Reuters/Paolo Bona
Sergio Marchionne.
"I'm a phenomenal fan of Elon Musk. I think he's the greatest," Marchionne said in a CNBC interview on Wednesday.
"He's a disrupter and I think he is a great marketer. And I love him."
Ferrari opened for trading Wednesday at $60 per share, or 15% above its IPO price of $52.
Ferrari needs to sell an additional 7,000 cars a year in order to keep growing.
Marchionne suggested that wealthy individuals who should be buying Ferraris are buying the wrong cars right now.
That turned into a dig at Tesla.
"I'm not going to make derogatory remarks about the competition, but if you have to wait over 12 months to get a car, people have a tendency in some cases to go someplace else," he said.
Tesla is known to struggle to deliver on time.
But as for Musk himself, Marchionne only had good things to say on Wednesday, repeating, "I think he's a great marketer."
Here's the clip: