Hey Snackers,
Instead of Venmo’ing your friend for booking the flights, you can now Venmo corporate directly: JetBlue became the first airline to accept payments from the PayPal-owned app. That friend who wants all the credit-card points is probably peeved.
Megacap tech gains powered the S&P 500 to a fresh intraday record yesterday, though the index ended shy of a closing high. Investors seemed optimistic about Netflix’s killer earnings and Stargate’s $500B AI-investment plans (more on that in a sec).
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Musk questions funding for Stargate, OpenAI’s $500B venture with Oracle and SoftBank
TFW you’re not picked… for the group project. Elon Musk said yesterday that Stargate — a joint venture that plans to pour $500B into the US’s AI infrastructure — doesn’t have the $$ to do it. His comments failed to put a damper on AI-linked stocks, which kept rallying after Trump gassed up Stargate’s plan to build infrastructure for OpenAI with heavy involvement from Oracle, SoftBank, and Nvidia. Japanese investment giant SoftBank will handle financials, OpenAI will run ops, and partners including Oracle, Nvidia, Arm, and Microsoft will contribute tech (think: chips, servers).
Stargatekeep: Musk said on X: “They don’t actually have the money” and “SoftBank has well under $10B secured.”
Clapback: OpenAI CEO Sam Altman replied that Musk was wrong, adding, “I realize what is great for the country isn’t always what's optimal for your companies.”
Hard flex: Separately, Microsoft boss Satya Nadella said, “I’m good for my $80B.”
Bird’s-AI view… The group behind Stargate, which began making plans during the Biden admin, has already started building data centers in Texas and said it’ll deploy $100B ASAP to build more infrastructure domestically. The White House doesn’t want America to lose its lead in the global AI race, especially against China, which is as little as six months behind. It’s estimated that $1T will be spent building US data centers over five years.
Not just money: Training and running AI models requires vast amounts of energy. Running one ChatGPT query takes 10x the power of a Google search, and CGPT’s annual electricity use could charge 3M electric cars.
Moving fast could break things… Trump on Monday scrapped a Biden-signed order to create AI safeguards meant to reduce the tech’s risks to Americans. But the vast resources now being invested in AI imply vast returns, and some believe the technology may end up being less useful (and possibly more harmful) to humanity than tech companies say.
Texas-based AgriDrone Company Positioned for Rapid Growth
Good harvest… Hylio’s AgriDrones have treated over 1M acres so far — and its network of customers is growing everyday.
Cream of the crop… Hylio serves 350+ unique customers worldwide (and counting!). From family farms to multinational corporations to government agencies, the company’s customer list includes industry names such as the USDA, Nutrien, Wilbur-Ellis, and King Ranch.
Made in the USA… Hylio drones are manufactured in Texas with both US-made and globally-sourced components, ensuring the tech is cyber-secure (NDAA-compliant).
Hylio has captured over $27M in lifetime revenue so far1 — and with its FAA-approved swarm technology, the company is poised to take a $556B addressable market by storm.
You can share in the company’s growth — become a Hylio investor on StartEngine.2
1 Lifetime revenues are for 9 years.
MrBeast joins the bidding scrum for TikTok — but its algo secret sauce may not be for sale
YouTuber, chocolatier, TikTok owner?… The internet’s highest-earning creator, MrBeast (aka Jimmy Donaldson), has joined a growing list of aspiring TikTok buyers. He and a group of deep-pocketed investors recently made a joint all-cash bid for the app, which has 170M US users. This week, President Trump gave TikTok a 75-day deadline extension to separate from its Chinese parent, ByteDance, or be banned in America. Several wealthy folks have thrown their hats in the ring, but ByteDance has said it has no intention of selling.
Bids: Billionaire Frank McCourt and “Shark Tank” judge Kevin O’Leary offered $20B for TikTok’s US biz (not included: its algorithm). Trump suggested Elon Musk or Oracle’s Larry Ellison as potential buyers.
Halfsies: Trump also pitched the idea of a US company buying half of TikTok and creating a joint venture — adding that tariffs on Chinese goods could hinge on the country approving a TikTok sale.
The sincerest form of flattery… TikTok copycats like Insta Reels and YouTube Shorts have been around for years, but social cos are racing to get even more TikTok-y to benefit from a ban. X and competitor Bluesky both recently announced vertical video tabs. Meta’s rolling out a clone of ByteDance’s CapCut and offering up to $50K/month to TikTok stars to post on Reels. Meantime, 700K “TikTok refugees” joined Chinese video app RedNote.
The secret sauce is everything… TikTok found success (and stayed successful amid copycats) thanks to its top-tier recommendation algorithm, the modern-day Coca-Cola recipe. But according to SCOTUS’s interpretation of the law, a sale wouldn’t be allowed to include that algo, and China likely wouldn’t approve exporting it anyway. It means buyers could end up having to re-create an algo that tech’s biggest players have failed to match.
Big Daily Movers
Moderna stock shot up 7% after Oracle’s chairman, Larry Ellison, said AI could help make personalized vaccines to detect and prevent cancer.
Netflix stock extended its rally yesterday, popping 10% and briefly hitting a record $1K, after the streaming leader unloaded its biggest-ever quarterly subscriber growth.
Shares of salad slinger Sweetgreen continued to wilt yesterday after Morgan Stanley analysts slashed their price target on the stock.
What else we’re Snackin’
United Airlines unloaded a record Q4 profit that was up 64% on the year. For the full year, it flew a record 174M passengers — and spent less on fuel to boot.
Trump pardoned Silk Road’s founder, who’d been given a life sentence for facilitating $200M in illegal bitcoin transactions (drugs, murder-for-hires) on the marketplace.
Google reportedly invested another $1B in AI startup Anthropic, which is seeking to raise funding at a $60B valuation.
P&G beat expectations as folks bought more of its household brands like Tide, Charmin, and Gillette. It said it might hike prices if Trump implements tariffs.
Johnson & Johnson beat Wall Street estimates for the fourth-quarter thanks to strong growth of its cancer-treating drugs.
Snack Fact of the Day
People spent 2.4 trillion hours on social-media apps last year
Thursday
Initial jobless claims
Earnings expected from American Airlines, Freeport-McMoRan, Union Pacific, Alaska Air, McCormick & Co., Texas Instruments, and CSX
Authors of this Snacks own bitcoin and shares of: Alaska Air, Alphabet, Microsoft, Moderna, and Nvidia
Advertiser's disclosures:
² This is a paid advertisement for Hylio’s Regulation CF Offering. This Reg CF offering is made available through StartEngine Primary, LLC. Please read the offering circular and related risks at https://www.startengine.com/offering/hylio.
Past performance is no guarantee of future results. Investing in private company securities is not suitable for all investors because it is highly speculative and involves a high degree of risk. It should only be considered a long-term investment. You must be prepared to withstand a total loss of your investment. Private company securities are also highly illiquid, and there is no guarantee that a market will develop for such securities.
This was a paid for ad. Sherwood Media has been compensated for this ad by the Hylio Reg CF Campaign hosted on StartEngine.