Good monday morning. Welcome to squawk alley. Jon fortt, sara eisen and myself at post nine. The markets up 63. Joining us today, re code executive editor cara swisher. First we want to get to phil lebeau for more on this ceo shakeup over at ford. Phil, good morning once again. Thank you very much. We will be talking with bill ford jr. , or actually bill ford, the executive chairman of the Ford Motor Company, coming to us from the companys headquarters discussing this decision in terms of dropping mark fields as ceo. Hes being replaced by jim hackette. Jim hackette, formerly the ceo of steelcase, board member at ford for a number of years and then took over the Smart Mobility business about a year, maybe a year and two months ago, and he now will be at the headquarters and we heard from him just within the last hour, saying look, we need to move faster, we need to make our decisions more unified as a company and as part of that, we are going to be talking with bill ford about what happens next for ford and about this decision, how quickly they decided the ford board decided because theres already reporting out there they have been mulling this over for some time as far as making a change. Phil, we just heard from robert frank about the ford family and obvious frustrations over the stock price. Is the read this morning that this move is to patch up that stock, or to truly graduate the company into a new era of mobility . The read is that its a combination of factors. Theres no doubt that the lagging stock price played a role and thats a key factor here. We are going to be talking with bill ford about that. The other issue here is fords lacking the type of vision and communication with wall street thats needed to make investors excited about the future. A good example is they had a meeting with investors and analysts i want to say a week and a half, two weeks ago and a number of analysts afterwards came away saying a lot of talk about vision for the future and products coming down five, six, seven years from now but nothing tangible. Thats what ford needs. Ford needs something tangible. I wonder how much, phil, tesla is an elephant in the room here, surpassing the market value of ford and gm just this year. Huge factor. Huge factor. On top of that, when you look at where tesla is in terms of future technologies, you will hear this argument from ford and from others in detroit, were working on technology thats as good as what tesla has and you will be seeing it in our products soon. Well, look what tesla is doing. They have these products that are out there with auto pilot, the model s and model x, and while some people will snicker at them and say look, they havent been tested all the way and they were rolled out before they should have been rolled out, the investor looks at that and says these guys are going in the future with the technology thats going to work. Wheres ford . Wheres gm . Wheres fiat chrysler, the other auto makers of the world . They are all working on it but we see most of the proof, if you will, from tesla. Phil, thank you for that. Busy morning for you. What a story. Phil lebeau in chicago. See you in a little bit. Lets bring in cara swisher. Once again, we are back to this conversation about whether the new era of mobilitys going to come from detroit or Silicon Valley. Right. Absolutely. Its been the ongoing debate. Its interesting because a couple years ago, you recall we had two years ago, we had mark fields at code and he didnt do very well. One of the reasons was everybody didnt think he had an articulate vision of Autonomous Car driving. It was a tough interview for him. I wonder if you see any parallels here between the ousting of mark fields, bear with me here, and the ousting of terry simmell at yahoo . Part of the hit on him was that he was too much about himself and yahoo wasnt google. Is this about ford not being tesla more than its about fords actual results . Well, i think its the question of what do they have to show for it, just as the previous person said. There is kind of a weird market valuation situation with tesla being bigger than ford because ford has much bigger revenues. Like all these companies, entertainment companies, it doesnt matter what you are, are you part of the future, where its clearly going. Are you doing what netflix would do. Everybody made fun of netflix, now they dont make fun of netflix. Everybody does what netflix does. The question is are you really committed to where its going. Its really going into Autonomous Vehicles. Whether its in a testing phase or you will have to eat a lot of revenue to get there, you have to have something to show for it. Ford never made that google deal. They had talked to google. There was some back and forth, it wasnt pleasant between them. They never made it a big deal with a company. They just set up an Autonomous Vehicle unit here in Silicon Valley but it felt more like show than actual and what attracted the engineers, this is a race for the engineers of which there are a limited amount to create these cars, so i think it felt like they probably werent far enough long and at the very same time, they werent selling enough trucks which of course is their business. If you cant do either of them, you are in kind of trouble. I dont think you can just do the autonomous part because that is for the future, but you definitely have to show some sort of progress there. Theres also electric vehicles, ride sharing companies, all these sort of Disruptive Forces coming together. You mentioned google. How threatened should detroit be by google and apple and some of these other Big Tech Companies with now a lot of scale and a lot of capital infringing on their business . You know, everything is not like unicorns and rainbows there. They are having trouble. I talked to google and their engineers, uber especially is having a lot of trouble in this selfdriving effort. A lot of political problems, a lot of experimental problems, all kinds of things. But they are doing it. They are creating the mass to create whoevers going to do this. Obviously tesla is way ahead because they have stuff on the road, they have had accidents and issues and everything else. At the same time, they are moving towards these vehicles. Same with mercedes. I have driven in several mercedes cars and its a question of who commercializes it, gets it on the road. But you have to do these experiments before that. The question is, has ford, ford has been the least aggressive. Gm has been making deals although obviously something has gone awry with its relationship, google just entered the picture there. You have to be really kneedeep in this right now at this point if you have any hope of being part of the future. Thats the question. I wouldnt want to be an automaker ceo because you have to live in the present and also live in the future. Kind of like tesla. Jim hackett is an interesting choice. We love his chairs, by the way. But you know, hes an interesting choice. He certainly does yurunderstand where technology is going for sure. I wonder when you think about the Technology Tesla has today, but the logistics and operational structure and manufacturing underlying core business that ford has, you think musk would trade places with in this case hackett today . Oh, i dont i think he likes just where he is. I suspect he likes just where he is. What an interesting life he has, right . Hes on the cutting edge of things. The problem they have is getting these cars out there and working properly. Hey, kara, im sorry, we have to interrupt you. We want to take our audience to where President Trump is now talking to Prime Minister benjamin netanyahu. No matter where we go, we see the signs of iran in the middle east. No matter where we go, whether its syria, where we were forced to shoot the 59 missiles a few weeks ago, no matter what area were in, we see yemen, iraq. No matter where we are, we see the signs, every sign, whether its soldiers, whether its money and guns, its iran. Instead of saying thank you to the United States, they now feel emboldened. Maybe they figure they were so good, they could do it. They cant do it, believe me. It was a terrible thing for the United States to enter that deal and believe me, iran will never have a nuclear weapon, that i can tell you. The intelligence cooperation is terrific. Thank you. Just so you understand, i never mentioned the word or the name israel. Never mentioned it during that conversation. They were all saying i did. So you had the story wrong. Never mentioned the word israel. Thank you. Lets go. Everybody out, please. Theres the president , first foreign trip. Obviously the second leg having visited saudi arabia now to israel as netanyahu himself tweeted this morning, first time a president has made israel part of the first foreign trip and again, the president turns to comments about iran, saying they could never be allowed to have a nuclear weapon, echoing things he said the past couple days. Little bit of a press frenzy in that room between the American Media and some of the israeli media shouting. Couldnt quite make out what they said. Clearly, its an important symbolic moment for Prime Minister netanyahu and his highly touted friendship with President Trump, and the United States. I did not realize that, that this was the first time israel was part of the First Official foreign visit by a u. S. President. That in itself is symbolic we will see the president in the next hour, of course, to the degree we get pictures we will take that live. Back to phil lebeau, who is now with fords executive chairman, bill ford. Thank you, carl. Lets bring in bill ford from the Ford Motor Company headquarters in deerborn, michigan. Thanks for joining us on a very busy day. Lets start first off with the decision to fire mark fields. Why now, and for how long had you and the other Board Members been discussing the need to replace him and bring in a new ceo . Well, first of all, i didnt fire mark. He chose to resign after a discussion he and i had on friday. I think thats very important. But you know, we only decided on friday that i would go and talk to mark, so i did and we reached this conclusion and then we moved forward with jim hackett. Susquehanna capital is out with a note today, raising the question that so many people are raising today and really, you are the person who should answer this being the person who speaks most for the ford family. How much of this decision is driven by the low stock price and the ford family saying enough, we need this company to do better . Well, you dont make a decision like this based on those kinds of things. Frankly, this was a board of directors decision, not a ford family decision. But theres no question that all of us were acutely aware that the stock has been languishing. And but also, that this is a time of great opportunity and great change for us. And we need to be quicker in our decision making. We need to have clarity in our messaging and in our communication, and thats something we also need a leader who has transformed a company before. You know, just as when i brought in elmalaly, he was the right man for that time. I believe if you look at jim hacketts track record, you will see that the transformational leadership, you know, when he ran steelcase, they werent the number one manufacturer and they defined themselves as a furniture manufacturer. He said no, lets reimagine how the work space of the futures going to be. He did that, grew the revenues and took them to the number one spot in the industry. So we really need that kind of leadership in this time of great change. You talk about moving faster. Twopart question here. First of all, did you convey your frustration or the board convey its frustration to mark and the other executives at the company that you werent moving fast enough, and second of all, when you talk about moving faster, does that mean hey, we need to be quicker about deciding certain parts of the business are just not worth being in anymore, and we need to either sell them or shut them down . Well, to the first part of the question, i really will never comment on any board discussions. Its just not something i will do. But i will tell you that yes, we are taking a very hard look at all the parts of our business that create value and those that dont create value. And those that dont create value, we cant continue to invest in them. We just had on kara swisher, who i know you are familiar with. Sure. She made a point that out in the Silicon Valley, ford is viewed as being quote unquote, one of the companies thats really not doing a whole lot despite how heavily you guys are investing out there. Given that, given the fact that jim hackett was in charge of the Smart Mobility business, do you redouble your efforts there, or do you sit there and say we only give it x amount of time before we have to make some hard decisions about how much further we invest in things like autonomous drive vehicles, electric vehicles, et cetera . Well, no, no, no. I would argue that there was a report out last month that said ford was the leader in Autonomous Vehicles. A group that had studied the whole av front and came out and said we were furthest ahead. Look, we have been working on avs for ten years. We farmed formed argo ai, a key player from google and from uber, and they have now ramped up and but we are just not talking publicly as much as some companies. Partly we dont want to tip our hand and partly, we want to make sure when we do, our messaging is very crisp. I feel actually very good about what were doing. If you look at ford Smart Mobility didnt exist just over a year ago. Jim hackett came in, started it. We bought chariot, there were six people. Now we are rolling it out around the world. Its growing tremendously. We are building other services that we havent gone public with which we will at some point in the near future. So im actually very pleased with the progress were making. But you know, theres always more to do and speed is important. So will we be hearing more in terms of more benchmark targets in terms of saying this is what we have and when at we will produce . We will. We also want to make sure that we are ready to talk about it. Its easy to a lot of companies throw out these big statements and then years later when they dont come to pass, they kind of shrug and i think credibility is very important in this. So we want to signal what were doing. We want to put specificity out there. We also dont want to necessarily tip our hand competitively on all the things were doing, either. Last question, bill. Jim hackett was talking during the town hall just a few minutes ago about a better vision for the company, almost a second version of one ford, not one ford being rebranded, but streamlining the company, if you will. Do you expect that you will be a leaner company under jim hackett . I really think that our entire Company Needs to really look at its interesting, phil. If you look at kind of the old model was fords Smart Mobility would be the innovation engine of the company but the entire Company Needs innovation. If you look at artificial intelligence, 3d printing, robotics, deep learning, all these things that are either here or coming at us, you know, they can profoundly help change all parts of our business. Thats why you are not going to hear us talking anymore about the emerging and the core. Its really all one Ford Motor Company and its one Ford Motor Company that needs to embrace change. Bill ford, executive chairman of the Ford Motor Company, joining us from the companys headquarters in deerborn, michigan. First on cnbc. Guys, you heard it from bill himself saying they need to move faster, this is a company that to a certain extent needs to reinvent itself. Lets see what kind of results we see from ford on that front and what it moons eans to the s price over the next couple quarters. Important interview on an important day. Stock hanging on to a 1. 5 gain. Phil lebeau in chicago. When we come back, a quick check on the markets. Dow up 80 points hanging on to its gains. When we come back, they have been called the google of genetic testing. We talk to the ceo after this. Finding time to get things done isnt easy. But weve got the Digital Tools to help. Now with xfinitys my account, you can figure things out easily, so you wont even have to call us. Change your wifi password to something you can actually remember, instantly. Add that premium channel, and watch the show everyones talking about, tonight. And the bill you need to pay . Do it in seconds. Because we should fit into your life, not the other way around. Go to xfinity. Com myaccount illumina is the biggest maker of genome sequencing equipment and has been called the google of genetics testing. Shares are up tlep37 for the y. Joining us is francis desouza, the ceo of i lumina along with meg terrell. Thanks for being here. Good morning. Thank you for having me. In january you announced your new sequencing machine. Tell us about what growth this machine will bring to illumina, what this does thats different from previous models. It was a hugely exciting launch because it represents the most powerful genetic sequencer ever launched. At the same time as its the most powerful, we also released it at a price lower than our previous machine. That we have done is give access to this huge power of Genomic Testing to a vast majority of labs out there. We believe that will drive a whole set of new Genomics Research going into the future. We have lots of labs that are interested in learning more about how genomices impacts human health and complex diseases like schizophrenia, autism. We expect to unleash a whole new set of research that will fundamentally improve our understanding of how health and disease works and then ultimately, improve our