WHEN: Today, Tuesday, December 20, 2022
WHERE: CNBC's "Squawk on the Street"
Following is the unofficial transcript of breaking news from CNBC's David Faber on CNBC's "Squawk on the Street" (M-F, 9AM-11AM ET) today, Tuesday, December 20th. Following is a link to the video on CNBC.com: https://www.cnbc.com/video/2022/12/20/elon-musk-actively-searching-for-twitter-ceo-sources.html.
All references must be sourced to CNBC.
DAVID FABER: Jim, no big surprise here. Musk is actively looking for a new CEO of Twitter and it doesn't take anybody a genius to tell you that. As we've seen from his previous polls, oftentimes he sort of already knows the answer before he actually asked people to participate in said poll and that would appear to be the case here as well. From everything I've heard, he has been actively looking, asking, trying to figure out who the candidate pool might actually be. Heard a lot of different names, but none of them enough so that I actually feel comfortable sharing them at this point, and I'm sure they're plenty of other reporters—
JIM CRAMER: I can tell you he's not going to do John Legere since he shot me down directly on that one.
FABER: He's not going to do John Legere. No, I think that's fair to say. It's not going to be Jack Dorsey. It's like—
CRAMER: You know David—
FABER: You can go through a long list of people it's not going to be Jim but I do think it's interesting because of course, you know, he has told people this and he's even said as much during his testimony in Delaware it's a four month project. That's what he sees it as, and he's going to find somebody to replace him. He obviously will still be the boss in a sense, given he owns the company, but to the extent it takes any pressure off Tesla, who knows, but he's out actively looking for his replacement so to speak.
CRAMER: Alright, what would be the classic hilarious replacement. Bret Taylor.
FABER: Yeah.
CRAMER: The Co-CEO of Salesforce who no longer is, who beat Musk.
FABER: That's true. Bring in, bring in the former chairman.
CRAMER: Who beat Musk. I don't think he wants to do that Bret.
FABER: No.
CRAMER: I would say this David. The question is, if you had to do a Venn diagram—
FABER: I've got so many different names here Jim. Again, it's not clear to me if any of them—
CRAMER: Do you want tech, a technology guy or do you want someone who's a salesperson?
FABER: It's a great question. It's a great question. What do you need more?
CRAMER: I think you need tech because you can't just—
FABER: There's so many different things to navigate there as the CEO of Twitter and obviously in a very difficult ad environment where you're dealing with half the staff that you had, which by the way may be good because certainly there seemed to be a lot of bloat at that company.
CRAMER: Yes.
FABER: We talked about not working on Fridays. It's not clear what days they were working there but, I'm sure they were but—
CRAMER: They were incapable of doing a doing a lot of campaigns and incapable of doing a lot of the things that people thought they do including integrating gambling, integrating stocks, integrating consumer—
FABER: And again, listen, we had what did we the latest research we had was Evercore lowering their price target on Tesla to $200 from 300. And they ended by simply saying investors now fear us brand damage given typical EV buyer demographics, roughly 40% just being from California, 70% from blue states in a dwindling backlog environment. They go on from there, Jim, but there's no doubt it's been having an impact.