Buy Hold Rant - Stocks and Investing

Ep. 52: Photonics Better Than $MU? $RKLB Earnings, $SPCX & $TSLA Terafab

Hamid Shojaee & Dustin Alper Season 1 Episode 52

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0:00 | 1:04:54

Spoiler alert: Hamid has broken up with $BMBL.

In this episode of Buy Hold Rant, host Hamid Shojaee drops a bombshell: he's officially exited his entire Bumble position after months of disappointing execution, stonewalled investor relations, and delayed product launches. Cohost Dustin Alper explains why he's staying put. Then the guys dig into Rocket Lab's ($RKLB) strong earnings beat, debunk the latest "photonics kills memory demand" bear case against Micron ($MU), and talk about SpaceX ($SPCX) AI's Grok 4.6/Cursor momentum. They also break down the massive Tesla/SpaceX ($TSLA)TerraFab semiconductor facility planned for Texas. Plus, a stacked round of listener questions on AGI timelines, Micron buybacks, SaaS picks, IREN, and more.

In this episode:

🐝 Why Hamid sold 100% of his Bumble shares
🔬 The BRR micro-cap experiment and what it taught Hamid about position sizing
🚀 Rocket Lab Q2 earnings: 60%+ revenue growth, raised guidance, and Neutron delay concerns
💡 Debunking the "photonics" narrative that's been used to bash Micron
📊 Micron short interest by the numbers
🏭 Tesla & SpaceX's TerraFab: a 100M sq ft chip fab planned for Grimes County, TX
🤖 Grok 4.6, Cursor, and why SpaceX AI might be closing the gap on OpenAI
❓ Listener Q&A: AGI/ASI timelines, Micron's $400B buyback debate, best SaaS pick, Zeta Global, IREN vs. Nebius vs. CoreWeave, and whether it's a good time to buy Meta

Do you think photonics is a true threat for Micron and other memory companies? Let us know in the comments!

⚠️ Note: This content is for informational and entertainment purposes only and not financial advice. Always do your own research.

Don't forget to check out:

The Best (and Free) Earnings Calendar: https://earningshub.com/
Hamid's Savvy Trader Portfolio: https://savvytrader.com/Hamid/my-actual-portfolio
Dustin's Savvy Trader Portfolio: https://savvytrader.com/dustin/rvr

#micron #mu #meta #spacex #elonmusk #rocketlab  #bumble #ai #photoniccomputing #photonics  #tesla #grok #grokai #iren #savvytrader #techstocks #earnings #investing #investingpodcast #stockmarket 

⏱️ Chapters:

0:00 Hamid exits his Bumble position
2:00 Why Hamid turned sour on Bumble
15:35 Lessons from the BRR micro-cap experiment
17:35 Rocket Lab earnings breakdown
23:35 Photonics: the newest Micron bear narrative
28:45 Tesla & SpaceX's TerraFab mega-fab in Texas
33:00 GrokBot, Grok 4.6, Cursor & SpaceX AI's rise
41:05 Listener questions begin
44:30 Should Micron spend $400B on buybacks?
47:20 Best SaaS company to invest in right now
49:10 Mind Robotics & Rivian's robotics spinoff
51:45 Micron's patience level vs. the "Bumble treatment"
54:30 Zeta Global: worth a look?
57:35 IREN vs. Nebius vs. CoreWeave
1:01:10 Is now a good entry point for Meta?

SPEAKER_02

Dustin, I have good news and I have bad news.

SPEAKER_04

Okay, give it to me.

SPEAKER_02

Okay, so a few weeks ago, I said that uh um that you know I'm getting a lot more interest in the Bumble app, because you know, I'm a user of the Bumble app. Yeah. And um, and I thought that as anecdotal evidence of one person, that basically probably meant that Bumble is getting a lot of users. And the good news is that no, it's just me that is attracting more people because we now know after Bumble's earnings report that the user count has gone down. So, so yeah, it turns out you were correct. It's just because I am that much more attractive.

SPEAKER_04

You are so attractive, yeah. Yeah, I mean, it was very easy for for me and I think all of our listeners to spot. And I'm I'm glad you finally recognize that too.

SPEAKER_02

I had a blind spot in thinking that it's not me, it's Bumble uh that is uh uh you know growing its user base. And it turns out nope, it's it's me. Which which is which was confirmed during their earnings call. That's right, because they have fewer users and they project to have even fewer users next quarter. Uh so they're they continue on this decline. Uh, and I guess that's the bad news. So my patience has run out officially on Bumble. And uh as of today, I own zero shares, or later today, as of this afternoon, um, I own zero shares of Bumble. So wow. Yep. It's a big jump.

SPEAKER_04

Yeah. So I guess for listeners that maybe missed the last couple of episodes of the podcast. And if you did, like what are you doing? Um for them, can you do a little recap of what changed um and why you exited this position?

SPEAKER_02

Yeah, so uh I I was still buying as uh as as early or as close to now as a month ago. Uh I was still adding to the position. And um part of the sequence of events that that sort of triggered me to sort of become sour on it is uh is that, and by the way, I still think Bumble is undervalued, just FYI. So there's a very good chance and probability that now that I have sold, the stock will continue or will start to rip. Um so I I want to put that out there because you know, I think people think that uh you know stocks can't go up after, you know, like in a certain situation. Uh if if you're down on it, they shouldn't go up anymore. And I'm not of that camp. But um, but anyway, they there was a rumor that came out from Reuters that uh the company might be up for sale, that they may have hired a contract or consultant to go, you know, uh look for opportunities. Uh, and uh I contacted Bumble with respect to that particular rumor. Um, and I contacted both um uh execs as well as uh investor relations. And um there was no comment from you know, Whitney said I can't comment, and investor relations three weeks later said they can't comment, and by the way, don't don't uh contact our execs. So I had in previous times uh exchanged a couple of emails and conversations with uh with Whitney on you know various different topics, nothing that was not public information, basically. So I was a little bit surprised by that. Uh, but one of the things that that showed me is that um the interaction with investor relations is that there's sort of sort of like some level of obliviousness as to, okay, this person, in my opinion, was unimpressive, that they don't know that the only person that's publicly like talking and and uh uh talking about their bumble investment and advocating for that company is probably me. I don't know of anyone else out there doing it publicly. So uh it was surprising. I think you're the largest for sure, the largest uh following. Yeah. And and then uh and then the the um sequence of events, which sort of led to the um uh the quarterly report being very disappointing, but not only disappointing, also having the new product getting pushed back, the ambiguity of the new product, and is that like there's talk about it being just features inside of the bumble product, and then also um maybe it's a new AI-based product. We don't we don't like really know. And now it's officially very late because it was originally supposed to be coming out in June. We got uh word that it's gonna get pushed back. The back end was gonna go in in June, and the front end was potentially gonna uh be a little bit later. Uh, and then on the call, they said that they had data make migration issues that pushed it back another two months, and we don't know two months from when. So it was a lot of like you know, information that is starting to like compound in that I don't like the um the direction of things, if you will. Um, so I turned sour on it. Um, I sent another email asking Whitney to sort of like respond to my uh concerns, and um I got an email back from Investor Relations uh to set up a call with investor relations to Will. And I've talked to Will before from Investor Relations, and there's like zero answers that come from Will. So um so I was uninterested in that, and that basically was the final straw that uh that I was done with the company. So I decided it was time. I'm gonna move on. There's other things that I'm excited about, so I'm gonna focus my time and energy and efforts on uh on on the other things. And um, I've already used some of the proceeds to buy more Rivian, and I've used some of the proceeds to buy more Meta. So two stocks that uh have been on my radar and I've been advocating for as well. So that is the whole story there.

SPEAKER_04

So I want to talk more because I'm still very much in Bumble. I haven't sold any shares. Um, I want to talk more about the delay in what I believe is a product overhaul. I don't think it's adding features within their product, um, or at least that's how I would character characterize it. Uh, they claimed that they needed to delay this overhaul by months. They didn't specify, but they said months.

SPEAKER_02

Um I thought it was two months, a couple a couple of months, maybe maybe a couple of months.

SPEAKER_04

Yeah, so minimum of two. Right. Um, due to data migration issues. Right. We're we're both in technology. What were your thoughts um by this? Is this something that you've that is expected? Is this normal?

SPEAKER_02

Well, this would be something that would be expected to happen when leadership is not highly technical, right? Like so, uh, and this is why um for software companies, I personally prefer leadership that's technical. Um, and uh, you know, like when Steve Ballmer, just sort of like to draw a different comparison point, when Steve Ballmer was running Microsoft, I felt like Microsoft was, you know, like didn't have the right visibility at the at the top uh in terms of what might be going on at the technical level. Uh and I think this is the type of thing that might sideswipe someone who's not technical. Um, I think Whitney's probably a great leader, and uh uh but like data migration taking an extra couple of months at the very end of the uh of the timeline is just added uh ammunition in my in my view that like just added to my sort of view that okay, this is not what I was hoping for or expecting from uh from this company. So uh that was surprising. You know, we we have built products from scratch in a couple months that have been fairly impressive.

SPEAKER_04

I was thinking the same thing, and yeah, we continuously are able to do that. Um it's I it's interesting because you come at it and it makes sense from a uh leadership angle. When I first heard this, my thought was well, the the way they're executing at the team level seems to be subpar. And obviously we don't know because we're we're not there, but just speculating. It just feels like to me they maybe don't have the right talent, um, or they they have the right talent, but they could be dragged down by subpar talent. Um, because I've seen that happen at companies. Um the other thought is maybe maybe they're not utilizing AI as much as they should internally. Because that like it just is a little mind-boggling to me. Again, kind of seen I've gone through migrations before. Having a delay like this should not happen. Um, or expectations should be set very early on of how long these things should take.

SPEAKER_02

Right. So just to comment a little bit on the AI uh topic is because like I think that AI is best utilized by those who are the best at software development. Like, meaning if you you still need extremely talented people to know exactly what AI is doing right and wrong, because AI makes all kinds of mistakes that are actually very difficult or impossible to find for someone who doesn't know what they're doing, right? So you you you guys, uh you know, our team obviously has known that for some time as we started the entire process without any AI, and now we're utilizing AI pretty heavily. So there is this sort of concern that, okay, the the team, now that like I've had a couple of interactions with a few different people at at Bumble, has been disappointing, disappointing, disappointing. And it's like, okay, there's there's now multiple shots of disappointment that have just all sort of coincidentally happened in a relatively short period of time. Uh, and then the quarterly report was disappointing, and then the new product getting pushed back. Now we're at this sort of like roughly 18-month time frame since Whitney has been back so at as uh as the uh CEO. So she's had an opportunity to sort of turn the things around, and they projected their next quarter's revenue to be down 10 or 10, 10 or 12%. I don't, I don't remember the exact amount from last year. So it's just a continued decline, which by this point I would have expected to have already tapered off uh and should be on a hopefully slight incline. Um, so all of that was like, okay, why am I still in this thing? Right. And what but once once I turn sour on something, uh doing it to just staying in the position just becomes more aggravating, especially if I'm right. You know what I mean? Like it's and and other things that I could potentially be investing in could potentially go up. So I decided to just move on and put it behind me. Uh uh I'm done, basically.

SPEAKER_04

But one other piece I would want to highlight, and then we'll move on. Uh I I think a difference in how we're going about it, but but uh a good thought on your perspective or a good realization on your perspective is something you mentioned on X is there's a there's a chance that they are going to get acquired, as the the Reuters article uh insinuated or rumored. Um but that is not the reason why you invested in Bumble to begin with. It was not an acquisition acquisition target, it was because you believed uh in leadership, you believed in uh a new direction for Bumble, and that they could they could succeed on their own. Um so that wasn't a reason for you to stay in. Uh for me, I I feel a little differently where I feel like for Bumble, the risk, I mean the risk is always it can go to zero, but the risk to me seems like it's limited, where either they are going to succeed on their own or they're going to be acquired. Now, whether they're acquired for an amount higher than where they are today, who knows, depending on what happens in the future. But the risk seems limited. But with that said, I think what what I maybe need to reassess, because I also did not invest in Bumble, thinking of it as an acquisition target, is maybe I need to adjust my allocation if if I think the likelihood of them being acquired is higher than them succeeding on their own. Because I bought into them succeeding on their own. So I don't see myself completely walking away from Bumble, but maybe over time I'll adjust my allocation target.

SPEAKER_02

Yeah. So I mean, allocation target uh adjustment is a very reasonable thing to do. But I I thought about it, it was already because it was the stock is down something like 45% from my average buy-in, almost half. Uh as a result of it having gone down to half, it was already down to something like four and a half percent of my portfolio. So if I was gonna let's say cut it in half, it was only gonna be 2% of my portfolio. And then if it even triples from here, it's barely making an impact. So, like from my overall high-level strategy, like I I like to make larger bets on fewer companies. And uh, but by the way, just side note, I also exited BRR because I'm like, what why am I even in this with point two point 0.25% of my portfolio? So um, so you you know, once you reduce allocation, then it just becomes a new nuisance because it's there, you it takes up some mind space and you're thinking about it all the time. I'm like, okay, I I actually don't want to think about this anymore. I kind of like want to move on and uh and you know, do I think that the stock has potential? Absolutely. Do you know? If I was in match, I've said this before, but if I was in match.com's position, I would just come acquire them. I mean, like, I'd even if the management doesn't want to sell, I'd do a hostile bid of six bucks a share, like give it a hundred percent premium. It's it's still incredibly cheap at six bucks a share for a company that could take out its number one competitor, right? So um I do think that there is potential in the stock. And I wouldn't be surprised if like literally something gets announced uh tomorrow now that I have sold.

SPEAKER_04

That's definitely happening. The chances have never been higher.

SPEAKER_02

Yeah, but but you know, at the same time, I don't want to be waiting for just some like miracle announcement to happen, you know, and it's just yeah, that's just not my style of investing. So um, but we have a lot of other topics to talk about. So we and we we haven't even covered the agenda. So what don't you tell us the agenda?

SPEAKER_04

And then we'll move on to okay. I do want to circle back to BRR because I do think that's important too. But uh we we need to talk about Rocket Lab earnings. We're gonna talk about the latest bear case for micron, which is photonics, something I know nothing about. So you're gonna have to educate me there. Uh, we're gonna talk about Terrafab and Rockbot, which I'm very excited to talk about, but we'll save that for the end. Okay. Uh so going back to BrR, this was a microcap, I think the first microcap you've invested in, at least in a while. Um does this change your strategy going forward? Are you going to stay away from microcaps? Are they still in play? How are you thinking about it?

SPEAKER_02

I would have to be very excited. I don't have any hard and fast rules, as you know, about the way I invest. So um what what this sort of like taught me is that I could get stuck in uh a microcap, even like uh exiting Bumble, I had to do it slowly over time, just and it still caused the stock price to go down pretty substantially. The stock price, I think, is at all-time lows. I think, and that might be partly because of me. So um uh, you know, it like it's sort of crappy to be stuck in something that you can't even exit. You know, so if I was to put any significant amount of my uh portfolio into a microcap, it I I could be stuck in it, uh, essentially, uh, or crater the stock. So um so as a result, I would have to be very excited uh going forward. This was sort of like an experiment, VRR was an experiment for me to see uh what would happen. And um uh and I think that uh I'm gonna be a little bit more um uh, I don't know, like uh my bar for like wanting to invest in something that small is probably going to be much more difficult going forward. Right. Um the good news there is that I'll probably continue sharing my portfolio, at least for now. There's no imminent danger of me not sharing my portfolio, but I probably will update my portfolio description a little bit so that um it might not be a hundred percent of my holdings in certain scenarios, and I'll announce it if that's not going to be going to be the case. So very cool.

SPEAKER_04

Okay, let's move on. Rocket Lab reported their earnings uh on Monday. Um it seemed like the results were fairly positive, but the stock did move down. Uh what were your yeah it recovered actually? Yeah. What what were your takes from earnings?

SPEAKER_02

Yeah, so um they basically meet met expectations uh on revenue and uh EPS, no surprises there. But what what's uh what's good to sort of like um put things in perspective is that meeting expectations meant that they were up over 60% year over year uh on revenue, which is pretty incredible growth. Like when a company is growing 60% year over year, uh it's just mind-blowing. Um before Neutron. And this is before Neutron, where like a lot a lot of us investors who have been in uh Rocket Lab for a few years now, we didn't think this level of revenue was possible before Neutron comes online. But um uh so that that was super exciting. Uh, and then the most um other exciting part of the um uh earnings report was their guide for next quarter was uh, if I'm not mistaken, 250 to 265 million uh for next quarter. And that basic estimate was roughly 235 million. That's right. That's right. So uh that's a substantial increase from the analysts' expectations, and also um it's an another 60 percent, it's actually a 61 to 70 percent year-over-year growth from last year. Uh, and again, that's still without Neutron. Um, their backlog has grown again substantially. They now have almost a $2.4 billion backlog. So that is very exciting. The one little bit of like potentially negative news uh was the way in which uh Peter uh Peter Beck talked about Neutron's uh progress, was very cautious about hitting their first launch by the end of the year. And the way in which he framed it is that um, yes, getting, you know, like we still are pushing to get uh to the first launch by the end of the year. But what is far more important is the reusability aspect of it. And we're trying to sort of do trade-offs as to how much testing do we need to do to make sure that the rocket is gonna rapidly reach reusability, because what's much more important is the 10th launch of Neutron, not the first launch, right? So it's like how quickly can we get to 10 launches as opposed to how quickly can we get the first launch off, but then like all of a sudden have to pause because all kinds of things went wrong. So that's the way in which he talked about it, but the market sort of took that to mean, okay, neutron's getting delayed again. Uh, and uh, you know, it it has been delayed quite a bit. So um so that was the sort of like only negative takeaway. And um and you know, the the the again, the stock is trading at pretty high premiums in terms of uh sales multiples. So it is justifiable for it to be pretty volatile based on a ward being sort of moved around here and there. And um uh my perspective on it is that Rocket Lab just continues to be an extremely strong company, executing exceptionally well. Uh and I'm very, very excited for it long term. Um, what is it currently worth? It's hard to say. But you know, what's it going to be worth five years, 10 years from now? Probably significantly more than it is today. So that's that's my view on it.

SPEAKER_04

So another uh takeaway, I don't think it's a huge impact to the business, but something that I love to see was their Ghost program, which is they added uh a new ability where they can launch Electron or their haste rockets from anywhere. They ship the rockets, the launch pad, uh, the ground support in shipping containers to wherever the customer uh wants. And this came from a customer request. And what I like about this in particular is you can only do this because the rockets are smaller. So it right, like you can't do this with Neutron, or it'd be a lot harder to do it with Neutron. Um, so it's finding advantages with the smaller rockets and creating new revenue streams from it, which I think is just absolutely genius. Because this is something that a SpaceX, at least currently, Can't do with their setup. So it just is it's a new differentiator for them.

SPEAKER_02

I mean, I was thinking about that and I was like, okay, for how long will they continue the Electron program after Neutron comes online? So because you're talking about $50, $60 million launches versus sub-10 million dollar launches with Electron. So uh there's a five or six uh X um uh higher price tag on a per launch basis. And a lot of that is going to depend on how much demand is there. If there's insatiable demand for Neutron, then you may as well redirect all your electron resources onto Neutron and just focus on that. And despite this being a very cool capability, they might abandon it in the future. I will I don't see them doing this five years from now. You know, um, it's a nice stopgap until Neutron gets gets going at uh at scale, but um uh but yeah, it's not something that would even interest SpaceX because it was like who who cares about a $10 million launch, you know.

SPEAKER_04

Maybe I I do think it potentially gets their foot in the door for certain customers that are looking for capabilities like this. Like the haste rocket is suborbital, um, so it's not even like it's it's going necessarily to space, but yeah, that's true. Like the military applications for it could yeah, right, could lead to other contracts, yeah. Yeah, and and there's a world where maybe they retire electron but keep uh haste. Um, let's move on to uh the photonics narrative. Um and I have your beautiful tweet up here. Yes. So so okay, so yeah. So what what is this? What happened?

SPEAKER_02

Every week we have a new reason why Micron is gonna uh or the memory trade is over and micron is gonna crash and memory prices are gonna collapse, right? And uh this uh the over the weekend, this photonics thing had really taken shape, uh, the narrative around it that photonics basically uh mean you know, like uh these GPUs won't need memory. And to sort of like um put into perspective what is this photonics thing, photonics basically allows for the GPUs to share a pooled memory resource, um, in this case, you know, like from micron or whatever, or high bandwidth memory for GPUs in data centers, where multiple GPUs could basically take turns on who gets to access the memory, uh especially static memory, for some portion of their memory needs rather than every GPU having its own sort of like memory chips. And you know, this might reduce the uh or basically get get you some better utilization of memory chips by maybe 40 or 50 percent. Now, the reason that this has even become a thing is because how tight memory supply is. And like these geniuses literally have to invent new ways of how do we like solve this problem. And you know, you know, when you need something 10 times more, or like when you need uh a hundred times more of a particular resource, you have to come up with creative ways on how you how do you sort of make it more efficient. And those creative ways have historically included algorithmic improvements, which we all heard about the Google quant algorithm, which made memory usage six times more effective in certain scenarios. Um, and then this is another one that might make memory usage as much as two times more effective, again, in certain scenarios, and it has nothing to do with NAND storage, and uh it has nothing to do with uh uh you know DRAM that you might use on your laptops and phones and storage on your phone. So, like it doesn't even help any of those other use cases at all. And we know that memory usage is continuing to grow at an astronomical pace that the supply cannot keep up with, and uh, so this is another one of those narratives that uh that just I don't understand why they take shape and take hold so quickly, and uh and the bears jump on board, and this becomes the reason wh why memory stocks struggle for some period of time. And you know, uh since photonics became a thing late last week, suddenly, you know, memory memory stocks started struggling, and um uh and and basically it's good to sort of put that in perspective. So yeah, I continue to be um excited about micron and what it's doing and its supply shortages, just uh pulling up the short interest for micron.

SPEAKER_04

Uh it's not that much, it's uh roughly three percent of the float. Um so do you think there's a short incentive that that is pushing uh a lot of these narratives, or do you think it's something else?

SPEAKER_02

I mean, like it's hard to speculate. The market is so large, it's kind of hard to comprehend how big the market is. And therefore, like I give up on on uh trying to predict as to why these narratives take shape. You know, there's like people who just cannot believe that you know we need that much memory. Uh, there's people who think AI is in a bubble, and everybody is sort of like talking their their viewpoint, right? And um uh sometimes they're betting with their money on their viewpoint, and sometimes they're they just are speculating and and not even necessarily putting money on the line. So it's kind of hard to know how these things take shape. Um, but when when we talk about three and a half percent short interest, by the way, that is roughly $35 billion on a company the size of Micron. So there is $35 billion worth of interest against Microns price going up, right? So that is a good way to sort of put things in perspective. 3.5% doesn't seem like a lot, but it's still a pretty large number, uh, you know, over $30 billion worth. So uh definitely something to keep in mind. And and by the way, those short numbers are at least two weeks behind. So we might even have higher short numbers uh in the latest, uh in the latest numbers that will come out in a few days. Let's move on to by the way, your mic comes uh on after a second when you start talking. I'm not sure what's going on again. But but if you keep talking, it'll it will stay on.

SPEAKER_04

Well, I could talk like this, and you could tell me if it's better or worse. I changed the setting. Um okay, so let's talk about uh SpaceX. Adrian just messaged me, it's worse. Uh let's talk about SpaceX and Tesla's. I'll switch it back. SpaceX and Tesla's Terrafab plans. Um, so we've known that Terrafab was coming for a while. I think what was announced this week, and why everyone's talking about Terrafab again, is they landed the location, which is gonna be Grimes County, uh, Texas, and they announced that the first phase is going to require a $16.8 billion investment from Tesla and from SpaceX. I'm gonna change my setting now. Yeah, you can you can go with the rest.

SPEAKER_02

Yeah, so Terrafab is an absolutely uh mind-blowing size manufacturer uh uh uh semiconductor fabrication facility that is uh just incredible in terms of size. The amount of investment in terms of dollars falls very, very short of similar investments being made by companies like Micron or TSMC and others, who uh, for example, TSMC has put a $100 billion fab in Arizona and um uh and they continue to invest in the $100 billion plus range in Arizona. But this uh this Terrafab uh facility is a hundred million square feet, and when you compare it to the largest buildings in the world, like uh Giga Texas, which is Tesla's other facility, or uh you know, the Pentagon, it it just dwarfs those those facilities. Now, um, so the question becomes can Elon build something this large for an estimated you know, SpaceX's estimate is that this terrafab is going to take about about 110 billion to sort of uh get to full production. Um and only what 16 billion you just said that like in this first phase that they're building or uh is what they're investing. Is it was it 16 billion? Yeah, 16.8. Okay. So you you know the the numbers are kind of minuscule relative to the size of the building. So I'm not sure what is going on here. Um, there is some disconnect, but um, but Elon definitely has a way to excite his fan base and his shareholders, and you know, I think some of that is definitely starting to take shape. It is an exciting uh manufacturing facility that's coming online, but um, it's not gonna be for years. They're hoping to get to production by 2029, 2030 time frame. So, and again, those are Elon dates, so you got to kick, you know, take that with a grain of salt. Um, but uh, but in comparison, like Micron in the same timeframe is uh planning on investing $250 billion in new fabs. So, you know, is that gonna dwarf the 100 million square feet terafab? Uh it's it's hard to say.

SPEAKER_04

The thing that I like most about this is I think these lofty goals kind of reignite uh the excitement of manufacturing in America. Uh, because we we've clearly lost that over time. And we we need things like this where you know we're gonna have the largest building uh in the world uh back in in America building uh you know semiconductors. Like that's pretty cool, assuming we could achieve it. Uh and hopefully it becomes a north star for other companies uh in America as well.

SPEAKER_02

Yeah. I mean, it definitely he Elon is definitely an inspiring person, the way in which he sets these goals, and you know, they're so out there that uh the goals themselves are quite inspiring. So I I love that aspect of it. But does that change my view and mind about SpaceX in particular as an investment or Tesla as an investment? Not really.

SPEAKER_04

Right. Yeah, I agree. Okay, uh, last topic, and then we'll get to listener questions. Grock bot was announced yesterday. Um and so I've been playing with it since yesterday. It's it's pretty good. Um, I'm I'm very impressed with it.

SPEAKER_02

So tell me more. And I haven't played around with it yet, so I want to know how it compares to Claude Cowork specifically. Okay.

SPEAKER_04

So let me start with. I believe the origins of Grokbot came from the cursor team, which uh SpaceX AI acquired. Um, so now it's brand as Grokbot. Um, to me, this almost feels like the next generation of an open claw, which is also very similar to uh uh clawed co-work. Uh so basically you have well, it looks like um the iMessage app, right? Where you have all your text messages on the side and then your main message on the right hand side. Uh, except you just add bots. Each bot has uh a different purpose. It could be as general or as specific as you want. You can give it different avatars, different names. Um, and each bot has access to its own virtual computer in the cloud. That computer has three applications on it: Chrome, uh file explorer, and a terminal, which is basically all you need these days. Wow. Um so what's really cool is let's say I want to have an outreach bot to try to get people to sign up for uh Savvy Trader, try to get some new uh portfolio owners on Savvy Trader. Right now there's no integration, which is funny, there's no integration with uh Twitter directly. So I can't use like a Twitter API. But what I can do is I could have it log into my Twitter on its computer. And instead of me telling it my password, I could actually take control of its computer and enter in my password. Now, whether it's actually watching me do that or not, who knows? Um but in theory it's pretty cool. And this is uh the real bottleneck is just like, do I trust it or not? How much access should I give it? Um, because I in theory I could log it into all my services, it could have access to literally anything and everything and use all of that data. Um but it's it's hard for me to do that right now.

SPEAKER_02

Um that that's super interesting because the uh like um uh cloud co-work does stuff on your local machine or can do things on your local machine. And it sounds like Grockbot is taking that and putting it in the cloud, and you don't need to uh worry about your local machine being available to for for it to use. So it's using its own browser um in the cloud somewhere. Uh that is super interesting, actually. That makes it um that makes it more compelling. Um I think because you still have to decide, even if you were going to use cloud co-work, you still have to decide to give it access and permission to all kinds of stuff, right? Um, yeah, I I think it's more compelling overall.

SPEAKER_04

What it can't do, what what cloud cowork can do and and this can't do is control your computer, meaning if you wanted to reorganize your files locally, it can't do that. But if you wanted it to reorganize your Google Drive files or your box files or Dropbox, like anything in the cloud, that it could do. It's almost like what they're missing and what they can't do, but what Google set up to do really well, if they wanted to make a competing product, is I want my bots to have their own Google workspace, like in our company. And I can do that manually, where I can give you know the outreach bot an outreach at savvy trader.com email. Um, but it's it's a little that that handoff piece is a little difficult because right now I'm just giving it my login um if I wanted it to, you know, kind of do anything meaningful. So it's still uh evolving, but by far this has been the the best uh UX I've seen from these automated uh agents. And by the way, you could also set up routines as well. So you could just set up, you know, uh try doing an outreach every hour. Give me a message. Uh don't even message me on what you did. Only message me when someone else is someone else reaches out like or responds. Interesting. So you could you could it's real it's really cool. Um, I need to watch more YouTube videos on how to I could like maximize this. But again, my only it's it's hard because I don't know what I should give it access to and what I shouldn't give it access to.

SPEAKER_02

Do you think that this is part of the excitement as to why SpaceX happened to rip today? Or is it like because I know it grok bot was just released, right?

SPEAKER_04

So yes, but what they announced today was uh what they're calling cursor grok 4.6. So before there was grok 4.5, now there's cursor grok 4.6, which is pretty much better in every way compared to 4.5. And 4.5 was pretty good. 4.5 was their first grok model, I believe, where they actually utilized cursor data. Um, 4.6 is even better at the same cost. So it seems like, and this was our speculation when SpaceX was acquiring cursor, the leadership at SpaceX just knows how this well, the leadership and the fact that they have Colossus, um they're able to identify and utilize the cursor data extremely uh effectively.

SPEAKER_02

Right, right.

SPEAKER_04

So I I that that could be the reason um why it's up today.

SPEAKER_02

So it it sounds like uh SpaceX AI may be catching up quickly to um open AI and enthropic.

SPEAKER_04

It's similar to how I think Iridium, and we didn't talk about that at all with Rocket Lab, but how Iridium is going to uh be a huge step up for Rocket Lab in the networking space. Right. Cursor is cursor is that for uh SpaceX AI in the AI space.

SPEAKER_02

Very cool. So uh that could be a good re-rating of SpaceX, depending on how much rev how quickly their revenue grows from uh not data center releases, but because I feel like that's high risk revenue, but actual revenue from AI offerings, like if GrockBot ends up becoming a uh product that people are willing to pay for at 100 bucks a month or whatever it ends up costing, uh API costs or API revenues going up rapidly, those could be uh could make SpaceX more much more interesting. But I don't know if we know what the revenue numbers are for that level of detail.

SPEAKER_04

Yeah, I'm not sure. Um, I'm also thinking through this a bit more, and I I know I said like Google has a good opportunity with Google Workspace. Like in theory, X can do this, it would just take a while where like you can have new accounts on X and then have a login with X option on a variety of different websites. Um, you just need a way to easily create accounts and tie that to some sort of email. So if X could handle the email side of things uh itself, like that that's that's right now to me the missing piece. Interesting. Yeah. So very exciting. I'm I'm very uh optimistic on Space AX or SpaceX AI's execution um from what I've been seeing since Groc 4.5 has been released. Right. Uh okay. Let's uh let's get into listener questions. All right, let's do it.

SPEAKER_00

And we've got a lot today. Okay. Um what is your hi? What is your timeline for AGI ASI and when or how will it be priced in?

SPEAKER_02

Um it's kind of funny, like so AGI just standing for artificial general intelligence. If uh and um I think it was Paul Graham who had a post on X a few days ago uh saying if you asked anybody from like 1980, you know, would what we have today be considered AGI, the answer would be yes. And my response was that if you asked anybody in 2020 if what we have today is AGI, the answer is yes. Um, so uh I think that uh all of these AI models have general intelligence. So there, like there's almost no question. I don't see how you could argue uh against that. Um the question is, can their intelligence self-improve? And that's where the sort of super uh AGI comes into play, like um superintelligence, where it just continues to improve and build new knowledge rather than just 100% relying on human knowledge that has been generated historically. Uh and that is a little bit more difficult to speculate on, uh the superintelligence aspect and whether it'll be self-improved improving in an exponential way. Um I think AGI is certainly like priced in. Like it would be hard to argue that we don't have AGI already. And um and I don't know what superintelligence would do. I mean, if people like Elon are right, uh money won't matter in the future because of uh superintelligence, right? Uh and uh uh and will just be taken care of by our um AI, superintelligent AI and super intelligent bots. So uh that's that's kind of how I look at it. But I think it's harder to speculate on uh in when that might happen or what that might mean to the economy or uh pricing of things.

SPEAKER_04

Yeah, I think probability-wise, it's farther away than we think.

SPEAKER_02

It's just yeah, it feels more but it also depends on what what what I mean. I'm not sure there's a consensus. Like everyone seems to think it's gonna happen sometime soon, the superintelligence aspect.

SPEAKER_04

But yeah, I think the reason why I say that the reason why I say that is it's it's always it feels like in software, the general rule of thumb is that last mile is just the hardest. Um, and that's what this kind of feels like is we we have have made so much progress in AI, but to get to true super intelligence to for it to have that cyclical improvement, yeah. That that seems like the last mile piece where we'll get to it, but it's probably far it's really.

SPEAKER_02

Probably it's also not definitive that it's even possible.

SPEAKER_04

Um it's possible that that's true too. I mean it's right, it's the right it's theoretically possible. But that's I think that's good enough. I I I where I stand is it's possible and it's gonna happen uh later, later than than most might anticipate. Oh all right, let's let's go to the next one.

SPEAKER_00

Let's go to the next one. Um okay, this one is from one person, but they're saying a couple things. Mead versus dusted, why waste 40 billion 400 billion dollars of free cash on Micron buybacks when a 5PE already isn't working? Then they say buy spy slash QQQ for a liquid rainy day floor. Then this person also goes on to Micron should retain $400 billion free cash flow on the balance sheet as floor for Micron share price and market cap. Invest most of it in SP 500 as a compounding floor on stock price. What do you think?

SPEAKER_02

Well, I mean, first of all, they haven't made $400 billion in free cash flow yet. Uh, this is speculation as to how much they'll make in the next couple of years, uh, maybe, maybe three years roughly. And the number might even be more than 400 billion of free cash flow. But let's just say 400 billion. Um, since it hasn't happened yet, we don't know whether or not a buyback of the shares would actually significantly improve the stock price or not. So um it sounds like this person's speculation uh is that it it won't help because it hasn't helped, but you know, it's trading at a PE of five before any share buybacks are happening. So um and to be more accurate, is trading at a forward PE of five or six before any share buybacks have started happening. So share buybacks might actually start increasing its stock price and therefore its uh its price earnings ratio. So um I think that is a legitimate use of uh free cash flow. Uh that's one thing. Another uh is that we also don't know what other investments these companies are going to be making in future technologies that uh might improve their manufacturing capacities, they might improve new techniques for uh you know building memory and storage, maybe even integrating processors into them. I mean, who knows what kind of things that they might invest their uh extra cash on. Um but investing it in themselves and their own technologies and their own stock generally is the better investment unless they're making a strategic investment in something else, as opposed to just buying random companies. Even I don't buy the SP 500, so I would never want one of my companies to be buying the SP 500. So um I would that would not be my advice for any any CEO.

SPEAKER_03

Have you heard of a company using their cash flow to buy the SP?

SPEAKER_04

No, I don't think so. I don't think I have either. Um yeah, and I I agree with you. I'd rather Micron invest in themselves, whether that be buyer buybacks, uh RD, uh, or acquisitions. Right.

SPEAKER_00

Okay, moving on. Question to both. If you would invest in SaaS, what company would you choose out there and why?

SPEAKER_02

Can we consider Meta a SaaS company? Um Meta is basically a software company uh as a service. They have three software products Facebook, uh, Instagram, and WhatsApp that's making making money, incredible money, and it's growing at 28%. Uh, and similar to SpaceX, they now are putting out model after model that seems to be competing on par or just sub uh subpar of uh barely uh below uh the latest models from um anthropic and open AI at a fraction of the cost. So um they're a serious player in the AI field as well, and they're not getting uh their their valuation. Uh I like Meta better than any other software company. What about you, Dustin?

SPEAKER_04

Yeah, Meta would also uh be my answer. Like if I'm looking at my portfolio, they are my largest SaaS play. Um but I will say, and I've said this before, when I'm thinking about SaaS going forward, what I'm looking for is a defendable moat against someone with a superior AI being able to replicate it. Um, right. So like meta's scale, you can't replicate with AI. But an example would be um, I don't know, a Slack. Uh you could easily replicate and make a better Slack or an or Slack just internally for uh your team if you wanted to. So those are the types of things I'm I'm looking at.

SPEAKER_00

All right, moving on. Hamid andor Dustin, did you see the LinkedIn article about mind robotics deploying industrial robots at Rivian by the end of 2026? Do you think the market is accounting for mind robotics potential?

SPEAKER_02

So mind robotics is a spinoff from Rivian, where Rivian is still owns a significant chunk. I don't know what the exact percentage of mind robotics that they own. It's somewhere between, I want to say, somewhere around 50% of mind robotics, but it is an independent company. Uh and it raised money independent of Ribbian uh at a roughly $2 billion valuation just recently, uh I want to say a few months ago. And these numbers are not exact, so you know, just uh uh this is just from memory. Um and you know, like so if you think about you know, a billion dollars of that belongs to Rubian, uh and that's a startup. So startups often fail. So you you know, taking all of that into consideration, is it already built into Rivian's stock price? Yeah, maybe. But it's you know, like overall, I think Rubian is very much undervalued, and mind robotics is just uh a bonus or gravy on top of the undervalued nature of uh Ribbian. I wouldn't be buying Rivian because of Mind Robotics.

SPEAKER_04

Um I didn't see the LinkedIn article, but yeah, I think the the key with Rivian is R2 needs to be a clear success. Um and mind robotics can help optimize uh expenses for that, but that's not a reason why I would invest in Rivian. It's that I believe in uh the vision of R2. Right.

SPEAKER_00

Okay, I'm gonna pull up the next one. Hamid, what are your thoughts about NVIDIA GPUs becoming an asset class?

SPEAKER_02

I saw the headlines for that. I know um Jensen uh was uh and the headlines were quite confusing. $500 billion fund to make something asset like the whole AI play and asset class. I actually don't know enough about it to comment. So Dustin, do you happen to know what that is? No. I I did not the details, unfortunately, but um uh I suspect I think Jensen is a pretty smart guy, uh, and uh I have a lot of respect for him. So I suspect uh it probably makes sense, but I haven't looked into it. So I won't comment on it.

SPEAKER_00

All right, let's go to the next one. Hamid, what's your patient love patient's level on Micron? I mean, what would it take for it to get the bumble treatment?

SPEAKER_02

This is a great question. Well, first of all, uh I've been in in some stocks for multiple years and uh before they move at all. So, like Rivian is a perfect example. I'm I'm in it for more than two years and I'm more excited about it now than I was two years ago. Um, with Micron, I've been in it for eight months and it has nearly tripled. Uh so uh I mean, I don't know if I need to have patience. This is one of the best investments I've made. So uh my view on it is that like, what more could I be asking for? I could not possibly ask for a triple in less than a year. Uh that that's just incredible. And and I think if it doubled from here, it still would be undervalued. So uh I'm gonna keep holding on to it for for some period of time. But so the business just keeps getting better, by the way. That's that's an important factor.

SPEAKER_04

Yeah, I was gonna take this a little differently, where a key difference between Micron and Bumble is Bumble's business is getting worse each quarter. Obviously, I'm still invested because I think they're going to turn it around with financially, it has gotten worse.

SPEAKER_02

So that part is definitely not uh arguable, but right. But you know, underlying it might be getting better, but financially it's gotten worse.

SPEAKER_04

So keep going with your argument. Uh where Micron is getting stronger and stronger every quarter. Exactly. Uh so that's that's a big difference. And then while you don't say it in your question, the what you're implying is patience level due to stock price. And obviously it's been stagnant for the last couple of weeks, months, whatever it's been. Um I think the patience running out for Bumble, Ameed, correct me if I'm wrong, had nothing to do with the stock price. It had to do with the them executing and the delays in the their product. Uh micron, there's there's no patience needed, ignoring stock price because they've been executing uh phenomenally.

SPEAKER_02

I love the way you've put that is perfect. Okay, cool. Yeah, then we can move on. I mean, it it's probably worth reiterating because just it if the stock price is going the opposite direction of the company's actual performance, things are getting better, and you should like that company more as opposed to less. So yeah, that that is exactly right.

SPEAKER_00

Okay, we've got a question about Zeta Company, Zeta Global question to both, as my question. So he asked it once and then no. What are your thoughts on Zeta Global Company on investment and standpoint gaining traction lately? Your thoughts?

SPEAKER_02

Dustin, you want to pull up Zeta? I I know we have looked this up on on the pod before, but I don't remember what uh what they do. So this is their description.

SPEAKER_04

Uh omnichannel data driven cloud. I'll stop talking so we're not talking over each other. Go for it.

SPEAKER_02

Uh I'll let you I'll let you talk.

SPEAKER_04

Omnichannel data-driven cloud platform that provides enterprises with consumer intelligence and marketing automation software. I'll just stop there. Um, so I I think the the if I had to sum it up, it's that last bit marketing automation software, and they have AI. Uh and let's see how their stock is doing. Yeah, so it's definitely up in the last month. It's up twenty over 25%. Yeah. Um, and their EHS score, uh P ratio of 137, forward P of 50, PS ratio of four and a half, revenue is up to 36%. Uh, and EPS is up or down, sorry, uh 73%.

SPEAKER_02

For for me, just to sort of like respond to to this person's question, is like why why would I be excited about this company when um when there are so many companies with uh with far superior um like revenue growth, earnings uh profit uh uh price per uh price uh earnings ratios, PE ratios. Uh and one of those companies that I own, you know, Meta has far superior uh everything, basically. You know, it's growing just a tiny bit slower, but it has better uh PE ratio of like 20 as opposed to 137. Um, you know, what what would be exciting about this company over Meta? Um, so it just doesn't excite me. And also like the their market space doesn't excite me, you know, marketing automation tools. Yeah. Like it's a hard pass for me. What are your thoughts on something on that?

SPEAKER_04

I don't know, obviously, I don't know much about their actual business, so I don't know if there's some new big product they're announcing down the uh the road. But I agree the the PE of 137 is steep relative to their revenue growth. Um, right, and is not something that excites me. Like I'm I'm okay, I'm not necessarily turned off by a high PE, but you need to have crazy growth to uh support it. And the growth is good, it's just not good enough for me. Right, right.

SPEAKER_00

Okay, I think this one's for more for Dustin. Could you both please tell the case for iron investment, it's advantage, future, short-term, long-term investment, and iron compared to Nebus and Corweev.

SPEAKER_04

Okay, that's a lot. Um, well, I would start with if you're interested in my perspective on Iron, uh, you can subscribe to my Savvy Trader portfolio. Link is in the description below, totally free. You could also subscribe to Hamid's Savage Rader Portfolio. Um, and I don't talk about iron though. He doesn't talk about iron, but I do. Uh, and I've I've had two or three long posts about it after um their earnings reports. So you can get all my thoughts there that I'm definitely gonna miss in this answer. Um, so what I like about Iron is they're in the data center space. I am of the belief that we need more uh compute uh and that we are not hitting or we're we're not peaking out anytime soon. Um I also like that so originally and they're currently transitioning from the Bitcoin mining business. Uh what I like about that is one, they already have substantial revenues from that business. And two, it shows that they're able to uh build these data centers at scale. Um, I believe currently they're targeting 480 megawatts uh by the end of this year, and next year they're targeting 1.21 gigawatts. Um so not gigawatts, gigawatts. The 1.21 is kind of funny just because 1.21 is so funny, but it makes it easy to remember.

SPEAKER_02

Um so it's a back to the future reference for those who don't know. Yeah, it's great.

SPEAKER_04

Except they they never referenced it, but whatever.

SPEAKER_02

Um, but it's it's 100% for people to it's like it's a yeah uh Easter egg.

SPEAKER_04

Totally. Um, so I I like I like their history, I like where they're going. Um in regards to Nebbius and Core Weave, uh Nebbius, they I know have more hyperscalers behind them right now. Um, and that they seem to be the front runner, at least on X, in regards to what uh if if you're investing in a data center, it seems like X really likes Nebbius. Um Core Weave, I think, had their earnings earlier today, uh, and I think knocked it out of the park with revenue. And so all the uh data center stocks kind of shot up today. Um from my understanding though, Core Weav doesn't own their own infrastructure, uh, whereas like Iron actually owns the property and the like GPUs and the power. Um also iron is uh I think fully or mostly uh using green uh energy. So I think that one, it's just great in general, and two, it's helpful when there's a lot of pushback on building new data centers because that's one less thing to worry about. They're not necessarily pulling from the grid. So hopefully that all made sense. Again, I definitely go into more details on my savvy trader uh portfolio, but hope that helps. Yeah, very cool.

SPEAKER_00

Okay, Hamid, I'm just gonna give you one more thing to talk about with your favorite comp one of your favorite companies.

SPEAKER_02

Okay.

SPEAKER_00

Is it a good price to start a position with Meta?

SPEAKER_02

Okay. I as uh anyone who's watched this show is like, I have no idea what the prices are gonna do. Um, you know, tomorrow or the next day or the next week or even the next month. I I try not to speculate on on the short term. Um, there are there are people who are like, this is the floor or this is the ceiling or whatever. And and whenever somebody speaks confidently like that about a stock price, uh like I immediately lose respect for them because there are so many unknowns that it's just not possible to predict. And uh what I can tell you is that I personally bought meta today. That's all I can tell you, right? I added more meta to my position today. And I have added meta at $700. If I knew it was gonna go to the $500s, I wouldn't have bought it at $700, obviously. I would have just waited until it goes to $500. But I added at $700, I think I've added as high as 740 maybe. Um, because largely speaking, I consider Meta very much undervalued under $1,000 based on its current performance. And that's literally how I view it. So uh similarly, you know, I consider Micron very much undervalued under, I don't know, $1,500, uh, maybe, maybe even $1,800. Um now in Micron's case, if it hit $1,500 or $1,800, I might trim it a little bit just because I have a lot of it and it would be high risk on my overall portfolio. And I again, I don't know what the future, I cannot see the future, therefore, like I I uh want to make sure that I'm uh appropriately uh uh you know accounting for some level of risk, but um but yeah, meta feels to me like it's very much undervalued right now.

SPEAKER_04

Yeah, just to add to that, um and clearly non-investment advice, but it does seem like meta is also undervalued relative to the rest of the Mag 7. Um you know, I think it's always helpful to see how other similar stocks are doing to get a sense of how over or undervalued a particular stock is. The other why are you laughing? No, I was just saying, yeah, that's uh I agree.

SPEAKER_03

Yeah, you laughing like this idiot.

SPEAKER_04

Um the uh the other piece, and this goes back to what we were saying earlier in the episode with uh Brock kind of more recently killing it. Um Meta is starting to focus on their coding agent, with I think they're calling it Muse Spark. We haven't really talked about it much on the pod. Um but Meta is no no one is looking at Meta as an AI investment right now, and they've been putting a lot of time and effort around uh that. So I I can see Meta um performing pretty well in in the AI space in the future. Um agreed. Okay. That is it for episode 52, I think, of I Hold Ramp podcast. Thank you all for listening and the very active discussion. I saw a lot of interesting emojis uh in the live chat. So thank you. Thank you for keeping it uh lively and colorful in the chat. We appreciate it.

SPEAKER_02

Yeah. Thank you, everyone. Appreciate it.

SPEAKER_04

Bye.