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Becker Private Equity & Business Podcast
12 Stories We Are Following to Start the Week 11-3-25
00:04:25
In this episode, Scott Becker shares 12 stories driving the week, including Meta’s decline, Amazon’s rebound, private equity struggles, Warren Buffett’s next chapter, and more.
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This is Scott Becker with the Becker Private Equity and the Becker Business Podcast. We're recording today on site at the Becker's Healthcare CEO plus CFO Roundtable. I'm going to just talk you through very quickly 12 of the stories that we're following to sort of start the week this week. First, meta platforms slash Facebook turns downward. We went through the story in our newsletter in six quick points. But but the basic point of it is they fell about 10, 12% on Friday. Essentially they saw profits t tank revenues are still great. Mark Zuckerberg and team are investing a ton in technology, in software and engineering. And so we'll see how that all comes out on the other side. Ultimately, Zuckerberg's a really smart person. He'll be able to dial in the spending at some point to make sure Facebook stays really efficient and really profitable is my expectation. Second, Amazon bounced back. Amazon had just a tremendous quarter. They were up about 10% on Friday. They're up again a few percent today. They're now more than 12% year to date. For the year, they've largely been the laggard of the magnificent seven. Now they're bouncing back tremendously. Third, private equity keeps struggling. We did a story this morning about the Carlyle Group, one of the largest private equity funds. They are still finding that even though they got 474 billion in assets, their profits and revenues are down. Is just less exits and less deploying of capital. Fourth, this concept of artificial intelligence and rigor. And one of the great challenges as a professional today, as a leader today, as a human today, is to use AI but maintain your academic and your intellectual rigor. And ultimately it's going to take some mix of both to stay great going forward. Is not relying so much on everything artificial intelligence that you can't say stay sharp and be able to think through and work through issues yourself as well. That's our fourth story today. This story and this is a quick promo. We've got a new book coming out next May, something around building great businesses. We'll get the exact title at some point. Hopefully that goes well. Sixth, Alphatec Spine hit new highs this past week. Strong outlook in the spine area. That's unusual because not so many medical device companies right now are heading out of the park. But Alphatec Spine is intuitive. Surgical also had a great last quarter. Seventh, Berkshire Hathaway is struggling compared to its peers. Berkshire's up 5% or so year to date. It's sitting on enormous amount of cash and Warren Buffett is close to retiring. So we're watching that. 8th Chipotle is down now nearly 47% year to date. A huge reversal of fortune since they lost their CEO Brian Nicole. Again, a lot of it gets back to it at Chipotle. Doing the basics right. We a separate discussion on CEO pay and we'll have a separate podcast. In this Republic traded companies, there's a scorecard for how CEAs CEOs do. If you look at Chipotle, you would now say that Brian Nicole's worth his weight in gold. However, one of the great problems on CEO pay is you have a huge number of CEOs that are paid really well at that scale but are actually awful. So that's a huge problem. When you have a great one, they're worth a lot of money. Ninth, Palantir remains up 165 year to date, hitting out of the box. It's one of the few stocks I'm invested in directly that's actually doing well. So God bless Palantir. 10th Bitcoin opens today at about 110,000. It's up 12% year to date, but up 58% over the last 52 weeks. Finally, 11th, the Becker's Healthcare conference, as I said, kicks off today. In addition to great CEO leaders speaking, we've got Caitlin Clark, Jack Nicklaus, Patrick Ewing and Wayne Gretzky. Should be a lot of fun. Also, the Beckers Healthcare podcast ranked at the very top of the Apple business's rankings this past week. So God bless that. Finally, 12th, I'll just point this out for a second. That between sort of this guy Mandami who's running in New York, and Nick Fuentes, who's all over the airways, who's just all over the airways as sort of a neo Nazi June Mondani on the left, influences on the right. It's a very challenging world and I'm hoping that the great vast middle is still out there and that there really is a vast Middle east between these two lunatics. Thank you for listening to the Becker Business and the Becker Private Equity podcast. Thank you for joining us.