Altimeter's Brad Gerstner on the Tech Takeoff 5/14/26

Summary

Halftime Report Podcast Summary

Episode: Altimeter's Brad Gerstner on the Tech Takeoff (5/14/26)
Date: May 14, 2026
Host: Scott Wapner (CNBC)
Guests:

• Brad Gerstner (Founder & CEO, Altimeter Capital)
• Josh Brown
• Malcolm Etheridge
• Bill Baruch

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Episode Overview

This episode centers on the explosive momentum in the tech sector, with a primary focus on Nvidia's historic run and the highly anticipated IPO of Cerebras, the largest AI hardware debut since ARM. Brad Gerstner, a seminal voice in tech investing and early Cerebras backer, joins CNBC’s investment committee to discuss the drivers, risks, and wider market context of the ongoing “AI Revolution.” The conversation also touches on market exuberance, concerns about narrow leadership, software’s role in the AI era, and the launch of a new “halo stock” ETF built around AI-resilient companies.

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Key Discussion Points & Insights

1. Nvidia’s Unprecedented Surge and AI Market Leadership

• [01:01-04:08] Scott Wapner frames Nvidia's ascent: record highs, strong optimism, cleared H200 chip sales to Chinese firms.
• Brad Gerstner explains the recent lag and subsequent “catch-up” rally:
  • Nvidia traded flat for six months despite sector peers surging.
  • Not driven by China: "China's de minimis at this point to Nvidia... this is a little bit of icing on top of the cake." ([02:58])
  • Core reason for rally: Nvidia remains the “most important company globally in AI” yet was trading at just 14-15x GAAP earnings—cheapest in the trade.
• Quote:
  "Numbers would matter. The economic law of gravity here is that if they deliver the returns... either they'll buy back all their own shares because the market won't value them, or the market will buy them."
  — Brad Gerstner, [04:59]

2. Competition: Cerebras IPO and AI Hardware Race

• Malcolm Etheridge questions whether IPOs (like Cerebras) threaten Nvidia’s dominance, noting alternative approaches to AI chip design (“coming for Nvidia's lunch”) ([05:40]).
• Brad and panel highlight the dawn of the “inference era”:
  • "There is room for more than one winner... the idea that Nvidia was going to lose share... is what capped Nvidia at 180 bucks." ([07:25])
• Ultimate constraint remains compute, not demand. Cerebras' innovation—memory integrated directly on wafer-scale chips—is finally meeting “unlimited demand,” but the limiting factor is now power and data center buildouts, not customer intent.

3. AI Exuberance & Market Narrowness

• Worries of irrational exuberance surround AI stocks ([14:50-16:50]).
  • Malcolm Etheridge: “Anything AI is going up. Anything that looks like it's attached to a data center is going up.” ([15:34])
  • Ed Yardeni note cited: “Earnings forecasts continue to rise sharply ... that keeps us in the bullish camp.”
• The group discusses cyclical vs. secular drivers:
  • Bill Baruch: “There are no good stories that aren't directly related to AI. None.” ([26:03])
  • Question of whether eye-watering multiples can be sustained in the face of cyclical cooling, especially if infrastructure constraints delay deployment and revenues.
• Gerstner highlights how “the biggest challenge right now is our ability to stand up all the compute,” with rumors of 30-40% of compute delayed this year ([20:36]).

4. Retail Investors & AI IPO Access

• Gerstner on Cerebras IPO: cautions against FOMO and urges a long-term view.
  • Institutional demand seen at $250–$275/share; prices above $300 likely retail-driven “excitement… not a get rich quick scheme.” ([13:01])
  • "We've locked retail out of all of these great value creation stories... Caution a little bit today. Don't have uncapped orders... buy this on a fair price over a reasonable period of time and compound." ([13:01])

5. Portfolio Moves: Trimming and Redeploying in Tech

• Josh Brown discusses trimming Nvidia after a dramatic run-up as risk management, not a shift in fundamental view ([10:53]).
• Amazon and Alphabet also trimmed as cyclical indicators suggest possible summer pullback; cash held for opportunity ([29:34-33:09]).
• Gerstner counters: Amazon’s CapEx is a competitive edge; US tech outbuilding the world without government subsidy ([33:23]).

6. Software in the AI Era

• Discussion of AI’s impact on traditional enterprise software:
  • Brad Gerstner: skeptical for two years; “software in the too hard basket.” ([39:39])
    • Multiples have reset: software not as cheap as some claim when adjusted for real stock-based comp; "I would say I can't see out more than two or three years max in terms of the impact that AI is going to have on software." ([39:39])
    • Winners will exist, especially among infrastructure/data layer plays (Snowflake, Databricks, Clickhouse), but “point solutions” are at existential risk.

7. The “Halo Stock” ETF and Defensive AI Portfolio Strategies

• Launch of Roundhill’s ETF (HALO), based on Brown’s concept: Heavy Assets, Low Obsolescence.
  • Focus: owning companies least likely to be disrupted by AI (e.g., property/casualty insurers, logistics, mining).
  • Brown: "What's the least disruptible names that I can own?" ([46:41])

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Notable Quotes & Memorable Moments

• On Nvidia’s value:
  "Either they'll buy back all their own shares because the market won't value them, or the market will buy them." — Brad Gerstner, [04:59]

• On AI industry structure:
  "There is no consumer chatgpt, there's no enterprise intelligence, there's no Claude code without the production of tokens...There is room for more than one winner." — Brad Gerstner, [07:31]

• On compute constraints:
  "Our revenues would be higher if we weren't compute constrained." — Brad Gerstner, [10:09]

• On IPO caution:
  "This is not a get rich quick scheme. This is a generational company... there'll be plenty of time if you want to be on the train and compounding with Cerebras." — Brad Gerstner, [13:01]

• On the market's narrowness:
  "There are no good stories that aren't directly related to AI. None." — Bill Baruch, [26:03]

• On risk and timing:
  "Worst mistake investors have made over the last 15 years is looking at these divergences...and say, look out below...and then, son of a bitch, all of a sudden the Russell 2000 comes roaring back." — Bill Baruch, [26:52]

• On Megacap CapEx:
  “If they weren't investing this aggressively in AI, I would have a problem with it. They all know that there's going to be extraordinary return on this investment.” — Brad Gerstner, [33:23]

• On software multiples:
  "Software stocks are not cheap. Software stocks have reverted from a decade-long superior multiple to the market to a market multiple... If you're asking me to pay a 20x free cash flow multiple on a business that fundamentally is at odds with AI...it's just too hard." — Brad Gerstner, [39:39]

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Important Timestamps

• 01:01 — Opening theme: Nvidia record, S&P/Nasdaq at highs.
• 02:58 — Gerstner on Nvidia’s lag and catch-up rally.
• 05:40 — Etheridge on Cerebras’ differentiated approach.
• 07:31 — Gerstner on “inference factories” and industry structure.
• 10:09 — Industry is compute constrained.
• 13:01 — Gerstner on IPO retail excitement and price caution.
• 14:50 — Exuberance in AI and data center stocks.
• 20:36 — Power and compute constraints—"30-40% of compute delayed."
• 26:03 — Baruch: "No good stories that aren't directly related to AI."
• 29:34 — Brown on tactical portfolio trims in megacap tech.
• 33:23 — Gerstner: US CapEx advantage; skeptical on excess debt fears.
• 39:39 — Gerstner: “Too hard basket” for traditional software.
• 46:41 — Brown: HALO ETF rationale; looking for AI-resistant companies.
• 50:22 — Gerstner: Cerebras IPO is a testament to American risk capital.

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Closing Thoughts

• Cerebras IPO is a “generational” event for AI hardware, with lessons for both institutional and retail investors about risk, patience, and infrastructure constraints.
• AI remains the only universally bullish theme in the market, but panelists debate whether current exuberance is justified or dangerous.
• Portfolio strategy calls for both prudence (trimming, holding cash) and conviction (remaining overweight in long-term leaders).
• Software’s future is clouded by AI’s rapid evolution, with infrastructure winners likelier than traditional “point solution” vendors.
• Investor access—and the capacity to “compound” through public market participation—remains a sore spot for retail, despite today’s milestone IPO.

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Panel’s Final Stock Picks

• Josh Brown: Eli Lilly — “Great earnings report, rallying on momentum.”
• Malcolm Etheridge: Dominion Energy — “Energy’s included in the AI trade.”
• Bill Baruch: JP Morgan — “Love this new Apple-Gemini storyline.” (also previously flagged Allstate)
• Brad Gerstner: Cerebras — “Celebrate American innovation and the age of inference.”

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Episode Tone

The tone is forward-looking, bullish yet mindful of risk, informed by both historical perspective and real-time market nuance. The roundtable blends sharp analysis, investor war stories, and cautionary guidance—especially for retail listeners dazzled by the AI gold rush.

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For first-timers: this summary distills the episode’s heart—AI’s market effect, how to invest thoughtfully in a time of generational change, and why not every rocket ship is as safe as it looks.

Transcript

[Megan Casella]

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[Scott Wapner]

I'm Scott Wapner and you're listening to CNBC's Halftime Report, the podcast the most profitable hour of the trading day. We record this live, weekdays at 12 Eastern. Listen in, Carl, thanks very much. Welcome to the Halftime Report. I'm Scott Wapner. Front and center this hour, tech's continued takeoff. Nvidia hitting a new record high. The biggest IPO of the year coming to market today. Today we're trading it with the committee. Joining me for the hour, Josh Brown, Malcolm Etheridge, Bill Baruch. And also with us Today at Post 9, we're calling him a special committee member today. He's Brad Gerstner. He is here. He's the Altimeter Capital founder and CEO. He was an early investor in Cerebras, which is going public today. And we're awaiting that first trade. I do want to show you what the markets are doing today. New highs for the S and P, new highs for the Nasdaq. The Dow has retaken 50,000 yet again. Nasdaq's on pace for its seventh positive week in a row. It is the first time it's done that since October of 2024. Let's begin with the tech trade. For obvious reasons. Nvidia for obvious reasons. That new record high today, you did have that Reuters report. The US has cleared the H200 chip sales to 10 firms. May not be entirely new, but we are learning names. And, and as Jensen Wong is in China, we're wondering what he might come back with. Are they going to be able to sell those chips there as he wants? The street remains optimistic. UBS has taken the price target to 275. Caner goes to 350. So there is a lot of optimism for a stock that everybody here owns. You get the first shot at this because it's one of your largest positions. It's so good to have you in the house. It doesn't happen that often, if ever. So we're so happy to have you. What should we make of what Nvidia is doing and what Jensen Huang could bring home on this trip?

[Brad Gerstner]

Well, I mean, the most unusual thing is Nvidia didn't do anything for six months as the rest of the semiconductor trade really catapulted to new highs. So over six months, remember, Nvidia hit $210 a share about six and a half months ago, and it was flat over that period of time. And so as our largest holding, it's almost 20% of our overall portfolio. But it's actually been a drag from a performance perspect up until recently. On the March 30th low, I think it hit 170 or 172 bucks a share. And so the catch up here really hasn't been about China at all, Scott. And by the way, China's de minimis at this point to Nvidia, they've announced a trillion dollars over the course of the next six to eight quarters of demand on Blackwell's and now Vera Rubins. And so this is a little bit of icing on top of the cake to be able to sell their older H2 hundreds to China. I don't think that's what's moving the stock. They're going to report earnings next week. And I think what's moving the stock is everybody's looking at the entire complex and saying the most important company globally in AI, the best company executing today in AI is Nvidia. Why is it trading at 14 or 15 times fully tax GAAP earnings when the rest of the complex.

[Bill Baruch]

What's so crazy is this Stock sat at 180.

[Brad Gerstner]

Yes.

[Bill Baruch]

For six months. Anyone who wanted it could have had it for sure. And it was at that price, the cheapest multiple on forward earnings. You've been able to buy Nvidia since before, before Chad GPT. So it's just this astonishing thing where in plain sight, Amazon rallied, Alphabet rallied, amd, Broadcom, one after another, they just took off. And this thing was just look at, look at this. Is there another one of these that's hiding in plain sight as you look over your current holdings or stocks that you're not in? What, what do you think is another candidate that we're ignoring right now that has this typ, you know, I love

[Brad Gerstner]

it, I love it. We come on the set, it's like, what is the thing that will go up 40% and immediately, well, welcome to

[Scott Wapner]

the market that we're in.

[Brad Gerstner]

I mean, the fact of the matter is I'm not smart enough, nor are, you know, most retail investors at home depict, you know, that closely. Right. The reason we've been in Nvidia is because we know they are the market leader. We know that they are the cheapest in the trade. And so we just had to assess at some point in time, numbers would matter. The economic law of gravity here is that if they deliver the returns that we expect that they're going to deliver, the one or two things is going to happen. Either they'll buy back all their own shares because the market won't value them, or the market will buy them. And I think the market at this point in time is saying, this doesn't make any sense. But if you said to me, Josh, Brad, what is the catalyst that finally got this thing moving? I couldn't tell you.

[Bill Baruch]

Yeah.

[Malcolm Etheridge]

Here's my question though. As we sit here and talk about Nvidia being at all time highs. I personally own the stock, so I have a vested interest in it going up and to the right. But as I look at a company, company like Cerebras getting ready to ipo, what they do is proposing to come for Nvidia's lunch. Right. Like their approach to inference is completely different from what Nvidia does. It's completely different from the Vera Rubin cluster that fills the rack that we're supposed to get excited about this summer after we hear about what it's gonna change and what demand for that looks like. So maybe that explains why the stock had such a hard time blowing past 180. And now we're seeing the excitement as the entire semi space has moved up. But realistically, after earnings, a little bit of air gets let out of that balloon because we have a chance to learn that even if it's not Cerebras, somebody like that is coming for those 80%.

[Brad Gerstner]

Sure.

[Scott Wapner]

But I would just say before Brad answers, I mean, Brad and Jensen Huang himself have been so, you know, bullish and optimistic about what inference is going to mean. Two years ago, you and Jensen were sitting on the the podcast together talking about this very issue, how they both saw what this was going to mean. I want you to watch the clip and we can talk on the other.

[Brad Gerstner]

Inference is about ready because of chain of reasoning.

[Scott Wapner]

Right.

[Josh Brown]

It's about to go up by a billion times.

[Bill Baruch]

Right?

[Brad Gerstner]

By a million X. By a billion X.

[Bill Baruch]

That's right. That's the part that most people

[Scott Wapner]

haven't completely internalized.

[Bill Baruch]

This is that industry we were talking about book. This is the industrial revolution.

[Scott Wapner]

My take from that is that in an industrial revolution in industry, not going to be one winner, not one big winner. There are going to be many big winners and this company is going to be right along there. Right.

[Brad Gerstner]

It's so extraordinary watching that. You know Josh, you and I were just talking. Sometimes these things are hiding in plain sight.

[Bill Baruch]

Yeah.

[Brad Gerstner]

Jensen told us like we knew inference time reasoning was going to change the game. We knew the world was moving to inference. He told you it was going to 1 billion x. And the reality is not many people listen. He went on to buy Grot for $20 billion. Cerebras is going to go public today. These are inference factories, purpose built chips in order to deliver low latency inference to all the people in the world. And for the folks at right, here's the one thing to remember. There is no intelligence, there's no consumer chatgpt, there's no enterprise intelligence, there's no Claude code without the production of tokens. Right. It's the production and consumption of tokens that is intelligence. And what Cerebras does such a good job at Grok as well with Nvidia is producing very low latency inference tokens. There is room for more than one winner. To your point Scott, this idea that Nvidia was going to lose share, you're right is the thing that capped Nvidia at 180 bucks. But I think the world woke up to the fact that notwithstanding Cerebras success, notwithstanding Broadcom success, notwithstanding the success of Trainium and TPU, Nvidia was still going to sell everything.

[Bill Baruch]

There were five companies in the S&P 500 that specifically said on their conference calls this earnings season they can't believe the cost of COMPUTE and tokens that is now becoming a material factor in the profitability of the enterprise users of AI and all and all of these products. Does a company like Cerebras or many companies like that is. Is that is what we're seeing the waste to solve that problem so that the price of compute doesn't outrun our willingness to do more and more things with AI.

[Brad Gerstner]

Right. Remember in the early phases 23 and 24 we were solving for pre training of LLMs that required a lot of flops. Right. We weren't consuming a lot of inference. Now the models themselves to learn they need to have an inference loop. Agents require inference and ChatGPT exploded. So the world moved from FLOPS to being able to solve what they call the memory wall. Moving KB cache and moving these model weights around on a chip. And the way that Cerebrus, remember we invest in Cerebrus eight to nine years ago and the idea was a long shot that they could do something nobody had ever done and put memory right on this wafer scale chip right next to the compute. They pulled it off and the world moved to them. Now it really matters. They have an unlimited amount of demand for their product. So the challenge for Nvidia today, the challenge for Cerebras is can we find the power, can we find the data centers to stand up all of this in order to support it. The one thing you heard on all those calls, Josh, whether it was Amazon or Google, we are compute constrained. Our revenues would be higher if we weren't compute constrained.

[Scott Wapner]

Right.

[Brad Gerstner]

Anthropic's compute constrained. OpenAI's compute constrained. Cerebras will help solve part of that constraint.

[Scott Wapner]

Speaking of demand, you price at 185. The indication is 335. As we await the very first trade, you will see it here. I promise you that if it happens within the next 50 minutes, you will see it and we will discuss it. I want to get back to that in a minute. But the mance sitting quiet to your right is the one who I have to get to today who has heard all this bullishness about Nvidia and I don't think feels any differently. Just trim the stock.

[Josh Brown]

Yeah, I absolutely do not feel any different. This is position management. We love the fact too that Nvidia does not have the capex that the other hyperscalers have. This got to be an over 8% position in a portfolio or right under an 8% position and a portfolio. Scott, you call me out on the, on the show Active and Tactical, we trimmed this down to about just over a 6% position. It's been a 50 plus percent move in the semiconductor space just this year alone. In the last month, basically 30%. We're, we're managing risk. So then we have a concentrating portfolio. It's better than a 10% position. Nvidia still, so I still love the name. But for us, you know, we've, we've seen this run up and then we have the Trump chi meeting with, at the time of this, trim, Jensen was not joining that party. And then we have next week we have Nvidia'S earnings. So I think we'll try and hit

[Scott Wapner]

recall, recall, recall that he was happy with the move.

[Josh Brown]

Yeah, I mean when I, when it made sense, you know, with the market moving up. What was that Tuesday night? And, and the news changed. But I'm happy. So our top position of both portfolios, I'm happy with where we are. And it's been our top position since the back half of 2022. I mean it's always been right there. So nothing changes in our mind. But we're a little more tactical here across the moves we've made. Selling things in that haven't had momentum and kind of trying to leaning into the semi space over the past month or two. It gets us in a really great spot. We have about 7% cash I'm looking forward to over the next week, next couple of months to get to work.

[Scott Wapner]

So you made the point as we again wait for the first trade here indicated far higher than 185 is where it prices above the range. Last check was around 335. So we'll watch for that. But you made the point as our viewers are watching this and this is, you know, the, the first of the really huge AI IPOs to come. It's the biggest in Snowflake, it's the biggest Chip1 since ARM. They're like this looks really tasty for me. You made the point with us when you were on a week or so ago that companies like this maybe to a degree not as much as a SpaceX or an open or an Anthropic, have in a sense already IPO'd in the private market. So temper your expectations as a, as a retail investor.

[Brad Gerstner]

Yeah, you know, I always try to shoot straight when I come on here and I see some of these retail investors placing bids, you know, without limits. Josh. At 375, $400, you know, in order to buy cerebral stock. This is not a get rich quick scheme. This is a generational company that I believe if you're in it for the next two or three years, will compound much higher because we're on a generational and transformational wave around AI and inference and they are delivering the inference factories to the world. With that said, I think you just have to be, you know, cognizant of the moment you just described. We've had, you know, epic moves in semiconductors. We have an all time high today, you know, for Nvidia. So you know, we got a lot of excitement around here. There'll be plenty of time if you Want to be on the train and compounding with Cerebras to buy this stock. It obviously moved up on the pricing. Didn't start at 185. We moved it up to 185, you know, which is where it ultimately priced. I think the institutional demand for this stock is probably in the $250 range, $275 range. If you said, Brad, where, where are you getting excited about buying more of this stock? I would say it's more in that range. That's what I'm hearing from the institutions. I think most of the demand over 300 is frankly retail. That. Listen, we've locked retail out of all of these great value creation stories. You know, it's a pet peeve of mine. That's why I want to do Invest America accounts, the Trump accounts. Every one of these people should be able to participate in the upside of this compounding. So I understand that they want to get in on the action. And all I would say is caution a little bit today. Don't have uncapped orders, you know, don't get this thing filled at, you know, some astronomically high level and then regret it and be selling it. Don't worry about the quick flip like buy this on a fair price over a reasonable period of time and compound over the course of the next couple of years.

[Scott Wapner]

Let's take that then from inference, if you will, to exuberance, because that is where it feels like the market has taken us. Malcolm, of late. If you, you know, yesterday, Nebius, and you got Cisco today, which if, if you're in this space or claiming to be a big player in this space and you have a good earnings day. What used to be special, as I've been saying, like a 14 to 15% move, is now routine.

[Malcolm Etheridge]

Yeah.

[Scott Wapner]

It's just become a daily occurrence for many of these companies. So how would you assess the exuberance that some are suggesting exists within this market? This is Cisco's biggest gap up on earnings since 2002, which is basically saying

[Malcolm Etheridge]

anything AI is going up. Anything that looks like it's attached to a data center is going up. But I have, I have a little bit of a hard time understanding the exuberance on the side here. That's saying Cerebra should be valued at 400 bucks a share when it IPO is considering what its technology is proposing to do. Right. It basically strips away all the old ways of semiconductor manufacturing that Moore's Law taught us. We need to get as many transistors as we can. Onto one chip and on smaller chips as time goes on and says, basically, give me the biggest chip you got and I'm going to put as many transistors on it as I can. Which then means that we don't need as much data center space from a square footage perspective as we've been talking about. We're not talking about the level of power consumption. We're not talking about the amount of fiber optic cables coming from somebody like a Corning. So all of the stocks that are going up and to the right, because the amount of money that's being poured into this by the four hyperscalers spending $700 billion, Cerebrus's success flies in the face of that right? To an extent at least. And so I think that the irrational exuberance on one side should be met with the cold water or the rationalization that, like, everything can't go up into the right forever. And once something does come along that changes the way we've been doing this for this amount of time, what does that mean for me and the companies that I.

[Scott Wapner]

Okay, so that plays to, I guess, Josh, the idea that Jim Chanos and I spoke about the other day, the idea that both the earnings and the spending are more cyclical than secular right now you can make the argument this is a fundamentally driven market. Sure, there is probably hype mixed in somewhere. Ed Yardeni has a note today where he says he's tracking the exuberance, to which he says it's impossible not to recognize some of the more ridiculous anecdotes that indicate some folks are getting a bit overenthusiastic about AI. Companies are switching into AI from entirely unrelated business lines. The stock market's performance is dramatically narrowed, and stock gains are boosting the bottom line for some companies. But at the same time, tech earnings forecasts continue to rise sharply. And at the end of the day, that keeps us in the bullish camp. Well, earnings and earnings were up 50% for tech, right?

[Bill Baruch]

So you look, you look at a, you look at a company, you look at Sandisk Stock trades from 250 to $1,500, like in a couple of months. Okay, on it. On the surface, it's insanity, but then you look at the projected earnings, and it's like, wait a minute, they're going to 8x their earnings over the next year?

[Josh Brown]

So what.

[Bill Baruch]

What would you expect the stock to do on. So that's the, that's the. So now the question becomes, all right, but are they going to do that in 27? Are they going to 8 extra earnings again in 28. So then the bigger concern becomes lapping these miraculous, some would say once in a generation capex explosions. Can we lap it another year, another two years? Because ultimately the growth rates can stay high but they can't match what we've just witnessed. That's my trouble with some areas of memory chips, semiconductors, but that doesn't apply to every stock. The semi index right now, even after having gone up 222% on total return from the liberation day low, is still selling at 27 times forward. 27 times forward in arguably the biggest boom for chip demand we've ever seen. It's not 57 times, it's not 100 times. I wish it were. It'd be easier. Just hit the sell button. It's harder because the fundamentals are there.

[Scott Wapner]

Well, how about that? You're Taiwan semi. Brad, for example, says the global chip market is going to hit one and a half trillion by 2030 because of AI. That's a fundamental fly in the face of that. This is all just hype and irrational exuberance driving this whole thing.

[Brad Gerstner]

I mean Josh has said, I mean you have these companies that are growing at extraordinary rates. I mean in the case of Nvidia, over 70% and you know, they were trading below market multiples. Right. This is a radically different situation than what Cisco faced in 2002. And so the people who have been, you know, propagating that myth over the last two and a half years have missed out on all of this upside. The question you're always asking is when is too much, too much. You know, but if you look at the memory stocks which we've been very large in for now two years, they're still trading at 5 to 6 times earnings. I'm going to have, you know, the CEO of, of, of Micron on the BG2 pod next week and this is what we're going to talk about. We are fundamentally restructuring these industries. So if you said to me what is going to be the signal? Right, what's the signal?

[Bill Baruch]

I know it already.

[Brad Gerstner]

Okay, tell me the signal.

[Bill Baruch]

Tom Brady launches a data center. Literally. Take the portfolio flat. Take, take the rest of the year off.

[Brad Gerstner]

That scary because we're not, we're not there. The number of Neo Labs or Neil clouds that we're being pitched in our venture capital firm every single week.

[Bill Baruch]

Any celebrities?

[Brad Gerstner]

A new Neil cloud. There are celebrities in these things.

[Scott Wapner]

So vodka to tequila to Jada cigarettes,

[Brad Gerstner]

that's where we're going. But I would just say this, you know, back to the NEO clouds. And the biggest challenge we have right near right now is our ability to stand up all the compute. So why might revenues fall short, Scott, you know, for a company like Cerebras or anybody else? Well, if we can't get the compute to run all the things that we promised to run, we will have a problem. And you heard the rumors, have seen the headlines that 30 or 40% of compute now is delayed this year. So keep your eye on power and compute. If delays persist, if we don't get these things stood up, it will roll back onto the revenue and the ROI of the CapEx spend that could slow the whole trade.

[Scott Wapner]

I'll come back to you just a second. I got to go to Megan Casella's got some breaking headlines for us from down in Washington. What are we learning?

[Megan Casella]

Scott, President Trump sat down with FOX News for an interview in Beijing following that summit with President Xi Jinping of China. And we're starting to get some news out of that interview. The top line for our viewers being that President Trump says that China has agreed to a large purchase of Boeing jets. Here's the full quote here. The president saying one thing he, meaning President Xi, agreed to today, he's going to order 200 jets. That's a big thing. He says 200 big ones without specifying. And Trump goes on to say, I think it was a commitment, sort of like a statement, but I think it was a commitment. So a few things to say on this, Scott. 200 jets from Boeing, he says China has agreed to purchase, but it's unclear at this point whether that was a firm order, whether it might be something like a memorandum of understanding with an agreement to keep talking about this down the road. And while the president says 200 jets would be a big order, I will caution that the expectation going into this was that the order might be something like 500 jets. Bloomberg had reported as far back as March that China was considering a deal for about 500, 737, 737 maxs, those narrow body planes. So no immediate comment from Boeing to CNBC on this, Scott, but you can see the shares have been moving on it just a little bit. Two other quick pieces of news to flag from this interview that we're getting a little bit more on Iran and the geopolitical conflict ongoing. President Trump saying that President Xi had agreed not to give any military equipment to Iran. President Trump saying that was a big statement, but he did suggest that Iran is or that China is going to continue purchasing Iranian Oil. That's something that the United States has been pressuring China to stop doing, to stop funding, they say, the largest state sponsor of terrorism. In doing so, the president says that she told him they buy a lot of their oil there and they'd like to keep doing that. Separately, though, he does say he would love to be a help on Iran. He would like to see the Hormuz straight open. So potentially more details coming out on that front as we start to get more from this interview. Scott.

[Scott Wapner]

All right, Megan, thank you very much for that. That's Megan Casella. We'll show Boeing just one more time. If you're asking yourself, well, why isn't the stock popping on this? Well, it kind of already did it, it already moved earlier in the week when it was learned that the CEO of the company would be on the trip to begin with. So, you know, obviously investors assumed that there would be business to be had and it looks like, in fact there is. We'll get some more clarity and we'll bring it to you certainly when we, when we, when we have it. What about the narrowness of the market? Okay, so we, we talked about some of the exuberance. Let's talk about some of the narrowness bespoke today. The only precedent for when The S&P 500 has been at record highs while fewer than 60% of stocks were above their 50 and 200 day moving averages. When do you think that was, Bill? December of 98 into March of 2000.

[Josh Brown]

You know, to tie in with what you were saying also is, is there are cyclical stories within this secular bull market and secular story of AI and what we're seeing right now in the narrowness, I mean we, we study a lot of proprietary indicators across the bullish percentage indexes and we're seeing complete deterioration, whether it be the S P or the NASDAQ 100, as this market's making record highs. And I think one of the catalysts here too, I mean, Dealer Gamma, I don't want to get too into it, but Dealer Gamma and Options, you're seeing positive while momentum in the leadership is breaking out. So we were in this unique position where when Dealer Gamma is positive, it dampens volatility and then we have momentum in the leading names and we're sort of just getting this melt up. But plus there's there's been good news and I think that's just such a unique spot where the narrowness of this rally, I think it can continue. But that's why you've seen me Trim some things take, whether it be micron. And we've talked about the Simi space and I'm looking forward to listening to Sanjay Mohorta. I mean, when he talks, the industry listens. And I think that there is a lot of really great stories out, out here driving things. But again, I mean, it's, it's not necessarily.

[Bill Baruch]

There's only one, there's only one good story and that story is the Capex bill. There's nothing else good happening. The housing market, which is the most important engine of the economy, is absolutely destitute. Every one of those stocks crashing, the homebuilders, the renovation, any basic materials selling into housing and existing home sales are the worst we've seen in our adult lives. Take that off the table. The consumer, let's say the bottom two or three deciles, absolutely panicked and in pain. The higher gas prices from the Iran war did not help, but it was already a dire situation going to that. We're not seeing credit deterioration. We're not seeing credit card companies say anything negative because the people in the top 20% are way outspending their own size.

[Josh Brown]

Relatives are rising.

[Bill Baruch]

Okay, so we're right, so we're, we're weathering it.

[Scott Wapner]

Yeah.

[Bill Baruch]

There are no good stories that aren't directly related to AI. None.

[Scott Wapner]

Yes.

[Bill Baruch]

Okay, so let's just stipulate that. That being said, the worst mistake that investors have made over the last 15 years is looking at these divergences, the advanced decline line, whatever they're looking at percentage of stocks above 200 day. They see this divergence, they see this gap. They say, look out below. It's going to be a catch down. And then. Son of a bitch. All of a sudden the Russell 2000 comes roaring back, the financials join the party and we do it all over again to new highs. It's really, really tough to time these types of net momentum divergences or to be able to say anything substantive about the market because We've got these 10 gigantic companies at the top whose earnings growth is coming in as far as the eye can see, almost regardless of weakness in housing, regardless of gas prices.

[Josh Brown]

And that's why we make little moves over time that add up and make,

[Scott Wapner]

and help us make those rotations. But that's why in some degree that Wells from yesterday, remember we brought up this note. Don't fight the tape. I mean, you can, you can hate on certain things and get worried about certain other things, but don't fight the tape is what they're talking about. And investors clearly are Not. So let's do this. You've got more moves to get to in the mega cap space, and I don't want to miss that. I want Brad to hear what Orlando Bravo told me about the software trade. See if he agrees. And we're waiting for the first trade of Cerebras. Again, early investor Brad Gerstner. He's going to stay with us. You can stay, right? He's staying. So we'll be back right after that. And we have Josh's best stocks in the market, too, so we'll get to all that.

[Bill Baruch]

That's part of the show. If you ask me,

[Malcolm Etheridge]

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[Megan Casella]

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[Scott Wapner]

All right. Altimeter's Brad Gerstner is still with us. I said we had some more moves from Bill Baru. And look, I, I get. I don't like. It's my pet peeve. I guess. I don't like portfolio management commentary when somebody makes a move because it's like. No, you know what? Like, you guys are portfolio managers. You're managing your portfolios. There are a lot of things that you could be doing around the edges. So I almost feel like it's used as more of an excuse to explain why you make a move. You trimmed Amazon and Alphabet. Now, I'm sure you're going to tell me exactly what I just said, but.

[Josh Brown]

Well, the numbers speak for themselves. What we put up, I mean, you know, we, we. We outperform the S and P very well every year after year. And the Reason we do it is because we're able to take some stuff off the top. We're ready to put that cash to work when the market comes back. I'm not calling a top here, but we do see some cyclical highs that come in June from our business cycle analysis and other indicators. But what we're doing in Alphabet and Amazon specifically, I mean, look at it.

[Scott Wapner]

What do you mean from your business cycle analysis?

[Josh Brown]

We use a business cycle analysis that overlays with wave analysis and, and some of the proprietary indicators we're looking at with breadth. It does line up that we have a pullback. We're also in year two of a presidential cycle. That this, this could be a bit of a. Not a blow up but, but we, this rally, I don't know where it's going to extend to. But then we may not do much for the rest of the year and we may bottom out through the end of the year and look at for a low in February. I want to have some cash because if we rotate or things like that, I want to be able, I don't want to just make no money for the rest of the year.

[Scott Wapner]

No, I understand but you know, blow off top.

[Josh Brown]

I'm not saying blow off top. I'm saying this, this could be, this the top that we kind of said

[Scott Wapner]

this could be a blow off. I said that.

[Josh Brown]

I don't think I said I don't know if this could be a blow off but a run of a run up.

[Bill Baruch]

No, no, no. He's a, he's a big boy. He knows what he said.

[Scott Wapner]

Yeah, okay.

[Josh Brown]

But I think with our moves here, trimming a little bit around the edges. Amazon and Alphabet 125% AlphaBets outperformed the S&P over the last 12 months. I mean I think right here, just from the weighting size, you know, we've kind of gone a little underweight. Some of these Mag 7 names individually doesn't mean that we don't have tech overweight in general. So we're using this as an opportunity to take a little bit off the table, trim around the edges. And the one thing about Amazon that it is breaking out and it has looked, looked terrific from a charting standpoint. Capex year over year growth of 59%. I think that's where you're seeing a lot of these multiples come down is because the spending is there. And then we talked about the constraints around compute and the revenue. I think that's what we're seeing where some of these, they're still terrific. Multiples, I think that lays a lot of opportunity, you know, in 2027 I think is going to be on fire.

[Scott Wapner]

If I recall, they're the, they're one out of earnings season that didn't raise their CapEx number for the year. Right.

[Bill Baruch]

It's already over 100%.

[Scott Wapner]

I mean, what are they going to do? But still.

[Bill Baruch]

Yeah.

[Scott Wapner]

What'd you take on the stock?

[Bill Baruch]

I, I would just, I would just say these stocks right now are trading extremely well. I don't disagree with Bill at all that there could be a pullback. It's very hard for anyone to, if they're not like laser focused on the market every minute of the day, it's really hard to play that game. I think for most investors, they've waited a long time for Amazon to break out. They've waited a long time for the narrative to change around Jassy. He's untested. They spend too much money. All of that is gone now. Now we're talking about Amazon as the premier place to do Claude workflows, anthropic, et cetera. And we're talking about it the way I think we should have all this time. So for me, I am not selling any because I think this is the start of something, not the end.

[Malcolm Etheridge]

Could I point out something though? You made a point that they, they now are spending more than their free cash flow, so they're spending 100% plus. I think that's where this pullback you're talking about comes from. When we really start having an honest conversation about how much debt is being racked up now by the mag seven, the hyperscalers, the biggest 10, whoever you want to talk about. And a lot of it's being done off book right through the SPVs and everything else that we can't directly see on these companies balance sheets. So at some point conversation about that starts to get louder and louder and I think that is where the pullback that you're talking about maybe starts to come from where October and November of last year we got a little exhausted with the level of capex and that's when the market said, yeah, I hear you, but a hundred billion dollars sounds

[Josh Brown]

like broadly Speaking we're only 7 to 8% above that October high. Like you know, the market has done a lot of moving in between and we, yeah, we are breaking out right now. But you know, it's, I think, I think there's a longer Runway. I just think we need to cool off a little bit here.

[Scott Wapner]

What are your thoughts on this?

[Brad Gerstner]

Yeah, we Own a lot of Amazon. It's been one of our biggest positions. I mean, listen, I remember the criticism of Amazon back in 2010. They were spending a lot of their free cash flow to build something and everybody said, why the hell are you wasting all your money on this? That something AWS turned out to be one of the greatest gold mines in the history of the world. Right. So I'm looking. If they weren't investing this aggressively in AI, I would have a problem with it. They all know that there's going to be extraordinary return on this investment. They're not racking up a lot of debt because they're producing 100 billion of free cash flow a year. I think it's extraordinary that we're financing almost a trillion dollars of CapEx a year to build out the entire AI infrastructure without any money from the US government. Like we are in the lead globally. You look at China, et cetera. They're having to subsidize this with taxpayer money. We have such profitable companies in this country. We got these incredible Frontier Labs and this capex build out going on. So I'm not concerned about that. To me, they're good investments. But, you know, we'll see. We just saw the growth rates accelerate in the quarter. 28% at AWB, 39%, you know, at Microsoft, 60% at Google Cloud. If we weren't seeing those numbers, Scott, let me tell you this. If Anthropic, why might the market be different this year? Okay, we're up a bunch at this point. If Anthropic had not shown up with the most parabolic revenue numbers in the history of capitalism, that shocked everybody. Even the market may be down to Josh's point. The only story is AI and everybody came into the year skeptical as to whether or not those revenues were going to show up. There was a huge wall of worry and they, you know, we, they just posted or it's reported $14 billion of incremental annual recurring revenue in the month of April. Nobody's ever seen anything like it. Remember, that's two data bricks and one Palantir. Okay. In a month that you're adding in terms of annualized revenue.

[Scott Wapner]

Yeah, it's astonishing. We'll come back to the conversation in a second. I want to get the news update now with Contessa Brewer. Hi there.

[Megan Casella]

Hi there, Scott. President Trump bought stock and hundreds of American companies since the beginning of the year, according to a newly filed disclosure with the Office of Government Ethics. It shows Trump invested in Nvidia, Apple and Oracle, among other companies in defense, energy, pharmaceuticals and banking. And of course, a lot of those companies have business with the US Government. Protests erupted in Cuba last night after its energy minister told state media the country's run out of oil and diesel. President Miguel Diaz Canal blamed the crisis on the US Government's energy blockade against Cuba. It started in January and parts of Havana have had blackouts as long as 22 hours a day. Former Spirit Airline employees have filed a proposed class action lawsuit against the airline, claiming workers were laid off without proper notice. They're still owed benefits and pay. The lawsuit, filed in U.S. bankruptcy court, alleges that Spirit violated the Federal Worker Adjustment and Retraining Notification act that Requires at least 60 days written notice of company closure. That's the news now, Scott.

[Scott Wapner]

All right, Contessa, thank you. Contessa Brewer coming up, still awaiting Cerebras, the first trade there. We'll get Brad's take on software as well, but whether he agrees with what Orlando Bravo told me just the other day. Josh Brown is also ready with his best stocks in the market he is flagging today. A breakout for one of the names on the list. We're back right after this.

[Malcolm Etheridge]

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[Brad Gerstner]

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[Scott Wapner]

Welcome back. Brad Gerstner, of course is, is still with us. So let's talk software for a moment. Okay. So we came into this week up four straight weeks. Now we're down fractionally this week, so maybe we're giving a little bit of that back. And we've talked in numerous occasions about the peaks and valleys of what's happened here. Times where there was opportunity or others where you were like, you know, most of the stocks that are down deserve to be down. So I, I spoke with Orlando Bravo the other day. Right. The world's largest software investment firm, Thoma Bravo. And I asked him whether the names have bottomed. I want you to listen to what he said. We'll react. On the other side of it, it's

[Brad Gerstner]

so hard to predict the market, but I really think so.

[Bill Baruch]

I mean these software stocks, many of

[Brad Gerstner]

them are great leaders.

[Bill Baruch]

They're in an excellent position for this

[Brad Gerstner]

AI wave and they're pretty cheap.

[Josh Brown]

So I do think we're pretty close to a bottom.

[Scott Wapner]

I wonder if you agree. And by the way, do you, I don't see it on your top holdings and maybe that doesn't mean anything. Snowflake, is it still you, you still have.

[Brad Gerstner]

We don't have it in the public funds. Nope. And we, It's a big deal. Well, as you know, as you know, I still own a lot personally.

[Scott Wapner]

Yeah.

[Brad Gerstner]

As you know, we, I, I've been skeptical of software now for two years.

[Scott Wapner]

Yeah, I know, but.

[Brad Gerstner]

Right. We run a long short fund and so my job is to find both winners and losers. And I've said very clearly multiple times on the show, starting 18 months ago, software was in the too hard basket. Right. I had Satya on my podcast in December of 24 where he said software was a thin layer on top of a crud database. Bill Gurley and I did a podcast, is Software dead? More than 12 months ago. So we've been worried about software. Now what happened in software? And this is the only place I would take any issue with, with, with, with Orlando Bravo, who's extraordinary and incredible investor. Software stocks in my view are not cheap. Software stocks have reverted from a decade long superior multiple to the market to a market multiple. When you look at free cash flow adjusted for real SBC, when you treat them like all of the other MAG7, they're basically trading at a market multiple. Now if you asked me, I would say I can't see out more than two or Three years max in terms of the impact that AI is going to have on software. So if you're asking me to pay a 20x free cash flow multiple on a business that fundamentally is at odds with AI. Right. And so they're all trying to identify their AI stacks, whether you're Salesforce or whether you're ServiceNow. But fundamentally what AI does is solve a lot of those problems. So for me, I've just put most of those names in the two hard basket. We're all in on the AI trade, you know, both picks and shovels as well as the models, you know, themselves. And so I don't view them as cheap. They're definitely going to be winners. Right. We've seen the bounce off the bottom for igv. I think that you're going to see Snowflake have a great quarter when they report. You know, Databricks is blowing the doors off. We're in another company called Clickhouse, which is in that data infrastructure layer. If you're in the data infrastructure layer, then this token consumption is driving a lot more consumption of your basic services, you know, as Satya talked about. But the closer you are to a point solution, that feels to me like you're on the front of the convey belt heading toward the guillotine. And to me it's just too hard.

[Scott Wapner]

And, and to be clear, what they do obviously is way more focused on the private software companies. Correct. Where there are like, you know, infinite numbers of software companies relative to the publicly traded ones. That's more of what I think he's talking about than, you know, what, what is, you know, a member of the, of the ig.

[Brad Gerstner]

But you looked at what these guys were buying just, you know, eight or nine months ago, the multiples they were paying for those software companies they were buying, they were just way too high. They were way too high. We can't pay that anymore. Given this level of uncertainty, the discount rates have gone up forever. This is not a once in a moment discount rates have gone up forever on software. And the inverse of that is multiples have come down.

[Scott Wapner]

Best stocks in the market. What's on the list? You have a new one today.

[Bill Baruch]

Yeah, we're going to keep this one simple. Allstate. This is insurance, property casualty. What's happening here is very simple. They've been able to raise premiums by over 7%. And there were no major storms, wildfires, catastrophes as a result of the last earnings report was just absolutely incredible for this industry. And as a result, we're seeing this stock now break above a level you could see here. It's been consolidating for a year now. We're testing the other end of that level. I called it a breakout in Progress in my pro column today. 220. If you're a purist, you're a true technician. You're probably waiting for that trigger at 220. I'm comfortable calling it here. I think it's going to go. It's not an AI stock. It's not going to go to 300. But I do think this stock could get up into the two 30s, two 40s where Wall Street's targets seem to be clustering.

[Scott Wapner]

Okay, good stuff. Thank you for doing that quickly.

[Bill Baruch]

Nailed it too.

[Scott Wapner]

Yeah. Coming up, a special edition of ETF Edge. There's a new way to invest in Josh Brown's so called halo stock strategy. We'll tell you about it coming up next. Some more details on this awaited Cerebras IPO for CENA parts and evolutions at the nasdaq. What do we learn?

[Megan Casella]

Well, Scott, there is excitement because right now, according to what I'm Hearing from the NASDAQ, there's 45 buyers for every one seller. The price is at $350 right now. The reason they're not opening is that Morgan Stanley feels that price is a little too high. Normally when you have a, an offering. So for cerebras, it was 30 million shares yesterday at 185 bucks. They just want to get 10% of that out into the market. So roughly 3 million shares right now they're at least at 3.6 million that have been sold. But that price is still too high for them. They want to just find the next threshold, which is why this could take another 25 minutes. But it really speaks to the demand for this company today.

[Scott Wapner]

Scott, good stuff, good color. Christina, thanks. You got to comment on that.

[Brad Gerstner]

I agree with her. I'm hearing it could be within the next 10 minutes. You know, my bet is we're going to get it done on this show. We're going to open Cerebras, going to be one of the most important IPOs, you know, in the last two years. We're going to open it on the show. All right.

[Scott Wapner]

We'll see. We'll see. The clock's ticking, so we will. We'll see. It was our own Josh Brown, by the way, who first coined the term halo back in February, which stands for heavy assets, low obsolescence. The idea was looking for names that would not be displaced by AI. Well, today ETF provider Roundhill is launching a new fund to capture that strategy. Roundhill CEO Dave Mazza joins us now. It's good to see you. Welcome.

[Brad Gerstner]

Thank you.

[Scott Wapner]

So how did, how did this all come about? You heard Josh talk about these names and thought, hey, this is might be a good ipo. I mean a good etf. My head's in the IPO world. Sorry.

[Brad Gerstner]

No, understood. And it's not that too far from the truth. I think Roundhill Investments is actually best known for our thematic AI technology focused ETFs. But when we saw this term that Josh Brown coined, it really resonated with us due to the fact that of course we're seeing AI disruption across industry after industry. But these companies are really AI immune and have the ability to withstand whatever occurs with large language models or agentic AI because of their durability by focusing on hard assets and low obsolescence.

[Scott Wapner]

You get a founder's fee out of this or anything or.

[Bill Baruch]

Oh yeah, no, I'm in. I'm involved. So I, I spoke, I spoke to these guys shortly after they filed and I said we could like do a deal together or like maybe a lawsuit.

[Scott Wapner]

I don't know.

[Bill Baruch]

What do you want to do? And No, I know. So I know Dave and his co founder, Will Hershey. They're, they're terrific guys. I know them for a long time and I've been impressed with a lot of the products they've launched. And I said, if you guys are going to do this, I want to help, I want to be involved on a limited basis. I have like 12 other day jobs, but I love what they've built. And because I'm in such agreement with Brad Gerstner about the disruption that's coming and because names like Adobe, which is now 10 times forward earnings, and ServiceNow and Salesforce, they're all on the 52 week low list and they go lower every week. I was looking for a way to say I want to own the S and P or the Russell 1000, I want to own the market. But what's the least disruptible names that I can own? So just looking at their top 10, and this is not an endorsement of any individual stock it owns. TFI International. Brad, you know what that is?

[Scott Wapner]

Nope.

[Bill Baruch]

Good. Nobody does. It doesn't even matter. Lennox International, which is H Vac, Anglo Gold, Ashanti, Barrick Watsco is in here. Southern Copper, JB Hunt, these are great businesses. Some of them are 100 years old. There's nothing you could type into an LLM that's going to change what they do, at least not in a negative way. They're probably all beneficiaries of AI, quite frankly. So this is just a way to express a view. We think there is going to be massive disruption. We want to be invested, let's not be invested in the most disruptible companies. Let's look for the companies that are AI resistant.

[Scott Wapner]

Hey Dave, some, some have looked at now, maybe not this one specifically, but you guys are the DRAM folks as well with that new etf. And some have said, well now, here we go. Now, the launch of these types of products, trying to capture the whole AI thing now is one of those signs that people look for when they're saying, oh, this looks like a top to me. How would you address that?

[Brad Gerstner]

I think we've seen that before. People were saying that about our magnificent seven ETF mags when we launched that they were calling it when we launched our meme ETF, which is up 65% year to date. And most recently, DRAM, which is one of the actually the most successful ETF in history, is up 96% since we launched it on April 2nd. Now, that doesn't predict where the future goes, but I think it's a little bit easy just to say that because you're launching an etf, it means that it trades over. In fact, I think it's actually unlocking the potential for investors to access stocks that they haven't had before.

[Scott Wapner]

I mean, the DRAM performance since the launch has obviously proven that at least the early calls not to be correct. Dave, I appreciate your time very much. Thank you. Dave Mazza again with with Round Hill Investments. Quick, quick break and then we'll come back and maybe we will get that first trade.

[Brad Gerstner]

Breaking news.

[Scott Wapner]

Mackenzie Segalos has some news regarding Apple and OpenAI. Tell us more Mac.

[Megan Casella]

So those Apple shares moving lower on a Bloomberg report that Apple's partnership with OpenAI has deteriorated to the point that OpenAI is preparing for possible legal action. Now, According to Bloomberg, OpenAI lawyers are working with an outside firm on options that could include sending Apple a notice alleging breach of contract, though no lawsuit has been filed and no final decision has been made at this point. The issue here, Scott, is distribution. OpenAI expected the deal to drive more ChatGPT subscriptions, deeper integration across Apple's apps, and better placement inside of Siri. And instead Bloomberg reporting that OpenAI believes the integration is limited, hard to find, and has not come close to becoming the major revenue stream that it expected. One OpenAI executive telling Bloomberg, quote, we've done everything from a product perspective. They have not. Apple's had its own concerns about OpenAI, including privacy. And the relationship has certainly gotten more complicated as OpenAI pushes further into hardware with former Apple executives like Jony. I've we are out to Apple and OpenAI for comment, but haven't yet heard back.

[Scott Wapner]

Scott, Good stuff, Mac. Thank you for the update. Mackenzie Segalis all right, so got about two and a half minutes to go in the show. I don't know if we're going to get your, your, your trade before we go, but how should we be thinking about now that we're going to get, you know, this IPO today, which is going to be the biggest, as we said, since Snowflake. Pretty good test case for the market and it looks to be an explosive winner between SpaceX, open, anthropic. How are you thinking about it? What would you tell our viewers to think about it?

[Brad Gerstner]

I mean, listen, today I want to celebrate Cerebrus. It's my pick, you know, if I can. You know, Andrew, Gary, Sean, jp, Michael, the founders of this company. This is what makes America great. You know, we have a breakthrough chip. It was a long shot deal. We had the risk capital that stepped in. And now it's going to go public today. I'm hearing in less than two minutes at over $100 billion. Right. An extraordinary, you know, value creation. But if you know this team, Scott, you know, this founder, you know, Andrew Feldman, he's an absolute warrior. And they're intent on getting to 500 billion and then a trillion dollars. They believe the wave is this important. Their product strategy is really on point for the age of inference. And so I would say today at Cerebras is going to be extraordinary for the markets. And I'm happy we get retail investors back involved in the AI.

[Scott Wapner]

Yeah, it's extraordinary too, the kind of, you know, risk to some degree that, that you people like you take. You said you were in this eight or nine years ago, as early as you got into a story as a believer. And now you get to realize all of those hopes which we expect to happen momentarily could happen in the next minute. If not, it will surely happen in the early part of the next show and you'll see the very first trade. Thank you so much for being here. It's great to be here. It's been a treat to have you on set with us as we walk up to the biggest IPO of the year, no doubt, and the biggest since Snowflake, the biggest chip one since Arm And a really good precursor to what we expect will be blockbuster IPOs from SpaceX, OpenAI and Anthropic whenever they hit the market. What do you got is your final trade, Lily?

[Josh Brown]

We've been leaning into it. They've been leveraging the balance sheet. Great earnings report and it is rallying.

[Scott Wapner]

Nice. Well, you bought more. We bought the lead. I just set you up.

[Josh Brown]

Oh, we bought more. That trimming that we've been making, we're taking it into where the momentum we see also kind of diversifying across the board. That earnings report they had, this reacted really well.

[Scott Wapner]

I appreciate you. What do you got that I'm going

[Malcolm Etheridge]

Dominion Energy, we've been talking about the AI trade raising all boats. Energy's included in that.

[Bill Baruch]

JP, I love this new storyline. Apple cheating on OpenAI with Gemini. This was always meant. Apple and Google work really well together. It was always meant to be. Let's watch for what happens next.

[Brad Gerstner]

All right. All right.

[Scott Wapner]

There it is. Well, is that. Is that. Yes, it does. Begin trading. Look at that. So we didn't quite get it before the very end, but I'm going to toss it over to Kelly for the exchange. And Kel, you just take it from here as we watch this trade.

[Brad Gerstner]

Hang on a second.

[Megan Casella]

Stay right there, you and Brad. Do you mind? Scott? Can you guys stay there for one second?

[Scott Wapner]

No. I appreciate that you've been listening to CNBC's Halftime Report, the podcast. You can always catch us live weekdays at 12 Eastern only on CNBC.

[Megan Casella]

All opinions expressed by the Halftime Report participants are solely their opinions and do not reflect the opinions of CNBC or its parent company or affiliates and may have been previously disseminated by them on television, radio, Internet or another. You should not treat any opinion expressed on this podcast as a specific inducement to make a particular investment or follow a particular strategy, but only as an expression of opinion. Such opinions are based upon information the Halftime Report participants consider reliable. But neither CNBC nor its affiliates and or subsidiaries warrant its completeness or accuracy, and it should not be relied upon as such. To view the full Halftime Report disclaimer, please visit cnbc.com halftime reportdisclaimer what made

[Josh Brown]

you confident that you could do something

[Megan Casella]

that hadn't been done before? I have no fear of failure. Trailblazing women in changing the game. One of my favorite pieces of advice, Think about what your boss's boss needs. Leadership can look in many, many different forms. It really does come down to just trusting yourself. Life is short and you just gotta think big to accomplish big things. Julia Boorstin hosts CNBC Changemakers and Power Players, new episodes every Tuesday. Wherever you get your podcasts.