← The Rundown
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Public.com presents the rundown, your daily market update in under 10 minutes. My name is Zaydad Mani, and Today is Wednesday, January 7th. In today's episode, I'll tell you why data storage stocks are soaring right now. Also, break down the latest fundraising numbers from X AI, then stick around to the end of the show to find out how much traffic is down at ChatGPT since Gemini 3 was launched. We got a great show for you today. Let's go. Stocks were setting records on Tuesday with the S P 500 and Nasdaq both gaining.6%. That was enough to push the S p to its first record close of 2026. The Dow Jones continues to outperform as well, jumping 1% yesterday and closing above 49, 000 points for the first time ever. Which is cool, but like, I still don't care about the Dow now. What I do care about, though is what's happening with memory and storage. Stock companies are absolutely ripping right now. Yesterday, SanDisk was up 28%, Western Digital was up 17% and Seagate was up 14%. You know, if you've ever went to buy a hard drive or a flash drive or an SD card, you've probably heard one of these companies. But the big reason that they're ripping right now is because of comments from Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang. At Nvidia's keynote at CES on Monday, Jensen stressed that AI isn't just about GPUs anymore. It's also about memory and storage. He said the storage market is largely unserved and could become one of the biggest hard hardware markets on the planet as AI usage expands. So those comments from Jensen sent these storage stocks flying yesterday. Now, there was already hype building around these names. These were some of the best performing names last year as well. And it looks like the rally isn't slowing down anytime soon. I think we might have to do a deep dive on these storage companies because storage prices increasing from AI will impact other things like the price of phones and computers. So that might have to be a future deep dive that we do now. Speaking of things that are ripping, investors continue to rush into metals like gold, silver and copper. Gold is near record highs right now, and both copper and silver did hit record highs yesterday with silver hitting $80 an ounce for the first time ever. So there is a pretty interesting setup in the market right now. This market rally is broadening out beyond just mega cap tech names, but at the same time, investors are still hedging by buying hard assets like gold and silver due to geopolitical uncertainty. Now remember, on Friday we are getting the December jobs report, which will be the first big macro data point for the year. We'll break down that jobs report and everything else happening in the markets every morning. So if you're new, it's a great time to get subscribed to the podcast. To stay in the loop, let's run through some headlines, starting with Discord. Discord has confidentially filed for an ipo, officially kicking off the process, but the company is still debating internally whether they actually want to go public. Discord was founded back in 2015. They built their identity as a place for gamers to hang out over text and voice chat, but since then they've grown way beyond just gaming. They have more than 200 million monthly active users, users now with servers covering everything from investing to music to random niche hobbies. The company was last valued at around $15 billion in a 2021 funding round, and they famously turned down a 12 billion dollar acquisition offer from Microsoft that same year. In hindsight, I bet they wish they took that deal, because I'm not sure how much Discord is going to be valued at once they hit the public markets. Now. Over the past year, Discord has clearly been IPO curious. They switched CEOs back in April of last year as part of a plan to put the company on path for an ipo. They've also stepped up their plan their massive user base by rolling out new commerce experiences for gaming communities. But like a lot of social platforms, Discord is also dealing with PR and regulatory challenges, particularly around child safety. The company is currently facing a lawsuit alongside Roblox over safety features, and US Government officials have also criticized the platform, alleging that it's being used by extremist groups to recruit and radicalize young Americans. So the company is facing some challenges and we'll see if they decide to move forward with an IPO this year. Zooming out though, this filing is a sign that the IPO window is still open when it comes to tech companies. In 2025, tech IPOs raised more than $15.6 billion on US exchanges, which is more than double the total from 2024. That also marked a rebound from a brutal three year slump. One of my predictions for this year is that this is going to be the biggest IPO year of all time, especially with SpaceX and anthropic potentially hitting the public markets. Let's shift gears and talk About Xai Elon Musk's AI company just raised 20 billion billion and this deal more than doubles X AI's valuation from last year to around $230 billion today. This funding round included some big time names like Nvidia, Cisco, Fidelity, along with Middle Eastern sovereign wealth funds. You know, just like the other AI companies, X AI is burning a ton of cash right now. Roughly $1 billion a month to build massive data centers and buy GPUs. XAI continues to expand its giant campus in Memphis, Tennessee, which could soon approach 2 gigawatts, according to Elon Musk. Now remember, XAI also owns X, formerly known as Twitter. And X has been the main marketing tool for Grok, which is Xi's chat bot. The company claims they now reach around 600 million monthly active users across GROK and X combined. But I think there's still some questions on the path to profitability. Like, I personally don't know that many people paying for GROG versus paying for chatgpt. But XAI has no plans of slowing down. They're already training their next big AI model called Grok 5. Now I should mention the company is facing some scrutiny right now in multiple countries because users on X are using GROG to generate inappropriate, potentially illegal photos of women without their consent. So obviously that's not great. We'll see how the company responds. But that backlash hasn't stopped them from raising more funds. You know, I'll occasionally use Grok, especially if I'm on Twitter, but it's not something that I'm using on a day to day basis. I do think that GROK has a pretty significant uphill battle when it comes to Chat, GPT and Gemini. Now, pretty good fun fact here. I actually went to high school with one of the co founders, xai. Shout out to my man Greg. Now, I wouldn't say that we were close friends, but we did have a lot of the same classes. And I did give Greg a ride home once. So Greg, if you want to return the favor 15 years later, it'd be great to have you on the rundown and, and we can catch up. Let's talk about some stocks making moves today. Mobilized shares are jumping after the chip maker for self driving cars acquired a humanoid robotics firm called menti for $900 million. Mo I says that Mentee will operate as a separate division and the goal here is to help accelerate Mentee's path to market. Company expects a proof of concept robot to come out in 2026 with commercial sales targeted for 2028. Now, we talked about Mobileye earlier this week. Their main business is making AI chips for self driving cars. So if they're already building AI chips that help machines see, think and move well, then it kind of makes sense for them to get into the robotics business as well. Investors are clearly on board with this vision. Mobilized shares are up more than 10 this morning on this nearly 30% to start the year. Now on the flip side, Deckers Outdoors, the parent company of hoka, is sliding this morning after getting hit with multiple analyst downgrades. Both Baird and Piper Sandler downgraded the stock, pointing to a weaker outlook for hoka, which has been the main growth engine for the company. Hoka's revenues grew 11% last quarter, which is a big slowdown compared to the 34% growth Hoka posted in the same quarter in 2024. Moving forward, Deckers is guiding for only low teens growth for HOKAS in fiscal 2026. So that's why Piper Sandler cut their price target to 85 a share, while Baird is a little bit more bullish with their price target sitting at 125. Currently, Decker's stock is trading around $102 with shares down more than 4% this morning in reaction to the downgrades, let's wrap the show with a fun fact. Web traffic to Chat GPT has dropped 22% since Gemini 3 was launched in mid November, according to data from similar web chat GPT, seven day web traffic went from 200 million down to 158 million in the last six weeks. Gemini's traffic, on the other hand, has remained flat at around 60 million daily web visitors. Now to be fair, this data only tracks web traffic. It doesn't include mobile apps or API usage or enterprise integrations, which are a huge part of OpenAI's business. There's also a chance that this is just a holiday slowdown with students being off school and people taking time off work. So there's less need for Chat GPT to, you know, cheat on homework or rewrite emails. Or it could be an early sign that Gemini is actually making a dent and taking market share from Chat GPT. And it could explain why Sam Altman declared code red at OpenAI late last year. I gotta say, producer Mike's prediction that Sam Altman would get fired as CEO of OpenAI this year is starting to look a little less crazy. All right, well, all right guys, that's the rundown for today. Hope you guys enjoyed today's episode. If you did and you have like five extra seconds, consider giving us a five star rating on Apple, Spotify, Spotify, YouTube, wherever you listen to your podcast. And if you are listening on Spotify, don't forget to vote in today's Spotify poll. Leave us a comment on Spotify. All that engagement really does help us out and it helps other people find the show. Thank you guys so much for listening, watching and commenting. Shout out to Mike and Connor for all the work behind the scenes and we'll see you guys back here tomorrow.