Prof G Markets - EV Tax Credit Comes to an End & Why Trump Rx Will Not Fix High Drug Costs

Episode Date: October 2, 2025

Ed Elson is joined by Jon McNeill, CEO of DVx Ventures and board member at General Motors, to break down what the end of the EV tax credit means for the auto industry. He then turns to the Trump administration’s new website for buying prescription drugs directly from manufacturers, and explains why it may fall short of solving America’s high drug price problem. Courtney Breen, senior analyst at Bernstein Research, also joins Producer Claire Miller to break down who the real winners of TrumpRx will be.  Vote for Prof G Markets at the Signal Awards  Check out our latest Prof G Markets newsletter Order "The Algebra of Wealth" out now Subscribe to No Mercy / No Malice Follow Prof G Markets on Instagram Follow Ed on Instagram and X Follow Scott on Instagram Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

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and it will now be used to land the buyer's first sexual experience. money markets matter if money is evil then that building is held the show goes up welcome to profitry markets i'm ed elson it is october second let's check in on yesterday's market vitals the s&p 500 closed at its 29th record high of the year as investors were optimistic that the government shutdown would be short-lived the Dow also climbed to a fresh closing record. Meanwhile, treasury yields fell after the ADP employment report showed that private sector payrolls unexpectedly contracted last month. That may strengthen the case for the Fed to cut rates later this month. In other news, as we predicted, the Supreme

Court decided Lisa Cook can keep her job at the Fed until it hears the case in January. And finally, gold hit yet another record high. Okay. What else is happening? As of yesterday, the federal electric vehicle tax credit is officially over. The credit offered up to $7,000 and a half thousand dollars off per electric vehicle. It was designed to incentivize Americans to buy electric vehicles. However, it was eliminated. Following the passage of the Republican tax bill in July, the last chance to use that tax credit was on Tuesday. Over the past few weeks, customer, have been rushing in to take advantage of it before it expired. EVs captured a record 12% of new vehicle sales in September, with overall sales spiking 27% compared to last year. By the way, Tesla posted its best quarter of the year in terms of deliveries. This expiration explains why.

Meanwhile, non-EV car sales dropped 3% last month. But now that the tax credit is gone, there are many questions that are now being asked of the electoral vehicle market. For example, what is going to happen to prices? What is going to happen to demand? And how will all of this affect the most valuable car company in the world, which is, of course, Tesla?

Well, to answer these questions, we are speaking with John McNeil. He is the CEO of DVX Ventures. He's also the former president of Tesla and a current board member at General Motors. John, thank you very much for joining me on the program. Yeah, good to be. year. So this EV tax credit has just expired, $7,500 disappeared overnight. Let's just start

with a pretty basic question. What does this mean for consumers? More specifically, are prices on electric vehicles about to go up? I think it's a good question. And I'd point to markets around the world where this has happened. So around Europe, subsidies have come off, and we've got the benefit of a couple of years of looking at what's happened. And so in France, Germany, some other markets, subsidies have come off, and leases have gone away that are subsidized as well. So it's pretty similar to what just happened in the U.S. And in those situations, the market continued to grow. There is definitely some demand pull forward in the weeks and months right after the expiration of the subsidy. but when you look over the long run

the curve is up and to the right but it's choppy it's not a it's not a linear curve it's there's choppiness when you have these policy changes but I think you know one of the differences now is that there's much more compelling product on the market and you have

a lot of choice and so consumers in Europe and the US are both experiencing that we're a few years behind but we've got something like 65 and different models of choice now in the EV market that we didn't have two years ago. And so I think over the long run, you're going to see the market continue to grow, probably like it has in Europe after the expiration of the subsidies. Just in terms of the pricing itself, someone's going to eat the cost of this.

Either it's the car companies who, and we'll see some compression on margins, or it's the consumer who will pay more. Who do you think is going to be eating? more of the cost? Who is who is going to pay for this? I think you're going to see a little of both and it probably depends on market segment. So you're going to see car companies offering incentives which compresses margin and you may see prices go up a bit. So where that may come to roost is at different ends of the market. So you've got the lower end of the market where there's now a lot of compelling product that's around $30 to $35,000. I would imagine you might see some incentives at that end of the market. But at the upper end of the market where people didn't qualify because of

income for these subsidies, you may see prices go up or prices just return to their normal levels without a subsidy. And so I think we're going to see a little bit of both. You're on the board of General Motors, you were the former president of Tesla. When this tax credit elimination was being floated around, I think one thing that I was thinking about and wondering is, you know, yes, this may mean that prices are going to go up. But realistically, the electric vehicle market is, as you say, it's already so big, it's already growing so much. Perhaps it doesn't need a subsidy. Perhaps it doesn't actually need an incentive. Was that the feeling among management and among boards in the auto industry, or was there

some real concern about this? I think there was both concern, but also, So I can just speak for myself a realization that, hey, as you said, this market's established. Like if you take battery electric vehicles and hybrids, one out of every four vehicles sold in the U.S. is now electrified. And so that looks like a market that's established and is probably getting ready to stand on its own. Had this happened two or three years ago, it would have had probably a very significant effect on the industry. But now that in GM's case, we're approaching 200,000 vehicles of production, we're able to bring the cost curve down. We're on a second generation of our batteries heading to third. And so we're pulling out costs not only in advance of this, but really so that we can compete on a worldwide basis with the Chinese.

Yeah, you bring up the Chinese, which I was going to ask you about. I mean, you mentioned the lower end of the price range for EVs in America around $35,000. But you look at China where the average across all new electric vehicles is actually lower than that, it's around 25,000, that their government is, of course, massively subsidizing this industry. Are there any concerns about how this will affect American competitiveness abroad if BYDs are being sold at these incredibly low price points in Europe and around the world? And, you know, we're not being subsidized in the way that we used to. Are there concerns that this could bolster the Chinese competitiveness in the EV market? I think, you know, we're really working hard to pull costs out and really maximize customer value at the same time because we need to be competitive. And the U.S. industry needs to be competitive.

This is more than a trillion dollar impact on GDP in the U.S. alone. So we've got to get, we've got to get as competitive as possible. I think policymakers are going to work on making the playing field as level as they can. As you said, you know, China's a different situation. We enjoyed that when I was at Tesla. You get essentially a free factory, subsidized workforce, subsidized parts, and you get a real advantage as you're building up capacity to compete. We need to make sure that's a level playing field in the rest of the world.

But at the same time, we've got to get to the point where we can offer a $20,000 to $25,000. or EV that's competitive feature-wise. The good news is GM is producing EVs in China with a Chinese partner. So we are learning all that we can because, quite frankly, they're fantastic at automation and cost efficiency. And we're learning all we can and taking those learnings back to the U.S. and applying those as fast as we can. So we can be competitive.

But right now, as you said, like if I land in Tel Aviv, I see BIDs. I land in Paris. I see BIDs. Yeah. I land in Santiago or Mexico City, I see BIDs. And the U.S. industry, I don't think, can settle for just being a North American regional player. We want to be able to export and compete, too. Yeah, just on BYD, which we just saw some new data.

Their sales actually fell for the first time in 19 months in September. But, you know, they've overtaken Tesla as the global leader. What are your overall views on BYD? What do you think of the valuation? What do you think of the business? And I think the bigger question for BYD is how dependent are they on the government is the only way they can sell those cars that cheaply

because of the subsidies they receive from the government or is there some other strategic advantage that BYD has over American companies? I think we're about to see the next chapter play out in the way that Chinese industrial policy works. So essentially what they do is they start a, almost our Darwinian approach where they fund and subsidize 100 players, which they've done in the EV market, they let the best of the best emerge. So in this case, it's B.D, Gile, others, Neo. And for those that are failing, they then consolidate that capacity underneath the winners. So the second chapter is the winners get cheap capacity, free capacity, and makes them even more. more competitive, and then the Chinese do what they're doing, which is they turn to the export

markets. We're seeing that we're at the beginning of that chapter right now. The reason that B2ID's sales went down largely, I think, is because there's been a price war in China, and the Chinese government has called timeout on that price war and said, you need to stop this and raise prices, which obviously hurts consumer demand. But I don't think that is going to last long. I don't see B by D's sales decreasing again in another quarter, they'll likely continue to increase. And so I think what that means for worldwide markets is you're going to see a lot more Chinese capacity looking to penetrate. And they're very savvy. They know they need local factories to do that and local distribution and local supply chains. So they're building those in Europe. They're

building those in South America. But I think for political reasons, they've been very cautious in approaching North America. Just thinking long term, or GM, as an example, you're on the board of GM, how essential is electrification to the overall strategy? I mean, it seems with the elimination of this credit, as maybe is less emphasis on we need EVs anywhere and everywhere, but how essential is it for the business? I think it remains our north star.

Like, we've committed, we've committed many billions of dollars to transition ourselves into an electric future. The reason for that is because you see where the consumer heads over time, and in a number of the super cycles that are happening, the U.S. is the leader. And so you don't get a look externally. In the EV super cycle or the vehicle electrification super cycle, others of the world are five to ten years ahead of us. And so we get the benefit of looking at what happens over time. And over time, you start to see that even in oil-rich countries like Norway, a super majority of the car sold now, EVs. And in China, a majority of the car sold are EVs. And along the coasts of the U.S., you've got very high EV penetration. And it's largely because people start to discover, hey, the fuel is less expensive. I don't have anything to maintain on this vehicle. So the maintenance costs are almost zero. And lastly, it just drives better because it solves a hundred-year-old problem in cars, and that is the weight of an ice engine is in the front of the car. And so engineers have

had to mitigate as much as they can to get that thing to move and drive the way that the way that we all want it to as consumers. You don't have that problem in an EV. You get a battery in the center of gravity of the vehicle for the first time. It's low and it's heavy and the car drives like a race car as a result or handles like a race car. And so you've got better handling cheaper fuel, cheaper maintenance. And so over time the consumers move to that, which is why I think even post-subsidy in Europe for the last two years, you've seen the consumers continue to move to that, but not as fast a pace as it is when it's subsidized. That's for sure. So it remains our North Star. But at the same time, we're realizing it's really good to have the flexibility

of a portfolio where you can meet the customer where they're at rather than trying to artificially lead the customer to a decision that they may not be ready for. Yes. So my final question here. As the former president of Tesla, I'd love to hear what you make of Tesla right now. There's more emphasis on things that aren't just cars, you know, autonomous, AI, humanoid robots. What do you make of all of it and what do you think about the business going forward? I think the business has moved away. It moved its focus away from a car business. I think Elon came back from China about a year and a half ago and essentially said to his team, the car business is lost. And we need to now move on.

And the existential products that Tesla has to have in his view are autonomy and robotics. And that's the future of the business. So as you've seen, the evidence of that is they're guiding down. And in terms of the quarterly expectations of deliveries and the annual expectations of deliveries that are in Elon's pay plan are not aggressive. And so I think they are really focused. on an autonomous future for both cars, which are essentially a robot on wheels and humanoid robots. And so I think that's the way the markets view in the company. And I think that's the way the company intends to be viewed for sure. Is that the right way to do it? I mean, for the market

seems to love it. This is the big question we keep having. Is it a car company? Is it not a car company? But the market seems to like the idea that it isn't a car company. My sense is it's a car company in transition. It's got the benefit of having more than $30 billion of cash on its balance sheet to see it through this transition to the other side to robotics. And they're acting like that. There's not new models that are compelling or really groundbreaking. Where they're trying to break ground is on autonomy and then on the Optimus Robot. All right. John McNeil is the CEO of DVX Ventures. John, we really appreciate you to time, thank you for joining us. Yeah, thanks for having me. After the break, a look at the White House's

plan to tackle soaring drug prices. If you're enjoying the show, give Profi markets a follow. Support for the show comes from Betterment. Nobody knows what's going to happen in the markets tomorrow. That's why when it comes to saving and investing, it helps to have a long-term approach and a plan you can stick to because if you don't, it's easy to make hasty decisions that could potentially impact performance. Betterman is a saving and investing platform with a suite of tools designed to prepare you for whatever is around the corner. Their automated investing feature helps keep you on track for your goals. Their globally diversified portfolios can smooth out the bumps of investing and prepare you to take advantage of long-term trends. And their tax smart tools can potentially

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We love our fans. For tickets, head to pivottour.com. See you there. A lot happened this month. Charlie Kirk, Jimmy Kimmel, James Comey, easy to miss a resolution in the epic legal fight between the Murdox. But their family drama matters because we've got a Fox News Secretary of Defense, Fox News Secretary of Transportation, Fox News Secretary of Janine Piro,

our Fox News presidency is the crowning achievement of 94-year-old media mogul Rupert Murdoch. In Australia, if you say Rupert, if you mention the name Rupert, people know who you're talking about. He has been one of the most important kind of media owners, not only for what he owns, but also for the way he's used it. He has had this fascinating, but for many people, poisonous, impact on political discourse, on politics more generally. How Rupert Murdoch remade the world on Today Explain. We're back with Proffty Markets. President Trump announced Trump RX, a government-run website for consumers to buy drugs directly, from manufacturers. This move came alongside a new deal with Pfizer. Pfizer will sell some discounted

drugs on the Trump RX website. Pfizer also agreed to sell its drugs to Medicaid patients at the most favored nation price. In other words, the lowest price available to other developed nations. And in exchange, the company will get an exemption from Trump's pharmaceutical tariff. So lots of questions here. What actually is Trump RX and what is Pfizer's role in this deal? our producer Claire Miller spoke with Courtney Breen. She is a senior analyst at Bernstein Research. Let's just start with your initial reactions to Trump RX. How big of a deal is this really?

Does this address the root causes of high drug prices in a meaningful way? I think there is a lot of layers in the healthcare system that lead to high drug prices. And I think the pharma industry body has actually spent a lot of time educating the administration, but also trying to educate generally that the manufacturer of the drug tends to only get about 50% of what is calculated as overall drug spent. So when we think about the multitude of factors here

is this one step going to change the outcome, not necessarily on a broad base. However, when we look at some of the needs that individual patients have, where today, if they don't have coverage with their insurer for a particular product, they are currently having to buy that at a list price. This Trump RX platform will allow them to buy these products that are listed on there

at a much reduced price relative to that list price closer to what an insurer or another channel might pay, enabling those patients that perhaps fall between the cracks today to get access. The other thing I would say is this will be particularly relevant for those products that have consumer orientation. So the GLP ones, these are particularly relevant because you've got many patients who have limited access through their insurance and are willing to pay out of pocket. But generally, the way to think about it is this could be a good channel for a patient who is able to pay a net price that is perhaps going to enable them to get access to a product that they can't get access to through their insurance today. Generally, however, the co-pay that you would be paying with your

insurer would tend to be lower than a total net price of a product. And so that's where there's a little bit of a challenge for many patients for this to be the silver bullet solution. Let's shift to the drug companies themselves for a minute. Why do you think Pfizer agreed to this? Is it really all about dodging the tariffs, which by the way, I think are still, like the jury's still out on whether those are even legal or not. So why is Pfizer down to lower the prices of some of these drugs? Two things. If you look back in history, drug pricing and drug pricing in the US and this being a bipartisan issue has forever been a debate about the sector. This has forever been a downward pressure that the industry has just kind of had to deal with nonstop over time. And so in some ways,

this was an opportunity for the industry to get on the front foot and come to an agreement with this administration whereby they were helping to achieve the goal of reducing overall drug spend and overall healthcare cost in the US while also ensuring that it wasn't something entirely punitive that was landed on them and they were able to be part of the solution and thereby ensure that they still have enough profit

so that they can invest appropriately in future and as well. So this was very much about kind of perhaps taking an opportunity to collaborate and put this one to bed for a while in terms of drug pricing pressure, but ensure to do it in a way that you can still have a viable industry going forward when it comes to drug pricing and the reductions we may see. What are you expecting in terms of deals with other companies? Pfizer stock popped on this news. Do you see much upside for other pharma stocks? We have seen the entire sector rally in response, and so what that means is we've kind of got a framework of what are the rules of the road or the various parameters that each of these companies are going to be negotiating on. What the details that are kind of playing out between kind of each company and the administration are which drugs are going to be included on something like Trump RX, what the actual anchor most favored nation price.

that they're going to compare to because there's a lot of different ways you could look at that. This isn't just a simple kind of easy way to say, all I look at all of UK prices or I look at all of Sweden's prices and those are the prices I take for everything. This is being negotiated on a drug-by-drug basis for each company. So we expect to see many more announcements in terms of kind of company-specific deals because there are those company-specific nuances. But in addition, the fact that there is a framework that we know that these are the realms in which the companies are negotiating, everyone feels a lot more comfortable.

And this is because the uncertainty and the worst case scenario, which the worst case scenario could be a 30 to 50% hit to the top line revenue of some of these companies, which would be disaster. And so now we're in a world where actually we've got a much. much better understanding of the scope, much better understanding of what the path looks like forward. And so now investors specifically are feeling a lot more comfortable with what the volatility and what that uncertainty might look like going forward. So if I had to summarize all of this, it sounds like Trump RX might have an impact for some people, but we won't

know the scale of the impact until we actually see what drugs are listed on there. Am I characterizing that right? Absolutely. I think that's really important. I think the other pieces are is kind of the MFN for Medicaid and kind of seeing what that does to overall Medicaid spending over time. And then the final thing that was agreed in terms of drug prices with Pfizer was guaranteeing MFN prices for new drug launches. And the concept here was the administration said, look, we don't want you to agree a drug price with us and then go and undercut it. When go and launch in one of these next European countries. And so we want to make sure that we're getting a good deal, but they were still investing appropriately to fund that future innovation. And so

this is again where the industry is said, okay, this is something we can live with because this is a go-forward situation where we can then play within these new rules going forward. And so again, we're going to see kind of a very slow evolution as these new drugs come out in terms of the strategies that the farmer companies take, the prices they're willing to accept in other countries, the length of time it perhaps takes to launch in these other countries around the world relative to those U.S. launches, which tend to come first. So in the meantime, it seems like the biggest winners here are actually the drug companies because they now have a path forward to avoid the tariffs.

I think what we know is over the last couple of decades, drug pricing debate has kind of reached fever pitch at many points along the road. This is an opportunity for that to perhaps be put to bed for a while for the companies to focus on kind of what they do best, which is investing in scientific innovation and having more certainty around kind of policy threats like tariffs or new drug pricing pressures. And so hopefully this means that we have a much more fertile industry that's able to focus on the things that it can do that add impact to patients and populations over the long run, rather than kind of reacting to the volatility of the policy environment that we may have been in had no deals been struck.

And as far as patients being winners, we'll have to wait and see. There are two potential populations we think about in patients, patients who are accessing drugs today and the prices that they're kind of having to pay or the access they have to those drugs, but also the potential patients of the future. And so making sure that there is the right spend, the right innovation going on, so that we're able to crack kind of the next big problem, pancreatic cancer, neurodegeneration, all of these disease states that don't have good kind of solutions today. And so this, I think, is the balance that we're always trying to walk in the pharma sector

of kind of ensuring that there isn't exploitation with price today, but ensuring that there is enough profit so that you can take the wild risks that you have to in the investment cycle when it comes to R&D because it is a very risky path, taking a drug from discovery through to the end of the journey, about $2 billion and very, very few drugs make it. All right. Thank you, Courtney.

We really appreciate you joining us. Absolutely. Thank you so much, Claire. That was Courtney Breen, senior analyst at Bernstein Research. So, let's be quite honest. If this agreement is carried out and it all goes to plan, well, it can only really be a good thing for Americans.

Part of the plan here is to figure out a way to raise prices in the G7 nations and also in Switzerland and in the Netherlands, and the White House is reportedly going to be doing the negotiating on that front. And then the idea is to use that extra revenue from those price increases to bring down the cost of drugs in the US.

And supposedly, those cuts will amount to discounts on certain US drugs of roughly 50%, so half off. There's not a whole lot to dislike about that. And yes, the details are very vague, as Courtney described, and the terms are confidential. We don't really know how expansive these discounts will actually be, and the only drugs that they have mentioned by name

are the drugs that are really pretty insignificant to the Pfizer portfolio. But anything you can do to get drug prices down, we'll take it. I mean, we spend more than $13,000 per capita on health care in America. That's more than twice the average of comparable nations. We pay eight times more for insulin than what Greece pays. We pay seven times more for Humira than what Germany pays.

We pay more for drugs and healthcare in America than any nation in the world, and it isn't even close. So for Trump to come in and say, look, here is a creative idea to get cost down. in America. Yeah, it's got my name on it, but whatever. I'm listening. I'm all for it. But I will also remind you that this is coinciding with what may turn out to be one of the most significant political impasses in recent memory. And that is, the reason the government is shutting down right now is because Trump and the Republican Party want to take more than four million Americans off of health insurance. Or I can be a bit more specific. it's because the Republicans want to subsidize their tax cuts with Medicaid and ACA cuts,

which will result in an explosion in health insurance costs, and that will price out more than four million Americans. So it's not that they're literally taking them off of health insurance, is that they're pricing them out of health insurance. To be even more specific, health insurance premiums in America are going to rise by 75% next year if these subsidies are not renewed. And that is what the government is fighting over right now.

That is what the Democrats are fighting over. That is why the government is shut down. And by the way, that is only one small piece in this healthcare story. There are another

11 million Americans who are going to lose their health coverage because of the big, beautiful bill, which is going to cut Medicaid funding by about $800 billion

over the next 10 years. And when you account for those cuts, you're now looking not at a 75% price hike, but a 136% price hike. Yes, insurance premiums under this new spending plan are going to more than double. So, once you realize all of that, suddenly this whole Trump-R-X-FISA situation starts to look a little bit insignificant, bordering on, ridiculous. I mean, And the idea that the cost of certain eczema drugs will come down by 50%, oh, great, but at the same

time, health insurance premiums for the rest of America are going to double, well, suddenly that 50% discount doesn't seem to really matter anymore. Suddenly, this whole announcement isn't very exciting at all, and in fact, it's starting to look a lot less like actual progress on policy, and it's starting to look a lot more like a distraction. It's starting to look a lot more like a way to make us forget about the thousands more dollars we are going to pay in our insurance costs, essentially just because we wanted to give more tax cuts to rich people. That's the real story here. So look, there is a way to see this headline positively. There is a way to believe that this is a net good for the US healthcare

system. But in order to believe that and in order to really get excited, about this, you have to look at this issue in an incredibly narrow way. You basically need to look at it through a straw. And that's how Trump wants us to look at all of these deals. He wants us to see the deal, see it on the news, read the headline, and instinctively, without really asking any questions, just say, oh, great, he fixed it. Healthcare costs are coming down, drug costs are coming down. But again, in this deal, as with every other deal, we see, there is a lot more than what meets the eye. The headline is a very small component in a larger story, which is not about the decline of healthcare costs in America. Actually, it's the opposite. It's about the

explosion of healthcare costs in America, the explosion of healthcare premiums. And it is just very ironic that it is precisely this issue that has forced our government to shut down. And by the looks of what happened in the Senate yesterday, yet another failed vote, there is not really anything to suggest that this issue will be resolved anytime soon. Okay, that's it for today. This episode was produced by Claire Miller, edited by Joel Patson, and engineered by Benjamin Spencer. Our associate producer is Alison Weiss. Our research team is Dan Chalan, Isabella Kinsel, Chris Nodonoghue and Mia Severio, and our technical director is Drew Burroughs. Thank you for

listening to Proftree Markets from Proftree Media. I'm Ed Elson. If you liked what you heard, give us a follow and join us tomorrow for our conversation with Claudia Sarm, the former section chief at the Federal Reserve.