking brilliant engineers. And he, he was totally aligned with that. We totally had a shared vision and SpaceX was built upon that. And I was working in SpaceX, that one in great engineers worth a hundred mediocre people. It’s all about how can you track the best brains on the planet to come with a sense of mission? And that’s what I did. And, and actually I remember I actually even had a math test for all my candidates, and it was like, nevermind what qualifications you’ve got. Do this math with the poor people. I fought them all through the ringer and I personally interviewed everyone. And actually as I, I built Lucid that way. I mean, I don’t, I don’t these days, but if you look at the core capability, the core engineering talent at Lucid, and many of them been with me for many, many years and lots of my Tesla Modelesque team came across with me. And literally we’ve got hundreds of people have come across from Tesla to Lucid. Huh. It’s lucid is like a beacon of light now that’s hundreds of people have come across and, they’re drawn to this flame that we are gonna be the best technically whatever, whatever it takes.
Barry Ritholtz: We are gonna get into Lucid in a few moments. But you mentioned SpaceX. I have to ask you a question. Not only is Elon running Elon Musk running Tesla, he’s running SpaceX, he’s running Twitter, or ostensibly he handed it off to somebody, but it’s pretty clear he’s still very involved. He’s running X-AI, that’s four companies. How can one person successfully manage running for a company? Steve Jobs ran Apple and Pixar and he was pretty hands off at Pixar.
Peter Rawlinson: Well, I think there is a worrying distraction there, and I think that’s why the mantle has been passed to Lucid. I, I pledge to my whole team, my investors, all our shareholders said, I’m fully committed to lucid alone, and I’m all in on just one, one task, one company. And that’s probably why you never hardly ever see me in the media because it requires that degree of commitment to set up a car company.
Barry Ritholtz: So the implication is, if you’re running for companies — and I don’t wanna put
words in your mouth, but — are you implying he has taken his eye off the ball at Tesla?
Peter Rawlinson: I think that you’ve gotta look at who is now leading technically. I mean, we’ve got the highest voltage car, we’ve got the most efficient, we’ve got the most aerodynamic, we’ve got the longest range, we’ve got the highest performance, we’ve got the, the best battery engineering, we’ve got the most advanced motor control algorithms. I think we’ve got the best battery management system, control system on the planet. If you look at all the breakthroughs that we are making, it’s very clear that back in 2009 to two, 2012, Tesla was doing that. And today, right now it’s Lucy that’s doing it, and someone needs to carry this torch forward for the benefit of all humanity. And we’re happy to do that.
Barry Ritholtz: To me, the thing that perplexes me more than anything about Elon Musk is if my product that I am trying to sell is supposedly going to reduce global carbon emissions and adapt to better outcomes for global warming, why tack hard to the right and get in bed with people who think global warming is a hoax given your client base? Are people concerned about global warming? I don’t understand the whole right wing trolling crazy sort of stuff that’s happened over the past year with him. You’ve watched him, I know it’s been a good long time, but any explanation for what’s going on there?
Peter Rawlinson: Well, I, I think it’s a, a worrisome trend of distraction. I’m an engineer and a scientist, and I believe there’s compelling overwhelming evidence that global warming is real. It’s happening all around us. You’d have to be blind not to see that. And I’m all in committed to doing what all I can. I will not rest to use my life energy to try to help this generation and future generations. And this is the sense of mission that we carry at Lucid to really advance the adoption of, of sustainable mobility. And we have to do that with a sense of utter urgency. And these distractions have no place in that mission for me.
Barry Ritholtz: Really interesting. When the Model S came out, I know it was less than five years to make it, but it seemed as if the technology built into the model S was 10 years ahead of everybody else. Hmm. Maybe seven years, but nothing else was like that. Hmm. In terms of the over, over-the-air updates, the interface, the the visual camera system, the self-driving, how big of a lead in any of those technologies does Tesla have? Or are you suggesting that they’re pretty much number two or or worse in all of those technologies?
Peter Rawlinson: In most virtual that you’ve mentioned? They’re behind us that we’re about four years ahead of Tesla. I would say that in terms of autonomous driving capability, they’re marginally ahead of us, but not a long way. They’re not at level three, they’re to level two plus something, they’re a little bit ahead of us, but that’s very deliberate. I’ve chosen to be a fast follower. But if you look at just about everything else, we are significantly ahead in the core powertrain technologies. And also some of the, I mean, you mentioned over the air, let me give you an example in terms of of that. When we launched Lucid, and a lot of people don’t know this, we launched Lucid Air in the fall of 2021 with a revolutionary 12-volt architecture that we embodied a nodal ethernet data superhighway in the car. That was in late 21. More recently, Tesla’s finally got to that with the cyber truck, but that many people don’t realize they think it’s an innovation of cyber truck. It’s actually Tesla did it two and a bit years after Lucid did Lucid innovated with that and Tesla followed. If you look at our OTA capability, it’s without par [Over the air] Updates. Yes. Over, over the air updates, we’ve done about 75 80 updates. They’re coming regularly thick and fast. And let me give you an example. We can actually, we’ve pioneered a type of over the air update, which is unique. That is a diagnostic tool. So if there’s something new that’s gone wrong with one of the supplier’s parts, we can lab test for a test procedure that would identify the nature of the fault, then we can code that test in our algorithms and we can over the air that, and we’ve actually done this. So it’s almost like getting a dose of penicillin that the car gets and it can actually self-diagnose and determine if there is a, a new fault from a supplier. This is cutting edge stuff. And more recently, as part of the seminal announcement this week that I made, that we’re going to get to five miles per kilowatt hour. Part of that, a part of that is hardware, but a chunk of that advancement is due to some new motor control software. And we will be over the air relaying that, transmitting that to all our fleet.
Barry Ritholtz: So in other words, you’re gonna improve the efficiency of previously sold cars. Totally,
Peter Rawlinson: Totally, Totally. [And they’ll step up to five kilowatt hours?] No,They won’t all, but they will all improve that incremental part, which is due to that software, the effect of that particular software. It’s only a, a car that we are going to launch very soon. We’ll have the magic five, but they’ll all benefit from this.
Barry Ritholtz: Really, really interesting. I, again, I don’t want to put words in your mouth, but I’m gonna repeat what you said in your polite British ways in, in my course American Ways, Elon Musk is running four companies. He’s distracted. Tesla was the leader in all these technologies, battery motors, software over the air down the road. And other than self-driving, they have lost the mantle of leadership. It sounds like you’re saying across the board in EV technology.
Peter Rawlinson: Yeah. Let me give you some metrics. If you look at, we, for many years, we supplied the batteries to the wool championship for Electric Motor Sport.
Barry Ritholtz: And is this related to the deal with Aston Martin or separate?
Peter Rawlinson: No, we’re quite separate. Quite separate. And we used all that knowledge from four years of successful motor racing to all the teams in the world championship for electric motor sport that we supplied the batteries for. All that expertise has been embodied in our battery management system, our BMS and our battery systems in our current cars. And actually right today we supply the front drive unit, the inverter and motor and transmission in the nose of all those race cars. That is the most advanced unit in the world today. It is nearly 15 horsepower per kilogram. If you look at what Tesla’s doing with its plant technology, it’s about 3.9 horsepower per kilogram.
Barry Ritholtz: So this is 4X that.
Peter Rawlinson: Yes. And if you look at our mainstream production technology that we put in Lucid Air, we get up to nine horsepower per kilogram. Plaid is 3.9. It’s not like we’re 30% to him.
Barry Ritholtz: Really interesting. So the old philosophy of race on Sunday sell on Monday, indeed. Still kind of real?
Peter Rawlinson: Indeed. And do you know what Barry, what’s remarkable about this? I think that adage was true in the, in the thirties and the forties and the fifties. But I’d been in advanced engineering in road cars all my life. I’ve always thought it doesn’t happen. What goes on the race car? You, the technology never comes back in. And, and, and finally I’ve had it happen and it’s genuine. What we’ve learned on the racetrack with our battery technology is embodied in every lucid air we’ve ever made.
Barry Ritholtz: So let’s talk about what took place in your post Tesla career. You joined Lucid as a CTO. What responsibilities come with that role at, at an EV shop?
Peter Rawlinson: Well, responsibility for the product, for the complete car engineering, the vehicle,
Barry Ritholtz: Everything! Batteries, motors and everything across software across the board?
Peter Rawlinson: Yeah. Yeah.
Barry Ritholtz: I don’t think a lot of people realize that Lucid began a long time ago as at Tiva, I’m not pronouncing it right. [You are spot on]. It was an electric battery maker. How do you explain that, that transition from just making electric batteries to saying, oh, let’s, let’s become an EV manufacturer.
Peter Rawlinson: I think there was a recognition that there wasn’t a, a, a true value proposition in just approaching that. Actually Tesla in the early days had had a similar approach. It was any later they thought, well, really, the, the, the car is, is is the true value generator. So I was approached, would I like to join this little company, which really had very little at the time.
Barry Ritholtz: And, and they had launched in like 2006. They’ve been around a long time.
Peter Rawlinson: Yeah, they’ve been around a long, long time. So I was, I was approached much later than that. And, and it wasn’t until 2016 that we really created a lucid and really focused on creating the Lucid Air, the best car in the world. And, you know, it was very clear to me that we’d have to change the name and launch Relaunches a different brand that was more customer oriented and facing. So Lucid was founded and created by a small group of us in 2016 out of the little, little battery company, which had been around for a long time. And that’s when we really got serious.
00:35:27 [Speaker Changed] So the, the co-founder and the CEO of Lucid retires, you are tapped to jump
into that role both as CEO and CTO. What was it like stepping into a place a founder?
00:35:41 [Speaker Changed] Well, it, there was, there was a, there was A-A-A-A-A-A tortuous transition
at one stage, but by that time, by by 16, so many of my former Tesla team had come across to join me
with this mission to create a better car. And I’d been joined by some, some key players in the team.
Derek Jenkins from, from Mazda. I persuaded Derek to give up his job as design director for Mazda
North America and joined to head up the design studio. Eric Buck came along, who is, is now my chief
engineer and, and senior vice president of, of product and engineering. And, and these are both brilliant,
brilliant people who joined me pretty well in the early days. And they were, through this period with me
and as a little team, we created Lucid and we launched Lucid Air. It was December 16, and then it was
clear we needed to have some serious money to put this thing into production.
00:36:45 [Speaker Changed] You raised a lot of capital over the years.
00:36:47 [Speaker Changed] Oh, yes, yes. And it, it requires a lot of capital. And then we had a, a, a lien
period through 17 and into 18 where we couldn’t find any funding. But we had what turned out to be a
very interesting card that had been played because in 16 I became friendly with the CTO at McLaren and
over a cup of tea in England in the McLaren Tech Center English style. We decided that we’d enter the
world of electric race cars. And McLaren recognized that they’ve got great race car experience, but they
didn’t have the battery pack experience. But we’ve got the battery experience expertise.
00:37:33 [Speaker Changed] So let’s talk a little bit about that battery pack. It’s scalable, it’s modular.
Yes. It continued to iterate based on race experience. Yes. How much of an advantage is the lucid
battery pack versus other EV makers?
00:37:49 [Speaker Changed] It’s a, it’s a significant advantage, but the biggest advantage in terms of our
range and efficiency is not the pack. And this is, it’s the motor and inverter and the, the complete drive
unit.
00:38:02 [Speaker Changed] So let’s, let’s talk about that because, and I’m gonna take a look at, at an
engineering drawing. Oh, right. But when I look at, at some of the internals for the engine, the motor,
and I still say engine out of habit. Yes. But the motor and the transmission are integrated into one and
the axle transmission goes straight through it. Yes. The differential. And so there’s no differentials,
there’s no, there’s a lot of things that come out of the vehicle with this very small, very lightweight yet
high horsepower, high efficiency motor. Yes. Tell us a little bit about the engineering behind that. Oh,
00:38:43 [Speaker Changed] Okay. Okay. So one of the, one of the, the, the, the disadvantages when we
were doing Model S was that there were two different teams. One was doing the, the transmission,
another was doing the motor. So JB Strobel’s team was doing the motor and I was doing the
transmission. And so you’ve got two different groups and where the two join is, is a weakness. So when I
set up lucid, it was clear we needed to reinvent the electric motor. And I can’t tell you Barry that at the
time that seemed crazy.
00:39:16 [Speaker Changed] It, it seems crazy. Just saying it right now, I’m smiling because what do you
mean you wanna reinvent the electric motor?
00:39:21 [Speaker Changed] I’ll tell you why. There was a perception that you couldn’t make a better
electric motor. That electric motors are so much more efficient than gasoline cars. That it’s done, it was
designed in the Victorian area and that was it. And it is true that electric motors can be very highly
efficient if you put one in an air conditioning tube, you run at a set speed and a set load, it can be at
right on that peak spot of efficiency. But that efficiency trails off dramatically in any side of that spot.
And if you look at electric car, people don’t often realize that car goes fast or slower when the motor
goes fast or slow. That’s what determines how fast you go. Right? How fast the motor is spinning and
how much you accelerate. That’s how much torque is being developed from the motor, how much
power is being released and the antithesis under, under regenerative braking. And so the task is to
create a motor and inverter system and transmission that’s got a much broader bandwidth of efficiency.
And this wast even be, it wasn’t, not wasn’t, it wasn’t even considered possible. I don’t think anyone was
thinking of it.
00:40:30 [Speaker Changed] And you also not only made the motor more efficient, but you integrated
the transmission to the motor.
00:40:36 [Speaker Changed] Totally. Totally. Totally. Which, so the electric motor’s got two parts.
There’s the fixed bit, which is called the stator, the very simple, and, and the, and the bit that spins in
the middle, which is called the rotor. And the rotor really provides power as a result of how fast it spins
and the torque that it transmits at that spin speed. And if you look at something that transmits torque,
like a propeller shaft in a car, you’re a car guy, you know, prop shafts are hollow. The tubular. Sure.
’cause that’s what’s required.
00:41:06 [Speaker Changed] Want to be light. Exactly. And modular.
00:41:08 [Speaker Changed] And you learn that the metal in the middle does very little. That’s why it’s
hollowed out. So I start asking, well, what does the metal in the middle of a rotor do? If it’s trying to
transmit to and it’s electromagnetic, what does, why does we have to have these solid rotors? Why can’t
we hollow them out more? Well, the answer is it does very little. We can haul it out. It should be like a
tube. And then we start thinking what we can get in. And I have a brilliant engineer, a team on, my
engineer on my team called Bash Palais Hungarian, who came up with this integrating a micro
differential insight. And this was all enabled by my, my brilliant motor engineer, Dr. iad Dalla. And I put
them both together to sit together and I said, look guys, I don’t wanna have a separate motor and
transmission team.
00:41:57 I wanna consider a motor transmission as a single rotary inertial system with total, I wanna
think of it as a single unit. I want a motor transmission unit. And you might think, why do you even need
gears? Well, you need gears because the wheels of a car are quite large compared with the diameter of
electric motor. So you need to provide that attractive force at the contact patch of the tire. And the
bigger you make the wheel, the less force you’re gonna have for a given to. So you do need to have a
reduction set. So we, we launched lucid air with a, a ratio of 7.06 to one Model S was 9.0 to one. We
went to 7.06 to one for air. And we compromised a little bit on not to 60, but we got better mid-range
performance. And I always wanted mid, more mid-range acceleration and efficiency. I wasn’t gonna be
chasing nor to 60 with it. And so that’s why we went to a 7.06 to one ratio. And
00:42:56 [Speaker Changed] What, what’s the power to weight ratio of that integrated and sort very
compact motor and integrated translation?
00:43:05 [Speaker Changed] Well, if you look at the whole unit as a drive unit, inverter, motor and
transmission, the whole thing with the differential, it’s 9.0 horsepower per kilogram.
00:43:18 [Speaker Changed] That’s substantial.
00:43:19 [Speaker Changed] It’s substantial. But it’s, it’s, it’s, it’s more like 20 at motor level. And if you
look at the elements within the motor, it’s more like 25. If you actually cut away the mo, so often people
attribute that to the motor, but it’s not mo the motor is about 32, 33 kilograms of the 74 kilograms of
the complete unit. So let’s
00:43:40 [Speaker Changed] Talk about what making that so relatively small and light does to the design
of the car. Yeah. Not only are we not talking about the hump in the backseat or even in the front seat,
but by making that motor so small, the floor panel of the car can be relatively flat. The wheels can be
pushed further out to the corner and the interior cabin becomes much more substantial for a car of this
size. That’s
00:44:10 [Speaker Changed] Right. But we’d done all that with Model S. But what we hadn’t done, and
this was the, the impossible step, and we had no, because electric motors were inherently much smaller
than gasoline v eights and the like, and didn’t need all these drive shelves. We had all those advantages
with Model S. But what I asked was kind of the, the unthinkable at lucid, well we know that the drive
unit, the electric motor and drive unit is a lot smaller. What if we really explored how small we can make
this thing? Why don’t we just go crazy? Let’s see how compact we can make this. Because if we could
make it even more compact, we could have an even more profound impact upon the design of the car.
And that’s when I took perhaps lucid greatest gamble. And this is why I could never have done this in a
conventional car company. Because what we did was, whilst one team set off my motor and inverter
transmission team set off to truly miniaturize that drive unit, the o the rest of the company, the rest of
the engineering and design teams were designing Lucid air as a car with enough leg room,
transformative leg room and comfort in interior space, but much smaller on the outside, much more
aerodynamic and much sleeker. It’s
00:45:35 [Speaker Changed] A mid-size car with the room of a full size car
00:45:38 [Speaker Changed] Inside. Absolutely. It’s got full size, it’s interior space longer than it longer
wheel base S-Class Mercedes. And yet on the outside it’s 10 millimeters shorter than a Tesla model S.
And so I bet the house on, we are gonna engineer this car and design the whole thing around the will be
size of these drive units because we will achieve that miniaturization, otherwise it wouldn’t work. And
we managed to pull it off and that’s how we were able to do lucid air. It was a huge push that the car
would only work if we could achieve this miniaturization. We had to achieve it to make the car work.
00:46:17 [Speaker Changed] So let’s talk a little bit about the lucid air. Which first came out late 2021. Is
that
00:46:22 [Speaker Changed] The right date? Yes. Yes. September 21. Yes.
00:46:24 [Speaker Changed] 500 plus mile range. The longest in the industry.
00:46:27 [Speaker Changed] Five 20 when we launched
00:46:28 [Speaker Changed] Five 20 when you lost fastest acceleration. Highest top speed. Yes. Lowest
drag coefficient. Most interior space, most luggage space. Yes. And then outcomes, the awards.
00:46:41 [Speaker Changed] Fastest challenging
00:46:42 [Speaker Changed] Fa fastest. Well, we’re gonna talk about the new, new 200 miles in 12
minutes, which nothing compares to that, but I’m looking at this run of awards from, let, let’s go down
the list. Car and Driver, Motorsport, Edmonds, wards Automotive Car and Driver, world Car Awards,
Newsweek, US News and Worlds Report. Bloomberg Car and Driver Motor, it it’s best supercar, best
luxury Car bus, electric car, 10 best engines and propulsion systems. Top EV pick record for longest
range ever tested. Car of the Year, car of the Year, ev of the year. Like you guys have cleaned up as of
April, 2024. Like every award you, you can suck up for this. So the first question is, when the air first
came out, it was kind of what can we do if money is no, no restraint, but then you’ve certainly come out
with subsequent models that are a little more affordable. Tell us about the plan for the next few vehicles
that are coming outta Lucid. Yeah, we
00:47:45 [Speaker Changed] Were really thrilled because we won MotorTrend Car of the Year for air.
And it’s the first time any company in the history of that award has ever won that award with its very
first vehicle. Hmm. No one’s ever done that before. Amazing. So this was, this was a landmark. Yeah.
And, and, and it was important we started with a high-end vehicle first to establish the brand. But when
I launched Lucer in the thick of Covid, and we did so on September 9th, 2020, I promised the world that
we would get to an entry level price of 69,900. And I’m so pleased that earlier this year I met my
promise that we brought the pure version of air, which is an outstanding car,
00:48:37 [Speaker Changed] $69,000, 69,009. What’s the range of that one? That
00:48:41 [Speaker Changed] Range of that one is 419 miles,
00:48:45 [Speaker Changed] Still not too shabby.
00:48:46 [Speaker Changed] And and the reason we’re able to do that is that we can achieve that with
just an 88 kilowatt hour battery pack. No one else is even close to that.
00:48:55 [Speaker Changed] And that’s the efficiency of the motor and the inverter.
00:48:57 [Speaker Changed] Yes. Which means we can get four 19 miles, which means more than
anyone else has got with a smaller battery pack, for example, a model S has got over a hundred kilowatt
hours. And because of that, because the battery pack costs so much to make, it saves us that money.
And as a company we can afford to put that, that product out
00:49:15 [Speaker Changed] There. So let’s talk about a couple more products that are on the drawing
board. If we look around and we see Hyundai and Kia, they have 40,000 Volkswagen, 40 ish something,
the model three in the forties, before even we’ll talk about the Chinese EVs a little later. But it looks like
if you can, the average price of a new car in the US is now about $48,000. If you could get in the forties,
it seems like it opens up a mass market. What are the plans? Totally. We’ll talk about the SUV in a
minute. Totally. What are the plans for, you know, a really Barry affordable entry level? Ev Barry,
00:49:55 [Speaker Changed] You’re describing our midsize platform Exactly that it’s scheduled for
production late 26, 48 to $50,000 car, state of the art. And we’ll be able to make that because we can go
further with less batteries and therefore we can afford to make such a compelling car at that price point.
Like no one else can embody all our learning, all the technology that we’ve developed from air and that
will transfer all our knowledge into midsize platform making EVs progressively more affordable. That is
our mission. We wanna be a major player. Don’t think of lucid as a niche luxury player. I wanna be selling
a million of those cars a year in the early 2030s. Gi
00:50:41 [Speaker Changed] Give us your, your spec target targets for that mid-size car, which I don’t
think you have a name for yet.
00:50:48 [Speaker Changed] We haven’t.
00:50:48 [Speaker Changed] What is the horsepower, what is the range and what is the interior space
gonna be like? Well,
00:50:53 [Speaker Changed] We haven’t disclosed that. It’ll just be super competitive, but I can say this
that, I mean, that will be a time when we overtly compete with Tesla model y model three. That will be
our Tesla model three and Y competitor.
00:51:08 [Speaker Changed] You you wanna call that a model three killer? No,
00:51:11 [Speaker Changed] I never call anything
00:51:11 [Speaker Changed] Killer. Oh, all right. Again, I’m putting words into your mouth. So what I
would imagine there’s,
00:51:16 [Speaker Changed] There’s room for both
00:51:17 [Speaker Changed] What I would imagine would do really well in the market is a car that costs
40 something thousand dollars is the size of an E-Class Mercedes or smaller with a range 400, dare I say
500 miles and 400 to 500 horsepower am am I hallucinating or is that, are those real realistic? Well, I
00:51:41 [Speaker Changed] Think, I think we have to look at the need for range in the future.
Paradoxically, I see the electric cars of the future having less range than today and less need
00:51:54 [Speaker Changed] For range as the network gets built out. Yes.
00:51:55 [Speaker Changed] As you get a more mature charging infrastructure, I never get range anxiety
in a gasoline car. I might
00:52:01 [Speaker Changed] Have, there’s always a gas station.
00:52:03 [Speaker Changed] I might have a strange accent, but I have learned something during my
days. In, in, in, in the US there’s a gas station on every street corner. I’m not gonna run out unless I’m in
Utah. And there’s next, the next one is i i 200 miles. Right. I don’t have to worry about getting gas. So
while we see, when we see a more mature charging infrastructure, and the other thing that’s coming is
faster charging cell chemistry.
00:52:25 [Speaker Changed] So let’s talk about that question. So that’s gonna help the new technology
that gen one, not gen two or three, but the next ev charging system that you’re gonna have available is
200 miles of charge in 12 minutes. Yeah.
00:52:40 [Speaker Changed] We’ve
00:52:41 [Speaker Changed] Got that, that, that exists today. Yeah. So that’s a, that’s a pretty big lift for
Yeah. You know, for a cup of coffee and a bathroom break. Totally. You have 200 miles. Totally. What’s
the next generation after that? Well, first
00:52:53 [Speaker Changed] Of all, and what I wanna say is the, the way cha and I will answer your
question, but this is a very important point. The way charging is measured really frustrates me because
everyone is obsessed with measuring it in how fast the percentage of the battery charges 10 to 80%
what doesn’t matter.
00:53:12 [Speaker Changed] You want the miles is
00:53:13 [Speaker Changed] What? It’s it totally. Yeah. It doesn’t matter what percentage the battery
charges, if your range sucks, your charge rate will suck. So what’s important is the power that’s going in
in kilowatts multiplied by your efficiency in miles per kilowatt hour. And that will give you miles charged,
well, it’ll give you technically per hour, but it’s miles per minute that matters. And you are, we’re on the
same page. That is the first thing, that’s the thing that counts. And we are able to get a grant touring a
get 300 miles of range charged in 21 minutes. Right. It’s extraordinary. No, we’ve got the fastest
charging thing on the planet. Now the one of the, the, the issues with today’s cells is that you trade, you
trade energy for power. So actually you could, you could have faster charging more power dent cells,
but you’d you’d lose range for that. So we always could tend to go for more energy cells, which have got
a limit to the charge rate. So
00:54:12 [Speaker Changed] Can you do both? Can you have Yeah, yeah. A small number of fast charging
cells
00:54:16 [Speaker Changed] That, that sort of count the benefits cancel each other out. It’s, it’s a, it’s a
great idea, but it’s, you do the math and it doesn’t help you actually, it actually makes things even more
complex. One of the, the potential saviors here is the, the growth of LFP, this is the new lithium, the, the
iron phosphate chemistry. Now iron phosphate has kind of sucked because it’s lower energy and it’s
cheaper. So it’s kinda like the cheaper, nasty, poor man’s sell. And it’s been really developed a lot,
particularly by the Chinese. And actually it’s, it’s it’s energy capacity is growing quite healthily of late and
it’s got the added advantage. It can take a lot of power charging. So I think there’s a real argument for
less lower range cars with LFP cells, a more mature infrastructure, not enough, and to far very
expensive. They’re cheaper. Expensive. Yes, you take a mass hit, but with lucid efficiency then with the
mass hit becomes less because we’re carrying less, less hours, less weight. And Lynn, you okay, you have
to charge a bit more often, but it’s really fast when you do charge. So you’re thinking then about like
stopping for seven or eight minutes rather than 15 minutes. And, and so it’s gonna be more stop and go
and I
00:55:39 [Speaker Changed] And that’s what BYD and the Chinese manufacturers make it. Yeah,
00:55:42 [Speaker Changed] They, they, BYD Goshen, there’s a, there’s several. They’re really taking a
lead in this blade type LFP technology. And I think it has its place, I think for a performance premium car,
cylindrical lithium ion cells, NMCs are the right solutions still. And I think they will have their place
alongside LFP.
00:56:07 [Speaker Changed] So it sounds like you’re fairly impressed with the technology in the EV space
coming outta China. I believe LA was it last year, BYD passed Tesla for the highest selling EV
manufacturer.
00:56:20 [Speaker Changed] I, I believe you’re right.
00:56:21 [Speaker Changed] Yeah. So, so China is gonna be a force out there. We’re not currently
allowing those cars into the United States. I don’t know if that changes anytime soon. What do you think
of the technology that you know that not just the battery technology but the whole automobile. Is China
gonna be a major player in the EV
00:56:39 [Speaker Changed] Space? Yeah. And big new tariffs announced in Europe as well. So my take
on China is this, that their vehicle engineering has advanced to a shocking degree in, in a good way in
the last three years. I can’t believe how, how much better their cars are. Their battery technology for
LFP. They’re in a leadership position. Their powertrain technology is still several years behind Tesla and
Tesla’s several years behind us. But don’t underestimate them. Don’t under, I mean, if they can
transform their vehicle, I wanna talk about vehicle engineering. I mean fit and finish door slam wind
noise, ceiling materials, comfort in the city
00:57:25 [Speaker Changed] Like that. Let me interrupt you there.
00:57:26 [Speaker Changed] Know traditional attributes,
00:57:27 [Speaker Changed] Let me interrupt you. Yeah. The, the thing that I have been so impressed
with, the lucid I’ve seen is you not only come from a, an automotive background, whereas Tesla is a little
more of a technology background. Yeah. But it feels like a luxury car. Thank you. The fit and finish is
outstanding. Thank you. You wanted that. The materials is excellent. Like it’s obvious you want to
compete with Mercedes. Totally not Tesla.
00:57:51 [Speaker Changed] Totally.
00:57:52 [Speaker Changed] But the thing I have to ask about is the US has shifted to a giant SUV
market. Tell us about gravity. When are we gonna see the first SUV with a 400 or 500 mile range from
Lucid? Yeah.
00:58:06 [Speaker Changed] And, and first of all, about the luxury, we wanted to endow the car with a
quiet luxury and understated luxury, but really high quality materials in a very understated, sort of a
California inspired design sensibility. And that’s often misinterpreted as it’s not true luxury. Well it’s not
ostentatious luxury. No. Right. It’s understated quiet luxury. So moving on to Gravity, you ask, so Gravity
is scheduled for starter production late this year. Oh really? Yes, absolutely. It’s gonna be a seminal
product. It’s gonna be the best SUV on the planet. Nothing less will suffice. What,
00:58:47 [Speaker Changed] When will consumers first be able to purchase these?
00:58:51 [Speaker Changed] We haven’t announced precise purchase start, start of purchase, which
scheduled for start of production late this year. Realistically, the ramp up in production will take place
during the early part of next year. So watch this space for an announcement in terms of availability.
00:59:08 [Speaker Changed] And are we aiming about a comparable price to the air?
00:59:11 [Speaker Changed] Yeah, I I see a starting point of just under $80,000 for a variant of gravity.
Absolutely. That’s essential.
00:59:18 [Speaker Changed] And, and I know I only have you for about five minutes, I have to ask one
question that we didn’t get to. You’re the CEO of a public company. I know that comes with all sorts of
obligations and dare I say, headaches. How do you feel about being public? How is your, your capital
set? Are you comfortable that you could go the distance to the 2030s? What, what are your thoughts
about being a public company and having access to the capital markets? Well,
00:59:49 [Speaker Changed] I, I, I, I take my responsibilities very seriously. It’s, it’s, it is a way to my
shoulders, but it’s one that I can carry. I’m comfortable with what we are doing. I think we, we can
conduct ourselves in an incredibly ethical manner. I’m very committed to this company and I’m all in.
I’ve never sold a single share in the company, ever other,
01:00:14 [Speaker Changed] And it had a giant run up when it came public with SPAC and came back
down.
01:00:18 [Speaker Changed] Yes, actually. And, and actually that that triggered some of my performance
stock options, which were based, my stock options performance package was based entirely upon share
price. And so it, all that remuneration was due to performance related stock options, which I triggered.
I’ve not, I’ve not sold a single share other than ones that I just had to for tax purposes. And so I’m all in
on this company. I am resolutely optimistic. I think we’ve got the best car in the world at the moment in
the Lucid Air. We’re outselling Porsche, Ty, and Mercedes here in the us. We’re out selling BWI seven.
We’re out selling the Eon EGT, and, and this is, this is a company that many people still haven’t even
heard of. Lucid,
01:01:09 [Speaker Changed] Any plans for a two-door coupe, a sports car?
01:01:12 [Speaker Changed] I’d love to do it. But we’ve got laser commitment. We have to focus on the
big ones. Gravity. So we’ve got air now, gravity’s coming. And then the really big one, the mid-size
platform, the more affordable 48, $50,000 car. We’ve got laser focus upon that. And something else, a
technology roadmap, which excites me the most because no one else is staying still. This is a
technological race and we have to keep running because if you don’t run, others will catch you up. And
the best defense we have is to keep our tech roadmap intact. And that’s what excites me the most.
01:01:55 [Speaker Changed] So last question before I let you get on with the rest of your New York tour.
Take me to the early 2030s. Where do you wanna be in units you’re selling? How many different models
do you want to sell? What does Lucid look like seven years from now? In 2031,
01:02:11 [Speaker Changed] I believe we can be a healthy company. I think that what is not recognized
is that our technological advantage today, which is seen as a burden, it will become a cost down enabler.
And therefore we will be, operate, be able to operate at a better gross margin. Because of that, our very
technology will be a grossed margin enhancer, which will give us a profitability edge. And by the early
2030s, I’d like us to be selling no less than a million cars a year because that’s what it takes to have a
meaningful impact upon the environment. But I also want this multiplier effect with our tech licensing
business because what the world needs is the 25, $30,000 car. And I don’t think that’s the business we
lucid as a company and our shareholders deserve because it’s all about volume, low margins. But I think
others could manufacture that. Having access to our world leading technology. And with that multiplier
effect, we truly can have an impact upon the environment and therefore the future of mankind.
Barry Ritholtz: Fascinating stuff. Thanks Peter, for being so generous with your time. We have been speaking with Peter Rollinson, lucid, CEO and CTO. If you enjoy this conversation, well be sure and check out any of our previous 500 discussions over the past 10 years. You can find those at iTunes, Spotify, YouTube, wherever you find your favorite podcasts. Check out my new podcast at the Money Conversations with experts about the most important issues affecting your money, earning it, spending it, and most importantly, investing it at the money wherever you find your favorite podcasts. And here in the Masters in Business Feed, I would be remiss if I did not thank our croc staff who helps us put these conversations together each week. John Wasserman is my audio engineer. Atika Valon is my project
manager. Sean Russo is my researcher. Anna Luke is my producer. Special thanks to Sarah Lipsey for help putting this together this week. I’m Barry Ritholtz. You’ve been listening to Masters in Business on Bloomberg Radio.
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