← The Rundown
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Public.com presents the rundown. Your daily market update in under 10 minutes. My name is Zaidad Mani and Today is Thursday, October 23rd. In today's episode, we'll break down Tesla's earnings and what Elon said in the earnings call that is raising some eyebrows. We'll also discuss the latest quantum breakthrough from Google and why Trump is considering investing in quantum companies. Then stick around to the end of the show to find out how many jobs Amazon is expected to replace with robots. We got a great show for you today. Let's go. Stocks were down on Wednesday with the S&P 500 dropping 0.5% while the Nasdaq fell 0.9%. Some of the big losers yesterday included Netflix, which was down more than 10% in reaction to their earnings. We broke that down on yesterday's episode, so go check that out if you missed it. Also, some hot names from this year like Nuclear Space and quantum stocks were also down big yesterday. Now quantum stocks are making a comeback this morning for a specific reason, but we'll talk about that more in a bit. Overall though, it's been a pretty weird few days for the markets. You know, the gold rally is on pause right now. Crypto is experiencing a mini dip and we have a meme stock making a comeback with Beyond Meat making wild moves this week. Oh, and there's also the government shutdown that's still ongoing with no end in sight. But you know, despite all the chaos and uncertainty, both the S and P and Nasdaq are still within 1% of all time highs. So the stock market continues to be resilient. Now remember, tomorrow morning we are finally getting the September CPI inflation report. This report was supposed to come out on October 15, but was delayed due to the government shutdown. But we'll finally see the inflation numbers tomorrow and that could have a pretty big impact on how the markets end the week. We'll break down the inflation numbers on tomorrow's episode, so make sure you guys tune in for that. There's just a lot of moving pieces right now that we are staying on top of with inflation, earnings, gold, random tariff news. So it's a great time to get subscribed to the podcast to stay in the loop. Let's run through some headlines, starting with Tesla. Tesla reported earnings last night and there was a lot going on with the earnings and the earnings call. Let's start with the numbers first. Tesla's Q3 revenues beat expectations coming in at 28.1 billion doll billion, which was up 12% from last year the company sold a record number of cars in Q3, thanks in large part to US buyers rushing to buy an EV before the $7,500 tax credit expired at the end of September. While the revenue numbers are good, the problem for investors is that even though Tesla sold more cars, it made less money on each sale. Tesla's profits dropped 37% because Tesla cut prices for its Model 3 and Model Y to boost sales. The company's operating expenses also jumped 50% to $3.4 billion, with the company saying that tariffs ate more than $400 million from their profits last quarter. Now, while Tesla does manufacture its cars in California and Texas, it does have to import raw material in parts, which they have to pay a tariff on. Now, as for the earnings call, it was an interesting one. Elon barely talked about the EV business. He was more focused on talking about the Robo taxi stuff, saying that Robo Taxi would be operating in Austin, Texas without human drivers by the end of Remember, Tesla launched robo taxis in Austin over the summer, but they have a human driver in them. I guess that's going to be going away by the end of the year. On top of that, Robotaxis will be expanding to 8 to 10 cities with a human driver by the end of 2025. Elon also hyped up Tesla's humanoid robot Optimus, saying that it has potential to be the biggest product of all time. But he did admit that getting it to market will be incredibly difficult. And then, near the end of the earnings call, Elon started ranting about his $1 trillion pay package. The Tesla rewarded Elon a trillion dollar pay package, but it still has to be voted on by shareholders. Now, Elon is already worth like $400 billion, but he made the case to investors that this pay package isn't about money, but more about voting control. He says that he wants enough control to have a strong influence, but not so much that he can't be fired if he goes insane. Tesla shareholders will be voting on the pay package at the annual meeting on November 6th. Overall, I'd say it was a relatively poor earnings report. Investors saw it that way as well. Tesla Stock dropped around 3% in reaction to the earnings let's shift gears and talk about quantum computing. Quantum stocks have been on a tear all year. They've recently experienced a dip, but they got a big surge again this morning after the Wall Street Journal reported that the Trump administration is considering taking a stake in some quantum companies. According to this report, the Commerce Department is in talks with several quantum computing companies and including Ionic, Rigetti Computing and D Wave to take equity stakes in exchange for at least $10 million in federal funding for each company. President Trump has made it a priority for the US Government to take a direct stake in what he calls Strategic American Industries. The administration already took a 10% stake in intel over the summer. They've also invested in rare earth companies like MP Materials and Lithium Americas. So this news sent shares of quantum companies surging this morning. Shares of Rigetti, D Wave and Ionic are all up more than 10%. The hype around Quantum really kicked into the gear late last year after Google announced a big breakthrough with their quantum Willow chip. Since then, quantum stocks have just been on a tear, and Google actually just announced another quantum breakthrough this week. Google says they were able to run a quantum algorithm on their willow chip 13,000 times faster than software written for a normal supercomputer. Now, I'm not going to lie to you guys, some of this stuff is a bit over my head. I'm not very technical when it comes to the quantum stuff, but this is surely going to add to the quantum hype. We'll have to interview a quantum expert on the podcast soon to really break some of this stuff down. Let me know in the comments what you guys think about the hype around quantum computing. It just crazy to me that we're still like in the middle of this AI boom and investors are already kind of bored and moving on to Quantum. Let's talk about some stocks making moves today. Volvo is on track to have its biggest one day jump ever after the Swedish carmaker blew past profit expectations thanks to their successful cost cutting initiative. Profits in Q3 were up even though sales actually fell 7% in the quarter. Volvo says they cut 3,000 jobs, they pulled back on spending and their focus on boosting margin, which actually jumped from 17% to 24% in Q3. Volvo is also navigating the tariff environment better than most, thanks to a new US EU trade deal. Tariffs on European cars dropped from 27.5% down to 15%, and Volvo's even moved some hybrid production to the US to dodge future tariffs altogether. So investors were pretty excited about that. Volvo stock was up more than 40% today. Now, fun fact, Volvo's biggest shareholder is actually a Chinese car company called Geely. Now moving on, let's talk about a loser. Shares of Moderna are down this morning after the company scrapped one of its most anticipated vaccine projects. The vaccine that was in development was aimed at preventing birth defects caused by cmv, which is a common virus that infects over half of adults by the age of 40, usually without symptoms. The issue is that CMV can pass from mother to baby during pregnancy, and that causes serious health problems for the baby. But Moderna's vaccine only proved to be 6 to 23% effective in trials, which was far short of the 49% goal that they had. The company is pulling the plug on that program for pregnant women. As a result, shares of Moderna are down more than 4% this morning on that news, let's wrap the show with a fun fact. Amazon plans to replace more than half a million human warehouse jobs with robots over the next few years. The New York Times got their hands on some internal documents at Amazon. And and according to those documents, Amazon wants to automate 75% of its operations. And they've already started rolling out fully robotic warehouses in places like Louisiana and Virginia. And this is going to be a big money saver for them. According to Morgan Stanley, the robot takeover could save Amazon up to $4 billion a year in labor costs. You know, whenever I see headlines like this, I always feel like it's inevitable that more robotics and automations are coming to pretty much every industry. And that's one reason why the robotics sector has been a hot investment, that I'm actually more bullish on robotics than I am AI. Now, obviously there's a big concern on what's going to happen to the people losing their jobs to robots over the next few years. For Amazon, they say they aren't firing people just yet in their warehouses, they're just hiring less people moving forward. So, yeah, this could be a big concern. We'll have to see what happens. You know, I like to take the optimistic approach and hope that the warehouse jobs get replaced by, you know, technicians required to fix robots. But with AI, maybe the robots will fix themselves. I guess it's just a reminder to start being nicer to your Roomba and ChatGPT just in case they end up taking over the world. 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, YouTube, wherever you listen to your podcasts. 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. And Doug, here we have the Limu Emu in its natural habitat, helping people customize their car insurance and save hundreds with Liberty Mutual. Fascinating. It's accompanied by his natural ally, Doug. Limu. Is that guy with the binoculars watching us? 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