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- [00:02]
State Street Investment Management Announcer
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- [00:18]
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- [00:33]
Ann Barry
it's merger Monday we have the latest on Fox's acquisition of Roku and what it means for ad supported streaming SpaceX after that record breaking IPO. We dig into one listener's question on which other companies might just ride the launch's tailwinds and From Instagram to TikTok, the UK just unveiled plans to block social media access for kids under 16. We break down the proposal and what it may mean for the stock prices for Monday, June 15th. It's blue markets Daily and I'm Ann Barry. More market details to come. But first, a social media ban for kids, long discussed in many jurisdictions and now gaining momentum, at least overseas, with a landmark announcement today out of the United Kingdom. Prime Minister Keir Starmer announced plans to ban children under the age of 16 from accessing major social media platforms in what the UK government describes as an effort to protect their mental health and online safety. Well, the proposal would block under 16s from platforms that include Instagram, TikTok, Snapchat, Facebook, YouTube and X, while messaging services such as WhatsApp would, at least for now, remain exempt. The proposed ban would be enforced through stronger age verification requirements and could take effect as early as next year. Well, the UK is not the first nation to take this approach. In 2024, Australia passed a law that requires social media companies to Prevent users under 16 from holding accounts. And those restrictions actually came into force in December of 2025 with platforms that failed to comply facing significant financial penalties. Well, supporters say that these moves are necessary responses to growing concerns about children's well being online in the United States. Dozens of states have sued Meta, and 14 attorney generals have sued TikTok, alleging that the platforms use addictive design features that harm children's mental health. Critics, however, have questioned whether these age verification systems can be effectively enforced and warned that young users may simply migrate to less regulated corners of the Internet instead. While investors are certainly monitoring the debate closely, the major Social media companies do not disclose under 16s as a share of total users, at least for now. But UK Data from regulators show the scale of teen usage among 13 to 15 year olds there. Roughly 87% use YouTube, 79% use TikTok, 71% use Snapchat, and 61% use Instagram. And if you replicate that penetration trend globally, we're talking about a pretty large population of users. Well, shares of social media companies were up to date with the rest of the market rally. We saw green across the screen, hot on the news of Iran and potential peace there looming. But we're going to keep on watching because we have seen the United States that when some of the litigation has resulted in rulings that have gone against these social media companies, their stocks have moved in the other direction. So lots going on. We're coming up in a moment to spin through the headlines that are moving the markets today, including TripAdvisor selling its restaurant business and doubling down on experiences. So can the company reverse years of declining value? But first, this episode is brought to you by Aflac. John, how's your reading retention?
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John Gratto
My teachers used to tell me it's great.
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Ann Barry
Well, there's another kind of retention employers worry about.
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John Gratto
That's right, financially stressed employees are more likely to leave their jobs. And with many employees unable to cover a thousand dollar emergency, that distraction is a retention killer for employers. But offering Aflac can help employees stay
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Ann Barry
more focused and it helps brokers too many saying Aflac is easier to work with than other carriers. Plus, there's no direct cost to businesses to offer Aflac plans.
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John Gratto
Don't forget about the possible tax advantages when payroll deductions are withheld pre tax. It helps reduce taxable income and potentially provide savings on taxes. Go to aflac.com brewmarkets to learn more.
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Ann Barry
Well, stocks were generally up across the board today. Again, that's as the markets reacted to news of an interim US Iran deal that aims to reopen the Strait of Hormuz, starting to ease concerns potentially about global oil supply concomitant inflation. Well, the price of Brent crude oil, that's the global energy benchmark, fell around 4% on the news, hitting about 80 bucks a barrel and its lowest level in roughly three months. But a couple of other headlines from today's trading session mattered too.
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John Gratto
That's right, kicking it off with Fox Corporation. Shares of the media company Ticker Fox tumbled more than 16% after the company announced a roughly $22 billion deal to acquire Roku. More than 100 million global households stream with Roku, making it one of the world's largest connected TV advertising platforms. Fox said the deal is a quote natural extension of its growth strategy which oriented the company around live news and sports plus free ad supporting streaming through its Tubi product.
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Ann Barry
Well, viewership of ad supported streaming options continue to rise in the United States with nearly half of all viewers subscribing to an ad supported plan. Fox Chief Executive Lachlan Murdoch said the combined company expects to cut about 400 million in annual costs. So there it is, the Synergy number and Fox plans to keep Tubi and the Roku channel as separate offerings. Well, investors perhaps waiting for more details on what this all means. Shares in roku down nearly 2% today. It looks like they were not happy with that valuation.
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John Gratto
Now over to Travel shares of TripAdvisor ticker T R I P up about 5% after the company announced a $700 million deal to sell the fork, its restaurant booking business to American Express.
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Ann Barry
TripAdvisor said the deal will allow it to focus on its primary growth engine, which is its Experiences segment as it works to reverse years of declining value. The sale also comes after Activus investor that's the mighty Starboard value, which holds over 9% of the company, pushed TripAdvisor to shed what it called a non core business. Meanwhile, for American Express, the acquisition strengthens its international business, currently its fastest growing segment, and expands its dining portfolio following earlier purchases of Resi and Tok with shares of American express. That's ticker AXP, up about 4% today on the news. And finally Salesforce strengthening its push into Agentic AI, which has emerged as one of CEO Marc Benioff's biggest strategic priorities. That's through another merger moment today, a little bit smaller in scale. $3.6 billion deal to acquire AI customer service platform Fin. Well, Fin's flagship product is an AI agent designed to handle customer queries across platforms that include WhatsApp and Slack.
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John Gratto
Software companies are rapidly building or acquiring AI powered support tools as LLM based agents threaten traditional SaaS workflows. Shares ticker CRM are still down more than 30% this year and trading about half a percent down today.
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Ann Barry
Let's take a quick break and when we come back, SpaceX officially wrapping up its first full day of trading. We answer one listener who's curious about the potential tailwinds for the rest of the space sector.
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John Gratto
so good, so good, so good.
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- [08:34]
Ann Barry
the SpaceX IPO. We're not leaving it behind quite yet because there have been so many firsts and superlatives that have been circulating this whole process. The largest IPO in history. Well, founder Elon Musk became the first trillionaire, at least on paper. But there are also key questions about the effect that the IPO will have more broadly in the space sector. So John, we got one letter from a listener.
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John Gratto
That's right, Jackson wrote. I am curious about the picks and shovel companies that will rocket along with SpaceX as its stock potentially continues to grow throughout the year and onward. Are there any suppliers to SpaceX's business that investors should be watching? Might companies like Rocket Labs and Unusual Machines ride these tailwinds?
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Ann Barry
Well, there's a ton to cover, so thank you for writing in Jackson. We do love to get an email. This one came in through good old fashioned email. So John, let's start by putting some numbers around the IPO event.
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John Gratto
Right. So this last Friday, SpaceX finally IPO'd. It set its stock price at $135 per share, raising a record breaking $75 billion. Keep saying this. Record broken. Record broken. Well, by midday the trading officially opened at $150 a share and ended the session just shy of 1 61. So that nearly 20% gain sent SpaceX to a $2.1 trillion market cap, making it the sixth largest US company. That was Friday. Well, today on the first full day of trading, shares are up another 20%, trading over $190, placing the market cap closer to two and a half trillion dollars. And Ann, you're on this rocket ship ride, aren't you?
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Ann Barry
I am. I'm totally going to clarify that this is not investment advice. I'm going to explain what I did because there was a reason for it that was not actually for investment purposes. So John, I'd been hearing, as we all had been, all this chatter about how SpaceX was going to allocate a large chunk of its IPO to retail investors, more than is usual. So typically institutions get by far the lion's share and retail investors get, you know, less than 10% of their allocation at IPO. Well, this time around, Elon Musk and Gwynne Shotwell, who's the president of SpaceX, have been doing the rounds and saying it was really important to Space X that retail investors do get access at the actual moment of the allocation in order to participate in the ipo. And lots of folks, whether it was Robinhood or Fidelity, were out there saying, we're going to be part of this. And Fidelity dropped the minimum holdings requirement to be able to open this up to more of its clients. So I've got to tell you, I was a little bit skeptical, right? I was hearing all this chatter about anyone can apply to get an allocation. I really did not think it would be as simple as just go and ask. And sure enough, Fidelity sent out the blast email. It reached me, and there it was saying that, you know, they were going to allocate some SpaceX shares at the IPO. So I went onto the Fidelity website, I put in a bid, I asked for a certain number of shares I expected to get certainly less than my ask. I definitely expected to get absolutely zero. I thought this whole thing was just really good PR and completely astonishing to me. I actually got, you know, a big chunk of that. I got about 30% less than the number of shares I've been asked for. I was just stunned to get any and frankly to get as many as I did. So it worked. It worked. So check your spam email, people, because you may be getting, you know, for stuff like this, whether it's whichever brokerage you work with. This, to me was evidence that actually this is being taken seriously. That's why I went to get to get an allocation Spaces. I wanted to know if there was a hope of the process.
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John Gratto
It's so interesting because X has been full of these stories over the last three days of individual investors saying, I asked for 100 and I got 17, or I asked for, you know, it's just interesting. It's across the board. These retail investors are.
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Ann Barry
And it's not zero. They were smart, right? They actually went out and I think tried to give like pretty broad participation so that people like me could sit in podcast studios and talk about how it worked. So the pr, the PR was working.
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John Gratto
So as part of that process. Ann, is there a lockup period for your shares that were purchased on the day of the ipo?
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Ann Barry
So there's a difference between sort of a lockup and sort of no flipping. So lockup is usually an expression that refers to those who've been holding shares for a really long time while the company's been private prior to the ipo. But to answer your question, yes, Fidelity has said that those who are given shares allocation at the time of the IPO are not permitted to flip their shares. Meaning it's June 29th is the first day that I could sell. Now, Fidelity, my understanding is, and I haven't looked at everybody, is a little bit of a shorter window than other brokerages who said you can't flip in fewer than 30 days. So fidelity saying sort of 15. Others are saying 30. And there are real repercussions if you violate this. So if you try to make a quick buck, you're prohibited from participating in IPOs over some period of time on your first offense. There's a more onerous repercussion if you do it twice. And then I think by the third time, they literally will say, we will, like, follow your information, like your Social Security number, and we will ban you from life for participating in IPOs on our brokerage platform. So you really don't want to flip if you are one of the folks who's a retail investor.
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John Gratto
Even if you wanted to get take advantage of that 20% rise we saw
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Ann Barry
today, you can't without there being repercussions. So lockup period. Now, when it comes to the others, let's talking about the institutional investors. Because most of the stock out there is held by those who've been holding the stock for a long time. The venture capitalists, the original investors, the employees, the board members, we call them insiders, and early investors are prohibited from selling shares for 180 days after this IPO. Typically, typically. Excuse me, typically, that's when they are locked up for. And then when 180 days hit, it can trigger a cliff event, which is where you suddenly have all these investors who've been, you know, their money tied up for years, if not decades, then say, oh my gosh, we're finally free. And they go and. And sell at least a portion of their stock. Often if you're a venture capital firm, because you need to get your stock out, you know, you need to get something back out to your investors. So that's what typically happens.
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John Gratto
And we've seen that story everywhere with the headlines about how many Employees of Space X become millionaires overnight, but that's on paper. So, you know, they have to wait for this lockup period to be able to really cash in.
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Ann Barry
But Space X, of course, wants to do something differently.
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John Gratto
Right. Everything about this IPO has been different. And what they did is they didn't use that 180 guideline that is typical. Early investors can sell up to 20% of their holdings shortly after the company's first earnings report as a public company. That's going to be in August. But then there's all sorts of other additional unlock periods. 70, 90, 105, 100 days after the IPO, it rolls out. And then this is a big point. Elon Musk, his personal stake, which is about 42% of the company, he's locked up for a year, reportedly. So that makes a big difference because there's not necessarily going to be that cliff event, but maybe investors are going to wonder what happens as things roll out.
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Ann Barry
Yeah, all these catalysts. The thing that I thought was fascinating on Friday as I was glued to my tier, to the telly, watching this all unfold, was the number of Elon Musk surrogates, and I call them surrogates, not quite tongue in cheek because they were literally like friends and mates, friends of who have been invested in SpaceX for a long time and they were doing the rounds on CNBC and other places. And of course, naturally the anchors question you and I would ask the question, what do you plan to do? Do you plan to sell your shares? And all of them said, no, I plan to hold on to it. This is just at the beginning. Others were a little bit more circumspect, knowing that their own fund investors were watching. And they can't say we're holding on to it forever. They said, you know, as long as the valuation is out there, we'll have to consider whether there's more upside. So they were thoughtful. But the point being, lots of people out there saying, you know, that they aimed, they aimed to hold it for a long time is what they kept saying. So talk, you know, talking party line was being adhered to on this Friday was so interesting.
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John Gratto
I'm glad that, that you were part of it in that way. Now, let's talk about Jackson's email because he's, he's interested in what other companies may benefit from the tailwind. So let's address that question. There's many questions up for debate. There's no doubt that the high profile IPO has increased interest and attention in the space. Space Generally, space related ETFs were on a tear this year as of the week before the SpaceX IPO. During the run up the Procure Space ETF UFO had risen 65% year to date. And then last month Vaneck launched a Space ETF warp and that was up 25% just in the first week of trading. So clearly interest in space was up across the board. But last Friday, when investors could buy Space X itself, There was a one day sell off. Virgin Galactic lost 30%, Intuitive Machines Lunr Lunar lost 13%, Red Wire down 11 and a half. And Rocket Lab dropped 11% just on Friday.
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Ann Barry
Right, so that was just for, for one day. And look, each company has its own stuff going on, but the overarching sense was that investors, now that they had the opportunity to buy the source itself, to go to the OG and buy Space X, were actually ditching some of these other space stocks in order to get the cash to go and then buy SpaceX. So that was one thesis out there. Well, let's just take a look at the two that Jackson mentioned in his email. In his question, he asked about Rock and Rocket Lab, which increasingly looks like a space infrastructure company rather than a launch provider solely, recently winning a $90 million contract with the US Space Force to build and operate a pair of geostationary satellites. Which sounds very similar to Starlink. Right? So that's kind of what we're talking about. Well, Rocket Lab shares did bounce back up about 6% today, up 50 still this year. So again, to answer Jackson's question, we saw Rocket Lab getting dumped on Friday, you know, but now it's sort of picking back up again, just as I think people take a step back and try and reassess each company's unique stories. Meanwhile there's Intuitive Machines, which flew NASA sponsored lunar missions in 2024 and 2025. But last month NASA actually passed this brand over for the next round of lunar terrain vehicle contract awards and actually sent that contract out to rivals instead. So as a result, Intuitive machines down another two and a half percent today, still up 60% for the year though. So the sector in general feels as though it is benefiting from the halo of SpaceX and interest in SpaceX.
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John Gratto
But it still is interesting to follow each one of these companies paths and stories and goals.
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Ann Barry
Absolutely. Individually. Yeah.
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John Gratto
So those are two that might be seen as competition to SpaceX. But Jackson always already asked about suppliers. He also asked about suppliers that might benefit. So analysts point out that most aerospace companies have long supply chains. SpaceX does far more internally, it's, it's vertically integrated. It builds its own rocket engines, spacecraft ground systems and software. But they do have suppliers, and there's one of note, and that's Lindi L I N Ticker. It's the world's largest industrial gas and engineering company, has a market cap of $243 billion, and they support 70% of SpaceX launches. They fuel the rockets and they recently broke ground in a new plant in Brownsville, Texas, less than 30 miles away from the SpaceX starbase operations. So rumor is speculation that they are staying in the SpaceX business. Shares of that company are up 22% this year.
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Ann Barry
There's just so much going on here. It's just really exciting to continue watching this. You know, one thing I would say, because I'm a book nerd, as we know, and I'm old school, I buy the hard copy books as much as I can because I sort of carry them around, which is ridiculous. I take them everywhere I go. But there's one book I recommend. It's Walter Isaacson's book on Elon Musk. It's a fantastic biography.
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Advertisement Narrator
It's.
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Ann Barry
And it actually talks about the way in which SpaceX works with some of its suppliers, why it's chosen to do some things itself, some of the frustrations that led them to make that decision and to vertically integrate. So if you're curious about who the suppliers might be, whether or not for investing purposes, but just because you're curious, I really recommend checking out Walter Isaacson's book. It's a fantastic read. And look, Elon Musk is beyond man at the moment, right? Definitely being called the Thomas Edison of our time. So if there's one book out there to try and get a window into how his mind works and what it is he's up to across his broad portfolio of interest, definitely one worth checking out. Well, if you have a question like Jackson, do send an email to us. We do love an email. Our inboxes are filled with joy. We get very excited when we see these come in. The email address for us is Brew Markets show@morning brew.com that is Brew Markets Show@morning brew.com. we also do read every comment that is left on the YouTube channel, that is left on Spotify and Apple, because you are able to do that. You can interact with us us on all the platforms, wherever you get your podcasts. Well, there it is, the closing bell. It's 4pm on the east coast and the market's wrapping up for the day. We don't have a ticker tape, but we'll throw it over instead to our human ticker.
- [21:10]
John Gratto
Our producer, John, as you mentioned earlier, green across the screen, The S&P 500 up over 1.5% today, the NASDAQ up 3%, and the Dow finishing up nearly a full percent, hitting a record close of 51,671 for the day.
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Ann Barry
So just a final thought on this because I was watching the news unfold last night, of course, the announcement from the White House that there is a ceasefire that's looming to continue, that the Strait of Hormuz may open back up. We did, however, see Vice President J.D. vance doing the rounds in the media today, saying that there's still lots of details that need to be ironed out, that there's still some work to be done. Nevertheless, if everything goes according to that announcement, the expectation is that Friday this week in Switzerland will be a signing officially of a peace agreement. One investor nugget though, as I was watching hours and hours of this last night, one smart commentator that I saw on the news saying, if you want to see whether there is confidence in whether this piece will stick, take a look at what the insurers are doing. Because once we see insurers basically saying that they're willing to ensure shipping companies again, that is the sign that they think that peace is going to stick. If the insurance companies don't do that, then it's going to be difficult for those ships to continue to try to get through the Strait of Hormuz. I thought that was an interesting little nugget. You're sort of looking for signs and always trying to read the tea leaves.
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John Gratto
Sure.
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Ann Barry
So I'm going to go down the rabbit hole and now try to find out what insurance rates are for shipping companies in the Middle East. That's it for today's Brew Markets Daily.
- [22:38]
John Gratto
Brew Markets Daily is hosted by Anne Barry and produced by John Gratto, Tarka Delatif, Avi Laroya and Emily Millard. Brittany De Taco is our audio engineer and the President of Morning Brew Inc. Is Devin Emery.
- [22:47]
Ann Barry
Wake up tomorrow with the Morning Brew newsletter and tune in to Neil and Toby on Morning Brew Daily. See you back here tomorrow. Same time, same place.
- [23:00]
State Street Investment Management Announcer
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