It was only two days ago that a Wells Fargo analyst downgraded
Amazon stock. He took his price target from
2:20 to 180, which Amazon today trades right around 180.
So he's basically saying that Amazon doesn't have any upside.
It is at its current fair value. That, of course, wasn't great
for Amazon stock. The rest of the market traded up
and Amazon stayed still. Well, only a day later, another
analyst named Mark Mahaney upgraded Amazon stock.
He upgraded it from 2:20 to 2:50.
So we have a bit of disagreement here.
Amazon is a divisive stock. There is analysts down grading
it and analysts upgrading it at the same time.
Since we already went over the downgrade of Amazon stock, I
think it would be good to look at the upgrade.
Luckily for us, the analysts. Mark Mahaney went on to CNBC to
explain why he believes the stock is currently worth 250.
So he sees some major upside in Amazon.
It's his very top pick and I'll be reacting to his appearance on
CNBC today. Now, of course, we have some
other news to get into. Tiktok is once again being
targeted by the US government. This time it's local
governments. The District of Columbia's
Attorney general went on to CNBC and explained that Tiktok is
nicotine for children. We'll be looking into why Tiktok
is so bad for kids according to the government.
We also have news that Costco is expanding into different
concepts like building Costco's underneath apartment complexes.
As a long time Costco shareholder, I'll share you my
thoughts on this new adaption and the ability for Costco to
innovate. And then of course, in a couple
days we have Tesla's robo taxi reveal coming up.
We'll be looking over what to expect and how this is a make or
break moment for Tesla. And then finally, as a little
bit of a bonus, we have some Tik Toks to react to.
This time it's Tik Toks of Google employees and a Day of
the life. We've seen these type of videos
before. We also have someone visiting
the offices of Salesforce and we have, I think this is 1 of a
young person that has like $100,000 that he's putting into
meme coins. We'll be looking at that as
well. I'll give you my reaction.
So as always, we have a lot to get into in this episode.
Let's go ahead and jump in now. We start today off with the main
story, which is Amazon, a stock that I've been following for
years. It's one of the main holdings in
My Portfolio. If we look at the story fund
here, Amazon is a $77,000 position, currently $20,000 in
the green. It's been a great holding so
far. And overall, I feel very bullish
about Amazon, both as a customer and as in Fester.
I use the product, I use the company.
I constantly have boxes of Amazon products on my front
porch. I'm always ordering stuff.
My wife is as well. Our orders per year online seem
to go up every single year as it's just so convenient.
Amazon gets things to your house so quickly.
Not only that, I'm a customer of AWS, which is Amazon's web
services, a major portion of the business.
This website, Qualtrim, is hosted on AWS, so I use multiple
parts of Amazon's business, whether it's Amazon Prime Video,
watching movies, ordering products, or the web service.
I use all of it. And it's grown a bit of a
conviction to where I think this company is on to something.
They play a bigger and bigger role in people's lives every
single year. And I believe the intrinsic
value of Amazon continues to grow over time as they make
lifelong connections with customers.
But regardless, a couple days ago, an analyst from Wells Fargo
downgraded Amazon, asserting that the stock was no longer
worth $220 per share. So we had a price target of 220,
and then he downgraded it back to 180, which is where it trades
right now. So this Wells Fargo analyst
basically said that there's no more upside in Amazon.
And he gave 2 primary reasons. One was that the cloud growth of
Amazon's great, but it's not enough to overcome the
challenges and the investments in the other businesses, the
primary investment being Project Kuiper.
Now this caught my attention when I see the analysts
concerned about Project Kuiper. I wanted to look further into
this. If you're not familiar, Project
Kuiper is the copycat of Starlink.
Now I currently have a Starlink with the Starlink service
because it allows me to go camping way out in a remote area
in the woods next to a lake, a place I normally couldn't stay
because there's no cell phone signal or Internet access.
With Starlink, you can just aim it at the sky and suddenly you
have high speed Internet and I can still manage my business.
Starlink allows for a lot of freedoms to go places you
couldn't go before and still have Internet access, and it
allows a lot of homes in remote areas to have access to the
Internet that they couldn't before.
I think that Starlink and satellite Internet is one of the
most incredible innovations over the past decade.
So I wasn't concerned about Amazon moving into this
business. In fact, I was excited that
there's some other competitor moving into this this industry.
But this analyst sees it differently, and he is concerned
that the major investments going into Project Kuiper will lower
the margins of Amazon, at least in the short term.
A recent report from the Wall Street Journal has the same
sentiment, saying that Amazon's earnings machine might take a
breather. For how long is the $2 trillion
question. They note the expected growth in
Amazon's operating income, saying Amazon's operating income
is expected to surge 69% this year and average 24% annual
growth over the next three years, vastly outpacing the 11%
revenue growth the companies expect to average over the same
time. But this might be a challenge
given Amazon's expanding ambitions.
Most notable amongst those is Project Kuiper, a low orbit
satellite network designed to provide broadband Internet
access to underserved parts of the globe.
So Amazon is in the phase of just getting started with this.
They've launched up a couple prototypes and they're set to
launch their actual satellites in 2025.
They're going to launch like 80 of them.
So they are way behind Starlink. They say that Kuiper is a
program near and dear to the heart of Amazon's now
spacefaring founder Jeff Bezos. It is also far from a sure
thing, particularly given the lead of Elon Musk's Starlink
service, which recently sent up its seven thousandth satellite.
So Amazon is launching up how many here?
They're they're planning to launch 83.
And Starlink has 7000 in the air and or low orbit.
And that makes sense because whenever you hook up to whenever
you hook up to Starlink, it literally takes within 10
minutes and you're hooked up to a satellite with high speed
Internet anywhere as long as you can see the sky, it works.
Florida State, Bezos used his last shareholder meeting as a
chief executive in 2021 to drive that point home.
He said, quote, can I stand here and tell you that our $10
billion investment in Kuiper will generate returns on
invested capital? I can't.
I believe it will. And we're working hard to ensure
that that's the case. So even Jeff Bezos realizes how
far behind they are. They're saying that there's no
guarantee of return on capital here.
Now, of course, the CEO should never say that an investment has
a guaranteed ROI, but at least they can give a bit more
confidence than this. This is a very open-ended, maybe
it will, maybe it won't statement.
And here we get to the crux of the problem.
These satellites require a ton of upfront investment before
turning a diamond profit. Several analysts are getting on
the bandwagon that Wall Street's near term estimates for Amazon
aren't fully taking into account these upfront investments.
So we have analysts like Brian Nowak from Morgan Stanley saying
that it is a tactical risk. We have James Lee saying that
there is a chance of downward revisions.
And of course, we have the Wells Fargo analyst that we heard
about two days ago, Ken Garliski, saying, in our view,
Kiper is likely to put a cap on margin expansion in the near
term. So here we see a group of
analysts starting to converge against Amazon because a
company's not going to have quite the earnings expansion and
free cash flow growth that we once predicted.
And this seems to be the ongoing case with Amazon.
Isn't there always something they're doing that dampens their
profits? A couple years ago, it was the
expansion of their retail business, their logistics
network. They doubled the size of it,
major CapEx investments. That was supposed to be the
major investment. Once that's over, then Amazon
was supposed to have record free cash flow growth and profits.
Well, after that, they had the artificial intelligence
investment, major CapEx investments into AI, into their
AWS system. But don't worry, we can wait
until after that, and then they'll have the major free cash
flow growth. But today, it seems like once
again Amazon is chasing down another rabbit hole.
They're expanding into Project Kuiper, once again dampening or
throwing cold water on that dream of Amazon having massive
free cash flow growth and margin expansion.
It seems like it's never going to be the case that Amazon will
finally just focus on profits, grow record free cash flows, and
investors can rejoice with their massive earnings they've made.
Well, there's one investor that thinks that that will be the
case, and this investor is not concerned about it.
He's an analyst and his name is Mark Mahaney, and he went on to
CNBC to explain his $250 price prediction for Amazon.
Now, he first starts off by giving an overview of Amazon and
why this company is currently his top pick.
That's right. It's a, it's a number one pick
in, in large cap, in in mega cap.
We think we're going to have ongoing margin expansion both in
the retail business and in the AWS, AWS business.
That's for the company as a whole.
I think free cash flow is continuing to improve and we
think we're going to see accelerating growth at their AWS
segment and stable growth, kind of consistent close to double
digit growth in their retail business.
You put all that together and we think there's a lot of valuation
upside to the share. So yeah, we like Amazon right
here and Prime Day is just another feature of it.
It's a, it's a, it's not a needle mover for the quarter per
SE, but it certainly helps. And it'll probably bring in more
Prime members worldwide, which is always a win for Amazon.
He's not focused on Prime Days being a key feature for Amazon,
being worth more. It's not a big part of his story
of Amazon. He's focused on the free cash
flow growth of the stock. Now I know one of the main
drivers of Amazon's free cash flow growth in the business
overall is advertising. Amazon is becoming a bigger and
bigger advertising company. I've said for over a year now
that I believe Amazon has the best advertising product in the
world with their direct ad listings under their searches.
And Harry's asked about how much money Amazon really makes for in
advertising, and he breaks down the math.
Oh, that's a good question. They're doing about 50 billion
now run rate and AD revenue and they don't disclose what the
margins are, but geez, it's got to be pretty high, Joe.
I'm guessing they're doing almost 50% margins on that.
If you look at what Google and Meta are able to do at that sort
of scale, 50 billion a year in AD revenue.
So that's 25 billion in up to 25 billion in operating income.
It's a substantial percentage of their of their overall, it's a
substantial percentage. The two biggest profit drivers
here are AWS and advertising. And by the way, the good thing
for Amazon and for Amazon shareholders is the fastest
growing parts of the business are the highest margin.
It's called a wonderful mix shift.
He's exactly right. Spot on.
Again, something that I've mentioned routinely before.
All the best parts of Amazon's business, all the high margin
portions of the business are the fastest growing.
The dreaded low margin retail business, the first party retail
business is the slowest growing part of Amazon.
So over time Amazon's getting a better shift.
The business is actually improving.
The margins overall in the business is going higher, while
Amazon maintains it's extremely wide Moat.
So overall, I love seeing the developments that are going on
with this business. And as he notes in this, Amazon
is making around $20 billion per year in operating income just
from advertising. And advertising will continue to
grow. We've even heard just a couple
days ago that Amazon is increasing the ad load on their
Amazon Prime Video because nobody's canceling.
And he also outlines the advances Amazon's making in
their media business. Yeah, Joe, I think that's been
one of the biggest kind of, I don't know, strategic pivots at
the company. They've really leaned into being
a media and entertainment empire's a strong word, but you
know, they certainly have a lot of professional content,
licensed content, you know, theatrical content.
And then over the last two or three years, you've really also
seen them lean into sports and where you get these massive
audiences, major reach, major frequency and and you get high
CPMS. And just beginning at the this
year, they started layering in ads into Amazon Prime Video.
It was one of the biggest UN monetized ad platforms out
there, potential ad platforms out there.
We think that'll help with profitability.
Fact, it's probably the single big, the biggest driver of
ramping margins, ramping up profitability at the company.
The other one is on the retail side.
They went through a major CapEx cycle in 2020 and 2021 and even
in going into 2022. And now they've sort of been
leveling that out. So you've got what's called
rising capacity utilization, better usage of all this
distribution centers that they that they may have overbuilt,
rising capital utilization, capacity utilization, there's
another word for that, it's margin expansion.
So you got these two kind of really nice.
Tailwinds, so he mentions an overall convergence of different
reasons that Amazons margins will likely expand the
additional ads on Amazon Prime. That is a further monetization
mechanism for Amazon, the use of their unused capacity in their
fulfillment centers. We know that Amazon they
overshot, they built too many fulfillment centers and now
they're finally filling that capacity.
When you fill capacity with fulfillment centers or server
farms, that is margin expansion. So we have all these different
ways that Amazon can push margins up.
But Even so, he also goes on to address Project Kyper and the
investments in that. Now there's some headwinds here.
They're starting to make a big investment in this satellite
system called Kyper and but as long as they break that out and
give us a sense of what those costs are and what they see is
the revenue opportunity, I think the market will give them a
little bit of the benefit of the doubt for that.
I once again agree. I don't see Project Hyper as a
wasted investment with no potential of return.
I think there's a very good chance, proven by Starlink, that
this can be a good business. Starlink has shown in and of
themselves that this is a profitable business and it has
massive demand. The Internet is incredibly
important. People can't get landline
Internet everywhere in the world, so Project Hyper has
massive potential. Starlink should not be the only
single company that offers satellite Internet, so even
though it's not a wasted investment, Project Hyper
certainly is a near term headwind.
Now finally he gets asked about his current price target on the
company. Yes, Yeah, we did, We did.
We're up near 250 now. We're looking on 2026, 6 and 30
* 25 to 30 times. Free cash flow gets you there.
And we think that kind of multiple for a kind of a key,
you know, brand, you know, an enduring brand, you know,
Amazon's going to be around in five, 10/15/20 years, a name
like that that can do premium growth for a substantial period
of time. We think that that kind of
multiple is well warranted. So there we have his price
target of 250 and his reasoning why.
And I believe Mark Mahaney's reasoning for having that price
target is much more compelling than what we've heard with other
analysts down grading the stock over short, short term
investments in the project hyper.
It seems like some analysts can't see the forest from the
trees, but Mark Mahaney looks at the overall picture.
Amazon's growing in their AWS, they're growing in their ad
revenue. They're fulfilling their their
fulfillment centers that they built a long time ago.
Their margins should step up in lockstep.
And this is a company that you can hold for five or ten years
and expect it to be around with a great degree of
predictability. Amazon is currently at 185.
If it went to 2:50 that that would be a 35% increase in the
stock price. Based off my share count right
now, what I currently own of Amazon, I have $78,000 invested
in this company. If the stock price increased by
35% that would mean that it would grow to a $105,000
position. Now I'm going to race against
the S&P 500. I buy every company with the
goal of outperforming the index. If Amazon raced up 35% over the
next year or two, I have to imagine that would outperform
the S&P 500. Now, of course, the S&P 500
could race up another 35%. There's always that possibility,
but I think it's unlikely given the valuation of the S&P 500
overall. Many companies are at stretched
valuations, and given my free cash flow forecast of Amazon and
the resiliency of this business, I think that Amazon is not
overstretched. In fact, I think the company is
still undervalued. So I hold this one with the goal
of outperforming the S&P 500. If Amazon gets anywhere close to
250 and the S&P 500 doesn't race up in lockstep with Amazon, this
is going to propel the story fund further and further away of
the S&P 500. Now, that's the goal.
We'll see if that happens. Now, moving on, as we see more
evidence over time of the damaging effect that TikTok has
on kids, the company's becoming more and more of a target for
lawsuits, especially this time from local governments.
For example, we have here the District Attorney of DC
explaining his lawsuit against TikTok, and some of the
allegations here are pretty damning.
Well, thank you for having me. For young people, the TikTok
platform is like digital nicotine.
It's an addictive, dangerous product that lures young people
into it, keeps their eyes glued to their screens for as long as
possible, and then when young people are able to get off,
lures them back. And that's all in furtherance of
profits. The platform is designed to keep
eyeballs on screens to drive ad revenue, and that's something
that this lawsuit tries to tackle.
Now obviously the goal of every company is to make as much money
as possible. I don't like the phrasing here
where he's saying, you know, TikTok just wants to make a lot
of money. Of course they do.
Every company wants to make a lot of money.
But I do like that he's outlining that some of the ways
they're doing it is at the expense of the general public.
Now let's go ahead and listen on.
We know that the impact on young people is severe in terms of
mental health, in terms of loss of sleep and attention, rising
levels of depression, anxiety. So this is a dangerous public
health risk for our children across the country and certainly
here in the District of Columbia.
The lawsuit that I filed here in DC in addition raises the fact
that TikTok is engaged in an illegal, unlicensed money
transmission business. That is something that was new
to me. TikTok has these different games
or you can send money from 1 user to another as a gift.
Now, I don't really understand it or the mechanics of it, but
they heavily incentivize gifting other people money.
And then it's in an ecosystem where you gift it back and it
becomes this money transfer scheme.
And this is something that Tiktok has monetized that
they've created into a big thing on the platform.
And now it's moving a large sum of money.
Tiktok is actually managing a large amount of money that's
being transferred from some users to others.
And what he's bringing up here is that none of this is
sanctioned or licensed. It's not regulated.
Tiktok is just doing this without any real regulation.
In real time, money is being transmitted between people, and
that TikTok coin function, when coupled with TikTok Live, is
lending itself to dangerous behavior, unregulated behavior
that other money transmission companies like Venmo or PayPal
have a requirement for safety and oversight that TikTok is
evading. So he lays the premise for this
lawsuit, saying that TikTok is like nicotine.
It's highly addicting and it's harmful, especially to children.
They can't regulate how much time they've been on it.
It causes them to lose sleep. It causes all these depression
problems. And of course, it's overall a
waste of time. Nobody goes away from TikTok
after scrolling for two hours and says that was a good use of
my time. I feel much better now.
Most of the time, it's regretful behavior from the user.
Not only that, he says it's a money transfer scheme, a legal
one that's without regulation. And of course, they're
benefiting from that. But ultimately, what he wants to
change is very interesting. Here.
The big thing he wants to change is the infinite scroll.
He alleges that TikTok wants to keep users on the platform in a
harmful way to the users and community, and in particular,
the infinite scroll feature on social media.
If he's successful in getting that feature changed on TikTok,
that could have major implications for every infinite
scroll feature on every social media website.
Most importantly, we want Tik Tok's dangerous functions to
end. We want to make sure that young
people are kept safer when they're using social media, that
there are reasonable constraints on the time and on the ways in
which young people are sucked into spending so much time on
screen. We certainly think the money
transmission business, as currently it being operated is
illegal, needs to come into compliance with the requirements
of DC law and consumer protection laws, and generally
speaking, we want the exploitation and the lack of
candor to children and their parents and to regulators to
end. TikTok has not been straight
with the public and with parents and with kids about how
dangerous its product is, how dangerous it knows its product
is, and the long term impact of the addictive behaviors that
it's algorithm creates. That's a long list of demands
for TikTok to end the money transfer scheme, to end the
infinite scroll feature, to make it so that they can't buzz your
phone with vibrations telling you to get back on the app every
5 minutes. If TikTok did that, they would
lose engagement on the app. Of course, that'd be worse for
their shareholders and owners, so it's unlikely they're going
to willingly do any of this. And that's the reason he's
suing. Now, one thing I'll point out in
this report and over and over again by these attorney generals
is a damage that's happening to children by TikTok.
They're talking about 10 year olds, 9 year olds, 13 year olds
using Tiktok and being damaged because of it, having all these
psychological issues because of Tiktok.
And even though I think the company has a big role to play
there, they should lock down and have better protections
restrictions from young kids using their app.
I think some responsibility has to fall on the parent hair.
And I, I don't give parenting advice.
I know it's very difficult. I'm a a parent of three so I
understand the difficulty of it but kids should not have Tiktok.
I think it's crazy that young kids, 9 year olds are able to
have Tiktok accounts. Lock your phones down.
Lock that App Store down. They have features to do that.
I'll never allow Tiktok on any of my kids phones at any point
and I'll lead by example. I don't have it either.
So if you have kids that are using TikTok, the best thing to
do is just to get rid of it, make their childhood better in
the process. Now again, the bigger picture
here is if these lawsuits are successful against TikTok
removing things like the infinite scroll and limiting the
amount of notifications that could also be replicated across
different social media companies like Instagram or Twitter.
Instagram and Twitter both have infinite scroll.
They don't stop the user from using reels after a certain
amount of time even though, so that would probably be a healthy
thing to do. So we're going to see if these
lawsuits are successful and what potential impacts they'll have
on different companies. Now moving on, we get to one of
the most innovative companies in the world.
We have companies like Tesla making robo taxis.
We have NVIDIA making GPU's that people can't even dream of how
powerful they are. And then we have perhaps the
most innovative company, which is Costco, one of my long term
holdings here. Costco, the innovative long term
compounder, is once again added again with their major
innovations and this time it's putting an apartment complex on
top of the warehouse. This is thinking outside of the
box and I like, I like what I see here.
It won't be long before a select few Costco fans in Los Angeles
will be able to live just a few flights above their favorite
retailer. Thrive Living, a
california-based developer, is converting a vacant lot in
Baldwin Village neighborhood of a city into an amenity rich
apartment building complete with 800 rental units, a rooftop
pool, gyms and a basketball court.
Sounds like they're doing this well.
They're doing it the Costco way. Very high quality, but maybe not
quite as cheap as Costco likes to to keep things, but at least
it's high quality. The most appealing amenity,
however, might just be the Costco warehouse that is slated
to take up the ground floor, complete with the pharmacy and
optical services. How great would that be?
You get you get a live on top of Costco.
Anytime you want a hot dog and a drink for $1.50, all you do is
you take the elevator down right right in the Costco.
So you, you can literally at any point in your life think I'd
like to go for $1.50 hot dog and drink and you go to the
elevator, you're in the Costco. 5 minutes later you got yourself
your hot dog. You could get the chicken bake.
You could even impulsively buy a 100 inch LEDTV only 50 feet from
your house. Or else would you be able to do
that anytime you want? You can go down an elevator and
walk right through a Costco. That'd be a pretty unique
experience. Getting Costco on board is a
significant win for Thrive, experts say.
Everyone loves to be next to Costco and have Costco
associated with their project, so this shows you a little bit
of the reputation for Costco. Everyone wants to be part of it.
Everyone wants to be next to it. They want to be as close as a
close proximity to Costco as possible.
People talked about this as the Starbucks effect.
Being next to a Starbucks is viewed as a good thing.
That's no longer the case. Costco has taken the mantle.
When Costco opens up central to a city, you know that's the
place to be and there's no closer place, literally, that
you can be than living on top of Costco.
The retailer's move could set a new precedent for the urban
expansion strategies, giving Costco more flexibility to tap
into densely populated areas and position itself closer to where
shoppers live. So the big upside for Costco
shareholders is if this concept is successful.
If Costco says this turned out great, having an apartment
complex on top of our warehouse, then that opens up a whole new
world of opportunities. No longer at Costco's landlocked
to open acres of field where they can buy a big plot of land
that can build their warehouse and have a huge parking lot.
But now they'll be able to open up in densely populated areas
where they have apartments above them and parking garages below
them. The experience will be slightly
different, but it will still be Costco.
And this may be an opportunity for Costco to continue opening
in all these important cities they want to be in.
They mentioned that California in and of itself remains a
massive growth path for Costco. The city that is home to the
biggest percentage of their warehouses continues to be one
of their biggest strengths and opportunities for a long runway
of growth. The company has 140 warehouses
throughout the state and a little over a third of them are
concentrated in Los Angeles. The Baldwin Village Costco will
be the company's 53rd store in the city.
So Costco is not yet saturated even in California, even with
140 warehouses in the state, they're still having to cram
them into different buildings and different concepts because
people love Costco that much. So we're going to see how this
turns out and what this concept does over the upcoming years.
Now moving on to a company that's also innovative, maybe
slightly more innovative than Costco, which is Tesla.
We know that in two days Elon has his robotaxi day.
There's going to be a big presentation and hopefully this
will be impressive to the shareholders because Tesla has
gone nowhere for around four years now.
Now they note that even though Tesla has increased competition
from companies like Waymo, it still commands a premium
valuation at almost 90 times earnings estimates for the next
12 months, putting it among the high flying tech companies like
Palantir and Snowflake. Whether the stock will regain
its previous highs or sink back to its lows is now up to Musk as
prepares to stand before investors at Teslas Robo Taxi
Day in Hollywood, CA. Ostensibly an event to highlight
the self driving technology that would allow the company to
compete with the likes of Waymo and G Miss Cruise, Musk needs to
convince investors that Tesla remains the hotbed of innovation
and still deserves to be thought of as a tech company like Apple,
Amazon or Alphabet. The outcome could determine
whether Tesla regains its place among the Magnificent 7 or is
relegated to fight it out with the dozens of automakers for EV
market share. So they're building this up to
be a pretty big event. Saying that if Tesla doesn't
nail this, if they don't show anything impressive and it seems
more and more like they're just another car company, the stock
is not going to continue to do well.
It should go down to a lower valuation because even though
Tesla has not gone far for the last four years in terms of
stock price, it's still at a high valuation.
The company's still trading with a lot of downside if things
don't go well. Tesla stock has always been
dependent on the future narrative of Full Self Driving
and the robotaxi. Right now, Tesla's a company
that has some level of full self driving.
It's impressive technology, but it's not quite enough to have a
human enter into the back seat of the car and simply tell it to
drive somewhere. It can't do that with enough
reliability or safety. So Elon Musk has some convincing
to do in this presentation. The biggest thing that they note
here is the differences in strategy.
Elon Musk is trying to make it so that cameras alone are enough
to have a robo taxi or full self driving just cameras.
And that's different than the approach that Waymo and others
have taken. So the stakes are very high for
Tesla. The valuation remains high and
the expectations high for this meeting.
Now it's going to be interesting what Elon Musk says, the
timelines he gives, what he reveals.
As always, this is going to be a massive spectacle, one of the
biggest events for any stock in any industry.
And of course, I'll be covering the event on this channel now as
tradition. Every once in a while, at least
before TikTok gets banned, I look at clips from TikTok of
different financial people or people related to the companies
I invest in to see what they're up to.
And here we have three different clips I'll be reacting to.
The first one is a Google employee.
This one is an employee of Google in New York City saying,
come work with me in Google New York City.
So we get to see what they do for work, the tasks they're
doing, the problems they're solving, how they're making the
world better and, and the challenges they're facing.
Let's go ahead and take a look at this New York.
Google and Chelsea. I did not dress business casual
at all, even had my little kit kneels on.
Badged in and went straight up to the 14th floor for some
lunch. Started off with some shrimp
salad and it was delicious and then some coffee.
Obviously the vibe here was so much more so.
So we got our our shrimp salad to start the day and our nice
our nice coffee or our drink to start the day.
One so much more fun and I kind of loved it.
And then we would we we skip the lunch.
I swear it. I didn't.
Fast forward here, we went from we went from shrimp salad to
drink and then the next thing without skipping any is lunch.
So apparently something must have happened before then.
Maybe she edited out all the big challenges she solved, but
we're, we're, it seems like it, we're on a food tour here more
than a day in the, the work that we do.
Much more fun and I kind of loved it.
Got some Indian food and went outside and then adventured the
building a little bit. Went into the game room.
This Lego micro kitchen. Amazing.
A few apples. And in between the the drinks,
so we went from lunch, we have pool.
So there's a a cool Google pool table there that's fun.
And then there's Legos with candy and different treats in
them, and then we're back to drinks.
So yummy and then a wheat grass juice.
Delicious. My intern friend from last
summer. My feet are kind of killing me.
So pretty. That's the whole thing.
We didn't skip any of there. That was it.
That is, come work with me in Google in New York City.
Now, of course, I mean, she must do something like there's got to
be some work she does that she must have edited out.
But how does this represent the company?
Well, when you share videos like this of the the job that you
work at, showing what food you eat and then what food you eat
and then what games you play and then how you relax at the top of
the building with a great view with no work whatsoever, with
nothing shown that you've accomplished anything for the
day, how does that represent your employer?
Well, how does that represent you as an employee?
Well, how does that do anyone any good in this situation?
If I was Google, I would be frustrated with these employees.
If I was a hard working employee at Google, I would especially be
frustrated with these coworkers that are creating this image of
Google. And of course every comment
under this video are deservedly so criticisms of it.
That we need more rate hikes, that Google can do more cost
cutting efforts at their company, that Google is a
playground for adults, and so on and so forth.
So you see the response these videos make, but yet somehow
they keep happening. More and more employees at
Google think that this is a good idea.
Now we move on to Salesforce. This isn't an employee at
Salesforce, but someone visiting the office.
People are obsessed with the food that these companies serve.
Everything I ate at the Salesforce office in SF.
Welcome to Week 2 of visiting a different tech office.
Last week I visited Google and now we're at Salesforce.
They also have very unique and yummy orders.
Obviously good hors d'oeuvres. Why is everybody obsessed with
the food at these companies? It seems like the only reason
they work there. But but here we go, we continue
on with it. Some work done and now for the
taste test. They had this honeycomb mochi
waffle which was delicious, and this crispy fried potato with
locks that I accidentally spilled on my laptop and we got
some Italian ice and visited the game room.
And work. Now I will give her a defense at
least. She's a food creator, so she's
going around blogging about food specifically, which makes sense
that most of the focus is on the food at Salesforce.
But the first one with the Google employee is also focused
almost entirely on the food. And I'm pretty sure her job at
Google is not to be a food critic for the company.
Now finally, we get to the last TikTok here.
This is one that I wanted to react to.
It's very short and it's a a video of a kid that apparently
has a $100,000 trading account and it looks like he's in high
school. So let's go ahead and take a
look at this. So he has a six figure account
in high school and he's trading hippo meme coins.
The situation he's in is incredible.
He has $100,000 in high school and I like what he's doing here.
At least he's trying to make more money with it, but I think
he needs a little bit more direction.
Imagine if instead of trading meme coins where there's a high
likelihood of losing capital, instead focus this $100,000 on
buying compounders, companies that were growing free cash
flow, that positive future expected returns.
That $100,000 could turn into millions in his 40s.
He could be set with that amount of money he already has by the
time he's 50 just by using it wisely and investing it
properly. But hopefully he gets that
guidance along the way. He may have to learn some hard
lessons in the meantime. That's all for this episode.
See you in the next one.