Chit Chat Stocks - SpaceX Earnings and Musk's $1 Trillion Update; Mega Earnings Round-Up $RELY $MELI $CPNG $PLTR + More

Episode Date: August 7, 2026

The Investing Power Hour is live-streamed every Thursday on the Chit Chat Stocks Podcast YouTube channel at 5:00 PM EST. This week we discussed: (00:00) Introduction (02:03) SpaceX's revenue projections and funding challenges (15:08) Uber's recent earnings and growth metrics (25:49) Trade Desk's earnings and market position (28:57) Coupon's earnings, challenges, and future prospects (33:45) Remitly's strong quarter and market position (36:53) Google's AI talent loss and its impact (50:04) Mercado Libre's growth, margins, and Latin American opportunity (01:00:11) Michael Saylor's Bitcoin song ***************************************************** Subscribe to Emerging Moats Research: emergingmoats.com  ********************************************************************* Chit Chat Stocks is presented by Interactive Brokers. Get professional pricing, global access, and premier technology with the best brokerage for investors today:  https://www.interactivebrokers.com/  Interactive Brokers is a member of SIPC.  ********************************************************************* Fiscal.ai is building the future of financial data. With custom charts, AI-generated research reports, and endless analytical tools, you can get up to speed on any stock around the globe. All for a reasonable price.  Use our LINK and get 15% off any premium plan: ⁠https://fiscal.ai/chitchat  ********************************************************************* Disclosure: Chit Chat Stocks hosts and guests are not financial advisors, and nothing they say on this show is formal advice or a recommendation. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Trade, election, climate, and economic outcomes with IBKR Prediction Markets right alongside your stocks and options. Earn interest on your position and receive $1 per contract if you're right. Learn more at ibkr.com slash predictions. Welcome to Chit Chat Stocks, the podcast that helps you find your next great investment. I'm one of your hosts, Ryan Henderson, and I am joined today, as always, by the one and only Brett Schaefer. This is our weekly investing power hour.

We talk all things financial markets on these episodes. This could be anything from financial news to earnings to portfolio updates to taking questions from the audience. It ranges every single week and we are in the heart of earnings season still. So we've got plenty of companies to discuss this week. Packed calendar, SpaceX reported, and we are going to play a game of real or fake with Elon Musk quotes from the conference call. So Brett's queued a few up for me.

I have not read the conference call, so I'll be the contestant in that game. But we do these episodes live every Thursday at 5 p.m. Eastern time on YouTube. So if you ever want to ask us any questions, head on over to YouTube, Chit Chat Stocks at 5 p.m. Eastern time on Thursdays and get your questions in there. Brett, where do we want to start? Yeah, Ryan, I think we should start with SpaceX. Biggest report of the week. we've had plenty. I think I usually try to count every quarter the biggest day for earnings based on

the earnings calendar. You can see I think today is the official peak from company perspective, maybe not market cap because last week we had the mega cap tech. But from a company perspective, today and yesterday were the peak earnings season. I hope everyone did all right. We had the Nelnet report. I know everyone was anticipating a couple minutes ago i hope it went well actually i haven't read it yet but yeah let's talk spacex you know that is my i think fourth largest holding and i honestly did not know they reported today so that tells you what you need to know about nelnet yeah i think

my investing too but i think they reported so the calendar said sometimes they're a bit mysterious all right you didn't look at the call elon was i don't want to sound cringy saying this but he was in his bag talking about a lot of things uh various he was in form yeah he had everyone you know on the tip what do they say uh in the palm of his hand right yeah i think that's fair every analyst, you know, was asking us, I'm going to go with the first one here. And I have four quotes. Some are real, some are fake. I'm going to read them off to you. And partially the ones that are real and inspires to talk about the actual projections from the report. We'll get to the meat, the nitty gritty. We have plenty of other earnings to talk about,

but I want to kick off with something fun. Here's the first one, Ryan. Quote, it's probably also worth mentioning that our internal projections for reaching $1 trillion dollars in revenue not arr but revenue have moved up from 2031 to 2030 prior to the ipo the financial predictions we had were reaching one trillion dollars in revenue in 2031 we don't expect that in 2030 there's a non-zero chance of 2029 there's you know just nonchalant we're gonna 100x revenue in a couple years but we've actually upped it by a year is this real or fake right so that is real yeah i saw that one on that white viral it is funny picturing musk going to the financial team and saying i want to say this on the conference call i need you to rework your models so it uh

so we hit a hundred billion or i don't think he even does that he just goes yeah we we ran the numbers again and what can i say we're moving up you don't think they actually ran any numbers he just went out and said it honestly probably maybe grok ran it grok ran the numbers yeah that it's a bold claim so over under i i'd go under he's usually about 10 years early on some of his advanced projections so i'm gonna i'm gonna go early well under full self-driving and of end of next year i mean yeah it's coming it's coming uh but yeah one trillion it feels optimistic is maybe the kindest term you know what i think if they raise enough money it is possible for them to sell low unprofitable compute to companies who need it at the lowest

cost now if they want to go out and take everyone's free money and buy nvidia chips and sell that compute at unprofitable margins to big tech i think they can hit a trillion dollars in revenue yeah that seems to be their plan the thing is at current prices they want to rate i think they're going to need to raise two to three times as much as they've already raised they have 100 billion dollars to projections i'm seeing a lot of analysts out there making these aren't my projections. I'm just stealing from other people that they need $300, $400 billion to build out the infrastructure they're planning to have prepared by the end of next year. The math is going to be extremely difficult. He could possibly raise that money, but they don't have the internal

cash flow to do that yet. And they're also banking a lot on the Starlink version three, which I don't have in the quotes here, but he said, you're getting an order of magnitude twice from it for some reason, which I thought was fascinating. But hey, Starlink Wi-Fi, who knows? Maybe it will dominate the world. All right. Second quote, Ryan. And what is severely underestimated are the cost savings achieved once you have a factory of a factory of optimist bots in development. We're at the early stages of this S-curve. Once we ramp into production, the growth is basically unlimited because we are building a self-sustaining ecosystem of physical AI. This relates to our plans at Terafab, which of course will be made with optimist bots.

so judging by the fact that you are clearly reading off of something i'm gonna go with real on that one no i just made that up 20 minutes ago wait really yeah oh well you know what honestly i could have yeah that seemed legit um all right wow that was fake shocking that was convincing it's easy because he says crazy things on every call and this one was especially crazy even even the tesla one as well but i think he saved the extra special juice for the spacex call here's another one and we're not talking one order of magnitude with starship not two but three orders of magnitude of payload into orbit per year which we are going to build the ai infrastructure in space that will power the grok economy no one can come close to this

i'm gonna go with real again no fake all right i should have known on grok economy i should yeah as i was reading that that was my weakest point i should have said vertically integrated ai economy which he has been using the man can come up with terms these are convincing the i will never not laugh when people say grok in any sort of serious conversation the thing is hilarious yeah people have been getting it to say uh things i won't say on this podcast on twitter that there's been a lot of jokes that the enterprise revenue has taken a hit because because of that yeah people anyone who takes that seriously should go look at twitter and see what's being used for i'm gonna read there are no guardrails let's just put it that way no i think

probably the most used prompt is at grok take off this person's clothes that is i'm shocked there's no enterprise adoption for grok yeah that's that's fair okay well this one is the last one it's real uh since it was two and two here and this one's actually the most crazy i'm gonna read off to you Brian. They're autonomous and they do not need servicing. And that's sort of what may seem the far future, but will come faster than you think way. Using robots on the moon to scale up manufacturing on the moon, which I know it sounds like super sci-fi right now, but it's going to happen, will enable us to build a mass accelerator on the moon. If you have a mass accelerator on the moon and you have solar and radiator production on the moon, you can, I know this

sounds totally nuts, but you can probably scale it to 100x the economy, 1000x the economy of the earth in terms of intelligence launched to space probably maybe even a million times we're going to land a ton of tonnage on the moon we're going to build factories on the moon the robots will be helpful with that i sound i feel crazy saying this and this is the richest man in the world in charge of like the most important businesses on earth the guy says moon a lot i mean that it's we're factories on the moon ryan you can't put a price on that it doesn't sound obviously it sounds crazy but it also

it kind of sounds like an optimistic like teenager like it doesn't sound he doesn't say it in any sort of sophisticated manner um not saying that that's necessarily a bad thing i think that probably makes him feel more accessible to to individuals um or relatable i guess it may be the better word in unrelated news uh spacex earnings dropped and they were poor were they right you have thought you have thoughts on them uh well shares dropped significantly after earnings i believe they reported i want to say 16 billion dollars in ai capex compared to two billion dollars in ai revenue so they're getting there um let me just let me double check those numbers for you yeah i think no i think that is and 16 billion in ai capex and

two billion in ai revenue also twitter advertising revenue continues to collapse I don't think that, yeah, well I don't know, I was supporting that anyways they are banking pretty much everything on Starship, Starlink version 3 and then this AI Compute

we didn't even talk about the NVIDIA AI partnership for orbital data centers that's just like an assumption they're going to do this I guess they're guiding for ARR to hit 25 billion dollars sometime before the end of the year so q4 revenue may be around 25 billion

dollars give or take not including starlink which which would be quite an aggressive leap i i don't really have any thoughts on the business because it's also up in the air right now but the one maybe chess piece that could get played from the competitors and this is maybe even angering the company because SpaceX announced they're going exclusively with NVIDIA is Alphabet. They hold a giant position in the stock, and they also have a giant contract to outsource some of their Google Cloud and AI infrastructure compute to SpaceX. So if they sell down the stock, they sell down their position, they're not going to purposely drive down the shares, but part of that, they could be part of that uh in the lockup period ending and if they rogue pull spacex and get

rid of that contract once they build up enough compute maybe that could be something that gets in the way of spacex's plans here i also just think the laws of physics will but who knows they got some of the smartest people in the world it would be exciting to see google basically craft spacex's downfall the thing is there and so i was wrong about this with tesla but when you when you go out you go public and you get a two trillion dollar valuation whatever it was 1.7 everyone that invested in you over the last 20 years likely sells at least sells a good chunk of their stock oh yeah you're not showing any earnings um there's other places to invest like i just i kind of underestimate i doubt

there's that much capacity from individual investors to buy this thing honestly they didn't issue a ton of their float it feels like this is ripe for a massive drawdown especially as the lockup expires and i can't imagine that type of behavior and and business valuation is good for the actual business itself like for like i wonder if employees they've got to care right i also think if you're you've been an insider and maybe i'm also underestimating how much they love musk at spacex but if you're an insider and you now have you worked there for 10 years something like that you have shares that are on paper trading for millions of dollars, you would have, I would take some of that off the

table. Probably a lot. And I imagine there's probably a lot of internal communication saying we want our employees to be believers in the business. So let's make sure we don't sell all our shares. Um, but yeah, if I'm an insider, no doubt in my mind, yeah, you're selling some you've been waiting for this moment you're gonna sell some a lot of people will probably sell most then what is your tie to the business like aside from salary it being a good job if things don't go you know you're not hitched to it with equity or anything like that you probably had really good customer employee retention i would guess when everyone was waiting for the ipo i agree all right we're 15 minutes in we have plenty of other earnings to talk and

we have a lot of people in the chat here discussing uber um let's see what are your thoughts on uber's earnings and uber as an investment uh someone else in the comment here says long uber really good earnings operating profit of 20 percent uh and then another person saying that uber has no long-term moat because of the waymo zeus and others there's competing takes we've even taken the oh what do they call the battleground stock to the comment section ride so you were looking at the quarter closely i kind of just glanced at it i also saw on your fiscal ai account someone said you have to retire the fist the free cash flow chart uh mario sabelli right fell remittantly long are you going to be doing that did he say that yeah i i was i guess i see his tweets through

the chit chat stocks account he says this chart looks nice but time to retire it future is going to be a different question yeah he he could be right um but for the time being as long as i keep getting engagement on that i'm going to keep posting um the let's go through the uber numbers um total trips grew 18 percent uh compared to a year ago that's a slight deceleration uh relative to last quarter but but still i mean it's pretty strong uh trips per customer monthly trips per customer grew slightly total gross bookings grew 24 percent uh delivery is growing the quickest freight actually had a surprisingly strong gross bookings quarter i don't know if there's like uh some fuel surcharge that's going on there or what but uh mobility the

headline i think what maybe people worried about was that mobility revenue grew one percent year year that was related to some sort of a uk uh revenue recognition or tax thing the the business is on the top line the business is fine i don't think anything's changed there um i got the chart here ryan long-term total gross bookings across all segments all around the world since december 2017 it's grown a 22 and a half percent annual rate and i think we're at a pretty similar figure recently so over the last decade 22 and a half percent and it's been extremely durable so we're still growing at a similar clip today and they're still acquiring quite a few new customers yeah i think they added two million new monthly customers this quarter i mean that's that's meaningful um

it's not massive customer growth like on a percentage basis but yeah it's you know they have not hit market saturation what's the comment section are we um i'm not sure maybe 15 pull it up the comment section is debating right now uber's staying power basically are they uh are we at sort of peak uber the i don't know if i have any sort of novel take on this debate between self-driving and competition and uber i i think people overestimate the impact of some of these um smaller like local city competitors austin has this cool business where they have buses basically that you can get as a group and it's a little app that that is that's existed for four or five years there's new competitors popping up in new york that are meant to be

like the anti-uber give more money back to the drivers um i had an uber ride the other day where the driver said how much do they charge you and then i told him the amount he said if you take this off uber and just venmo me i'll give you half the price oh it's it's one of those where everyone has bad anecdotes it's kind of like airbnb i think you have a bad ride you have bad anecdotes and you want a different experience and you want to believe that the business won't last but that's been going on for five years and they continue to grow bookings that continue to grow writers can continue to grow the amount of overall trips the the power of the network effect is huge it really is like at the end of the day they are the most reliable ride you can get in most places

the waymo risk we can talk about that longer term but i i think two three years from now they're going to be delivering much more rights than they are today i don't think that's going to change and if they get their way and congress passes that rule uh well they might be locked in forever world events unfold in real time and now you can trade them with ibkr prediction markets you can trade election climate and economic outcomes alongside stocks options and bonds all in one integrated platform these are simple yes or no contracts priced to reflect the market's view of probability if your prediction is right you'll receive one dollar per contract and earn interest on your position while you're invested. IBKR prediction markets turn market expectations

into actionable trades. Prediction contracts are not suitable for all investors. Learn more at IBKR.com slash predictions. Yeah, I need to look more into that. I could officially switch to psychological long here. Now, I haven't done a report on them or anything. Don't see anything in my own portfolio that I'd consider selling for Uber, but I'm looking at the EV to EBIT the PE might have been misleading but the EV to EBIT 23

pretty reasonable figure margin expansion has been incoming and there should be some durable revenue growth or gross bookings value growth for the foreseeable future feels like a reasonable price they're buying back stock I think

yeah they bought back a little less this quarter but But they are a net share decliner. I like Dara. I think he's doing a good job. This is kind of a hedge fund hotel. A lot of big hedge fund managers seem to crowd into Uber here. i i just don't see a world where waymo is making a big enough dent in uber's trips within five years i just don't think it can happen at least globally globally yeah maybe it's

select US cities possibly yeah yeah it's possible alright we have a question from Tyler along with two adding us in the comments to make sure we ask it do you guys think Uber will be able to

successfully lobby for a hybrid human AV model to prevent job losses among the marginally employed thus delaying the unwind of their network they're trying to. I think that's a multi-billion dollar question. I'll leave the big hedge funds to answer that. I would say that's part of the uncertainty of this thesis, but that is one of the things where, and I don't know what will happen, but it seems like one of those

events where once it gets resolved, if it goes in Uber's favor, the stock is going to not reprice enough for the de-risking and that may be a better opportunity after it happens. Like a better buying opportunity after it happens. Whereas now you're buying some of that uncertainty but if the uncertainty resolves

it could be a better buying opportunity if the stock pops like 5% when the moat has widened significantly overnight. Yeah. I have no idea whether or not that

proposed law will actually pass from just from first principles i think that wouldn't really make sense when when when has it been a good idea to stop innovation because it might impact jobs like people get jobs elsewhere and typically new technologies too much sense here new technologies tend to create more jobs Yeah. Also creates angry citizenry. Yeah. And most people don't love driving Uber. I think most people aren't wanting to do that forever. I've got a comment here. Your take that Waymo will not put a dent in Uber over time is insane yeah it could be maybe i i don't own shares so i i'm not married to this idea but i just think

the waymo risk is overstated like look at the amount of rides they're delivering right now there seems to be a lot of pushback against waymo at least kind of lately um and it's going to be hard to scale up way more globally it's obviously capital intensive to scale up as well um yeah i think uber can earn a lot of cash in the meantime you know if you if you think waymo gives all the rides in 20 years there's a lot of cash flow to be earned in the meantime but um let's shift gears we've got a lot of companies to discuss today did you see trade desk down 20 again yes you know it's You know it's a bad quarter when management tries to get out in front of it with the quote from the press release, like the first quote.

Let me read you the first quote from the Trade Desk earnings report. This quarter did not meet the standard we set for ourselves. That is when you know your stock is about to get destroyed after hours, but it has reinforced our belief that we are focused on the right opportunities for the future revenue growth was three percent i believe year over year for the trade desk that is their slowest growth rate since the pandemic and if you exclude the pandemic probably their slowest growth rate ever i it feels like there was a lot of the headlines sometimes it's hard to decipher between news and noise with with headlines especially in between quarters but when your own customers i can't

remember if it was their own customer that sued them but their own customer which was one of the biggest advertising agencies globally put out a statement that said basically the trade desk has been charging us for the wrong things and um kind of warning other customers to avoid them you know there's going to be a massive revenue impact um and i think we saw that this quarter it jeff green i think i like the guy um but advertising is hyper competitive the first party platforms the walled gardens have massive advantages we consistently have seen that and even though the trade desk has done a great job scaling up the business by being functionally a middleman it like i don't want to go anywhere near it can you guess what uh

drawdown the trade desk is in now i was gonna try to calculate that including after hours fiscal ai doing that tech yep i got after hours advanced that's advanced stuff 92 i'm good at this i write movers for the molly fool so it is down 90 nice i'm gonna be writing about it this week why the trade desk collapsed again once that pops up in yahoo listeners will know who wrote that uh yeah no nothing else um sometimes you gotta admit when you're wrong about a business and move on now one that maybe we could debate whether we're right or wrong or whether the stock is very cheap ryan coupon how could i live life without coupon stock well very very uh wealthier at this moment the dog has gone nowhere for three years

the last thing i'll mention oh yeah anything else on the trade desk worst performing stock in the s&p 500 in 2026 it has officially taken the crown and so far by a wide margin but yeah let's talk coupon underwhelming report wasn't really excited to read it but you want to go through some of the results sure i think the underwhelming was maybe expected because they have to lap the customer losses i think most importantly uh and i haven't done full analysis on the quarters kind of just the headline thoughts, but I did read the conference call. The product commerce active customers have recovered to 24.7 million. That is about where they were before they had the data leak scandal.

That's up 3% year over year. The product commerce segment revenue was up 8% year over year on a constant currency basis, but gross profit and gross profit margins were down as they put out a bunch of incentives, coupons on coupon for customers that have left that they want to bring back. EBITDA margins are down significantly because they have all the fixed cost bases. There was something I mentioned I wrote about on the Emerging Motors newsletter, which is a fire that was developing in one of their warehouses in South Korea. They said it was less of a big deal than maybe the news was portraying. I didn't really like that the was there because they've had these incidents before. I'll take them at their word, but

we'll see. It seemed like something that could significantly impact product inventory getting destroyed, things of that nature. Last thing, developing offering segment revenue is up 24% in a constant currency basis. They said Coupang Eats, which is the DoorDash competitor within their internal ecosystem. So kind of think of if Amazon also had a DoorDash and they were both, I don't know if Coupang is a market share leader, but both pretty close to the top of the market share there in South Korea. They said it's now profitable. They have it within that RocketWow ecosystem. And then the Taiwan build-out seems to be going well.

Revenue keeps growing there. So the numbers aren't going to look great for a couple of quarters, but it is what it is. They're buying back a lot of stock, which I like. they have probably the capacity to buy back a lot more i didn't see anything to hate here i kind of expected the quarter to be bad that's about it yeah it you knew going in that there was the headline numbers weren't gonna look too good uh i did think it was a little funny and i know they kind of have to do this but on the conference call they broke it out as like revenue growth excluding all the customers we lost

from the data breach uh was 18 percent whatever it's a fair data point if i know but it's like well you're gonna have to count those uh i think honestly it's setting themselves a bad bogey because that or tough bogey because they're gonna have to hit that 16 growth unconsolidated figures once like they get to a normalized period i think the market's going to be expecting that which is weird because the stock trades are like 10 times normalized earnings yeah it's a good example too of when you have a like a vertically integrated e-commerce business there's a lot of margin deleverage that happens when there's a surprise to customer demand like if there's a data breach and customers you know

boycott you for three months or whatever you've already invested in all this capacity expanding your fulfillment network you've got uh employees trucks all this stuff that you've invested in that now you're not getting as good of utilization out of earnings looked even worse because there was a 400 million dollar fine but it yeah it's gonna make it's gonna hurt earnings more than it'll hurt the top line i think this for me coupons one that i'll probably own for a long time until until i unless i get the sense that they are delivering less value for customers it it's one of those where it's not just price action like companies have bad years they have bad quarters uh and hopefully i can look back on this one day and say you know kind of

whether the whether a couple difficult years to generate good returns you had to go through that but um yeah for the time being they have been uh a little underwhelming yeah and it's kind of in that no man's land at the moment even though the stocks i'm showing here trading at 0.8 times sales and I think has the capacity to get to 10% plus margins at maturity, and they might be a double-digit growth for a long time. You kind of do that math and see where it could possibly be attractive at this moment, but they're in no man's land because long-term shareholders such as ourselves,

well, I guess not everyone just keeps doubling down, doubling down, doubling down, doubling down. The stock hasn't gone anywhere for a long time, So people are kind of in, all right, I'm going to hold this, but improve it mode. But for the people that invest in a quarter-to-quarter basis, the pod shops, whatever, momentum traders, the numbers aren't going to look good for maybe six to 12 months here on the headline numbers. So for anyone waiting for that revenue acceleration, it's not going to show up. And that's why I kind of think the stock's stuck for a little bit. yeah now let's talk phenomenal companies and stocks i know everyone's been dying to speak about this one remitly q2 report exceptional this is one this is probably the company i'm the most excited uh to read about each quarter numbers were really strong across the board here maybe i can pull up some of those specifics so i'm not just uh speaking in platitudes here but

let me get to the report real quick so you had revenue growth of 20 year over year believe that might be a deceleration could be wrong send volume up 27 they passed 10 million active customers uh i think the the number that stood out to me was active customers grew sorry i'm pulling up this data in real time here also shameless plug active customers grew 20 active revenue per customer or send volume per customer continues to grow. So you've got, this continues to be a business with a ton of momentum. Like they are really, really well positioned as the digital alternative to remittances. And you have the legacy players like MoneyGram and Western Union who are actively just shedding customers to them

every quarter. And Remitly is lower cost. It's more convenient. It gets sent right away. And there's just a lot of natural momentum and natural growth that Remitly doesn't really have to pay for. But they can, you know, they can amplify the marketing and try to acquire those customers. The thing that stood out to me, and it's been a while since I have seen this, but operating expenses actually declined year over year. So general and administrative dropped 6% year over year. For a business that's growing, how often do you – like when you're growing 20% on the top line and you're growing volume almost 30% year over year, how often do you really see a company like that lower G&A expenses? It feels rare without hearing usually of like a big hiring or a big employee cut. The one line item that they are still growing quickly is marketing. They actually accelerated their marketing expenses. They are reallocating pretty much all their operating expenses to marketing. Not all, but a good chunk.

A lot of momentum for the business. I really like it. It's my largest holding. So no surprise there. and stock-based compensation came down. Yeah. More buybacks than stock-based comp this quarter. Yeah, I would like to maybe give a PSA

to Remitly management team. Your share count can move in the negative direction if you generate a bunch of gap earnings with a capital-like business. But they're making baby steps. I think they can get there. What I was running for the newsletter, which is covering Remitly this week, when a lot of people are listening to this, it'll be out tomorrow, Friday morning.

You can ping me on Substack, try to get a free trial, or sign up for yourself. You can pay for the report. The incremental margins, I don't have the number in front of me. Actually, I can probably just bring it up, but eh, okay. It's going to be too hard to search the report. It's either 50% or 60% as a percentage of transaction dollars. So let me explain that a little bit better. The transaction dollars is essentially the gross profit,

where if you take revenue, you subtract the cost to serve a foreign transaction, whatever they pay the intermediary banks, stuff like that. Once you get the time to that, that grew some sort of percentage this quarter, or some sort of nominal dollars were grown. Of that, 50% to 60% of that figure dropped straight to the bottom line as earnings. So on the incremental revenue and transaction dollars they earned this quarter year over year, 50% of that fell through the operating income, which indicates very strongly that the operating margin expansion they are undergoing, which is currently at 13% versus I think 3% a year ago,

is going to continue so i think that was the biggest highlight for me yeah i think they could be a lot more profitable than people are guessing this one it really does like it i don't understand why it trades at less than a five billion dollar enterprise value i think there's a very clear path to a billion dollars in annual earnings within three to five years. That's all right. Just keep buying. Just keep adding to your position then, Ryan. I mean, shares are a double year to date, so it's been good, I guess. I think many people are probably still expecting the operating leverage to continue.

They need more evidence here. I'm looking at the operating gap, operating figure chart. And outside of, okay, late last year, they generated slight operating earnings. They've only had three real quarters here of gap operating profit. They probably expect a little bit more. But I like the new management team.

Well, it's really just the new CEO. He seems to be bringing in a little of the necessary Amazon cost cuts. Cost management, bro. it's your corporate lingo correct yeah on the conference call he was like yeah you know with ai you need less people i was like that's that amazon charm i know well it yeah uh and to be you know again we always have to clarify this not rooting for layoffs ever they are not doing well i don't believe they did any sort of mass layoffs they did a hiring freeze yeah yeah um

and and they're you know still growing the business so uh they have generated it seems some efficiencies the other thing i wanted to talk about and this is maybe a big takeaway for everyone's portfolios and investing broadly and mario sabelli introduced he kind of brought this up this week last week western union announced that it's going to keep its dividend intact they're not going to cut the dividend this is the beauty of investing in companies that are on the right side of the innovators dilemma this is like a perfect example you've got remitly which is digitally native mobile first don't have the big fixed cost base of western union

the world moves online they move to remitly they shift away from western union western union all of a sudden less customers less revenue less cash flow they've got a dividend that they've got to pay out they commit to paying more of the dividend which is just going to give them a harder time investing in the digital initiatives that they need to to recover the business and it's just going to amplify the market share gains for the digital players like a remitly like a wise this is this is the beauty of the innovators dilemma i i think the wise overlaps lower but remit sure yeah i think it pretty much translates well over there yeah uh i'll just say so we move on other topics i was covering that idea at length on this friday's newsletter uh and i agree

generally with mario what mario says what about airbnb and booking ryan okay when i sell my business i want the best tax and investment advice i want to help my kids and i want to give back to the community oh then it's the vacation of a lifetime i wonder if my head of office has a forever center. An IG Private Wealth Advisor creates the clarity you need with plans that harmonize your business, your family, and your dreams. Get financial advice that puts you at the center. Find your advisor at IGPrivateWealth.com. New from Nespresso, blend wellness into your coffee routine with the Coffee Plus range, infused with functional benefits. Choose the coffee you love with added B vitamins, like Coffee Plus B12 to help support immune

function and coffee plus b6 to keep your day moving or go with the flow and choose ginseng delight our new double espresso with ginseng extract whatever lies ahead don't change your morning let your morning change you discover coffee plus on nespresso.com here's a comment here from jfp something something something airbnb and booking both had great quarters both posted at 15% plus earnings per share growth and cranked buybacks. Airbnb down 4.5% year-over-year on share count, booking at 5.6%. I guess I didn't have a question there,

but did you look at the booking numbers and the Airbnb numbers? Because they look pretty solid, but I would maybe hesitate people to think this is some permanent inflection for these platforms. The biggest event of the world. happened last quarter right yeah but i think maybe something that's even bigger is there's been a notable uptick in booking volume uh booking volume growth for airbnb since they launched reserve now pay later so there has been and it's not it's nothing crazy but

airbnb is growing booking 16 year over year booking holdings is growing nine percent so there is an outperformance there i think the other part that maybe was enticing was airbnb Brian Chesky noted, they're not just seeing growth from their emerging markets. They saw notable acceleration in all of their core markets, not just the US, UK, Australia, some of the other ones as well. That's nice. That's nice. But again, I quote here, I'm just going to temper people's expectations. They said in North America, we saw high single-digit growth in ninth and seats booked, the highest growth we've seen in almost three years look doesn't change the this quarter doesn't change anything material about

the business it's just gonna the comp next quarter or next year is gonna be tough that's all i'm saying like i don't think anything's changed except for what you mentioned with the deserve now pay later it's nice they have these basic features to the platform they spent a lot of time in their shareholder letter talking about their ai benefits okay i try to use their customer support i i took 30 seconds i yelled at to give me a human it's not it's one of the worst i've seen i uh yeah you know what you know what should be popular right now if you want to be a good business if you want to uh win some customers over have great human customer support alongside a good chatbot i don't mind nowadays it's few and far between but a good chatbot

in 2026 can be helpful but most of the time you're going to want a human yeah yeah so seriously uh and nothing gets me more infuriated than an ai chatbot the uh you know you know who's got them the worst the insurance companies of course that's the whole business model yeah um no i i liked airbnb's quarter the i kind of have mixed feelings about some of these payment deferral methods it's the same with remitley actually remitley almost at the same time rolled out send now pay later and airbnb rolled out reserve now pay later so you've seen sort of muted growth in cash flow because they're deferring more people are deferring payments out i don't know if i love that choice like i guess it can accelerate uh bookings or it can accelerate

payments that maybe would have otherwise not happened but i just worry that now you're just kind of ruining your working capital advantage yeah i think you have to underwrite that into your how you're going to price for customers but i'd rather have a platform that offers this choice than not just price it correctly they always claim they do but of course we don't have the underlying economics for us where do you stand one through ten on brian chesky today a ceo lower lower lower lower lower man does not want to be seen to be the ceo of someone that's focused on inching out durable booking volume growth he's an explorer maybe it's time for him to hit the advisory role what do you think there's a i just i mean business is doing well

like it's a hard business to screw up business is doing well but he doesn't seem to be focused There seems to be some vanity projects, like kind of some – I don't know. He wants it to be more than a – like you've got a phenomenal online travel business, and you're becoming like an AI guru. to like just work on serving customers and improving the platform you don't have to like work on these long thought pieces that are literally generated by ai and then have them taken down that one was funny that one was funny airbnb still doesn't have a loyalty program dumb you can flip that as bullish you can flip that with bullish and say they they don't need it yet no which but it was like all right well then yeah revenue growth would be higher i maybe there are some there's some low-hanging fruit that i think would improve the business

and choosing not to do them i don't think choosing not to do them for a rainy day i don't think is the right idea advertising promoted listings that helps hosts it helps hosts yeah why not why not allow it uh loyalty programs it they have a sneaky one you know if you uh connect your delta account delta airlines account you get 1x points on all airbnb uh purchases and you can reload this i just found this out no one knows no one knows about this they're also giving like a hundred dollars off experiences haven't found one to use yet but it's there yeah i'll be curious uh to read the conference call and see what progress has been made on experiences i will say i am still in the camp of this is not going to work but prove me wrong i'm i can be proven wrong here

okay we have mercato mercato libre or palantir or google losing mount rushmore scientists let's let's talk briefly about palantir uh alex carp described this quarter as otherworldly in his press release did he you read what he said should we read the direct quote this sounds yeah it's i think the only one worse than a elon on this let's say oh my gosh this is yeah he called it other world okay that's it maybe I'm looking at something else he had some sort of thing

where he was just rambling about how they're the best you can't stop us things of that nature yeah he is leaning into the like musk say outrageous things and gather a cult following

program it's working for him it's a good quarter yeah i think it was a 100 their net retention rate i think was almost 160 so so they're getting 60 revenue growth from existing customers uh yeah that's pretty exceptional the and it's uh it's an actually profitable business as well which is uh there's a lot to like there's one thing not to like which is the valuation um can you guess the forward pe well i saw your post about it it's what 90 times 83 that's expensive and that does not include stock-based comp which is very real for their business yeah someone says airbnb should buy

trip advisor i agree i agree yeah um let's talk google losing their scientist yeah if you heard of jeff dean i've not they have a bunch they have a thing of nerdy facts where he he's so good at he was so good at improving google search and infrastructure and things like that where they would say things like fun fact something something jeff i don't know like nerdy computer science things like he created i i don't even know how to say you type one word into google a jeff dean blah blah blah blah this one was a jeff dean fact of 200 billion dollars in market cap lost from a single person would that make you feel good or bad i probably put a big weight on my shoulders of what my startup is supposed to be worth uh yeah this guy left alphabet after 27

years he is probably the greatest scientist maybe of modern times of computer science um i don't know if we can read his whole resume today but essentially what it looks like at the outside is they're losing a lot of their core scientists from the early days uh hasabis the deep mind guy is getting moved into a different advisory role and it feels like they're kind of scrambling a bit on the advanced ai stuff where they're not as organized um i it's probably not as bad as people think but it can't be good to lose like a mount rushmore scientist like this no i just the the one benefit i i give them the benefit of the doubt that they are hiring well uh and that there's a lot more bright people at

google you look at the talent that has come out of there you know it's possible that there's been this big exodus and people are wanting to go elsewhere but it seems like pretty much every relevant person in the world of ai today was at some point it inside of google google google deep mind yeah i wish i had a list of everything he's done but it's a lot it's like you know the auto complete advertising querying all this google search stuff he essentially made it work for billions of people around the world uh so thank you jeff dean i guess you'll collect your billions uh in computer science with his new startup whatever it's called this stuff's all so confusing it like we have i i don't know what it's even called but he's starting something it's

an ai they're going to give him a ton of money to do whatever he wants and that's that's about all i can say about it what about mercado libre here yeah i mean there's a lot to unpack for mercado libre uh they have now delivered 30 consecutive quarters of more than 30 percent revenue growth. They're the only company in the world to do that. Basically, the big story here is that margins in Brazil, which is still their largest market, continue to collapse. So revenue grew 55% this year across the entire business, not this year, this quarter. Operating income declined. I'm going to read the quote. I got to pull it up here from Marcos Galperin. I believe I'm getting the name right. He says, in our last shareholder letter, we described the size of the

opportunity ahead of us in Latin America's digital economy and why we believe investing boldly today is the right response to seize it. This quarter, we want to focus on a different part of that same story um why the structure of our business a single ecosystem spanning commerce and fintech creates a flywheel this wasn't the quote that i thought it was going to be uh but brazil continuing to show the strongest trends even though income from operations declined 17 percent year over year basically you kind of have to take them at their word there's been a lot of competition uh flooding into the brazilian market from a lot of asian commerce businesses c limited's a bigger one and it looks like

uh a fight to zero kind of like everyone's trying to win that market and they're doing so unprofitably and that's what's creating the margin collapse but galperin has been pretty optimistic he's kind of taking a different tone than analysts that they see a massive chance to win market share in brazil and they're investing heavily into it so i don't really know where to stand on it brett you are in brazil any thoughts well i use amazon because i guess you need a bank account to use mercado libre uh amazon seems to work fine here there's some cross-country stuff That makes the deliveries longer, but it feels like similar to other parts of South America where you have the MercadoLibre vans everywhere, their advertisements are everywhere.

I think they have a long runway to keep growing. I don't see any reason for this to be bearish. They're investing up front, and just like we saw with Coupang, And Coupang didn't do it on purpose. They lost customers, which kind of set back their margin structure. But you can't really run that profitably on an e-commerce business that's vertically integrated if you're not close to full capacity. MercadoLibre is investing ahead of that.

That's why their margin is down. The fintech business seems fine. Everything's growing really solidly there. and you combine everything together the consolidated margin of it is one that is hard to talk about on a podcast because there's so many moving parts but the consolidated operating margin of

what do we got here? Is it 8%? That might be not right. Pretty low. Whatever it is is low. It can be much higher. Advertising is growing really quickly. The prime subscription equivalent of Melly Plus is doing well. They have a good strategy there to basically have every other video offering but Amazon Prime.

It's fine. The business keeps growing. I think people are severely underestimating the revenue growth potential. Maybe gross profit's a better figure because they are moving to some first-party revenue, which is

going to accelerate revenue but not accelerate the gross profit as much but i still think that's growing at an extremely impressive clip gmv is growing an extremely impressive clip uh payment volume for the payment side of the business is growing at a very fast clip i'm still very bullish i'm using the word very a lot but let's finalize and say i think on a forward earnings basis multi-year it's very cheap but similar to coupon a little bit of no man's land yeah i think everyone wants the amazon returns no one wants the amazon investment required to get those returns it's a vertically integrated e-commerce business looks great after the fact when when they've won a market it doesn't look as good

when they're in massive investment mode, which MercadoLibre and, well, I guess Coupang maybe has unrelated problems. Taiwan, they're similar. True. Do we want to talk Michael Saylor? I was hoping this would be a surprise. Did you see this?

I did not. Okay. Well, they had their Q2 earnings, which they got to figure out something to do on the conference call, and they seem to have a big Zoom here. I'm going to, it's a two-minute video. I'm going to play, I don't know if we can make more than 10 seconds here,

but I think this is a good way to close out the episode. Ryan, I'm just going to share the screen and hit play for you. Good evening, shareholders. The market is pricing fear. I'm pricing Bitcoin. the quarter was rough but the sasper share rose they saw us selling everybody froze this is your oh my god champion this is a conference call for investors for anyone that can't see it he has these executives dancing and kind of a synchronized

thing on zoom it was tough to watch uh if you're if you're listening this is the king of bitcoin lucky you um oh god i also want to read i want to read another post it says when i say this is michael saylor says when i say never sell your bitcoin i speak as one saver to another i have never sold mine not one satoshi strategy is a public company not my wallet since 2020 it has disclosed it may buy or sell to manage capital our shared conviction in bitcoin remains unchanged so when he said never sell your bitcoin uh strategy was recently forced to sell their bitcoin uh forced is maybe a strong word no they had to for their preferred payments they levered up they forced they were forced to sell it was their choice to buy uh and use their money that way but

yes he calls it managing capital and the comments are kind of uh a catastrophe of people saying you told me never to sell um there's also a post that he had from a while back that was that got a lot of likes in the comments uh it says sell a kidney if you must but keep the bitcoin this honestly was good for bitcoin actually when he tweeted this because it made it sound like the selling was done from micro strategy or strategy so there was like a slight bump but i'm glad i'm glad this is finally happening uh yeah it's slowly ending it's nice he's he doesn't hey seeing the mental hoops people were going through to rationalize owning crypto just so

clients didn't hate them it's nice to like no one could explain in a simple uh practical manner why you needed to own crypto and and how it would replace currency uh or replace the u.s dollar which seemed to be a lot of the takes and now we don't have to worry about that quite as much it seems like people just don't care anymore except for the few people that are left and there was i think last week yeah 100 million dollars again that got uh stolen out of quote-unquote cold storage the stuff is also like ai infinitely confusing and makes zero sense but it was it was quite sad these people that were trying to be extremely secure with their bitcoin it just got hacked and stolen yeah that song um when i was watching before this i got through about 30

seconds i might watch the whole thing just because i hate myself no i don't i don't know if like yeah yeah you don't have to punish yourself like that that's a conference call of a company you're supposed to buy like this is where you put your savings and they're on there just singing like it's a christmas carol yeah well i think we're running up on time that was a packed week uh we will have more next week earnings are still ongoing there were a lot of reports today there will be a lot of reports early next week uh that we will tackle thank you everyone for tuning in thank you for all the comments in the chat and the civil uber discourse uh that went went on in the comments as well we want to remind you that brett and i are not financial advisors

Anything we say or discuss here on Chit Chat Stocks is not formal advice or recommendation. We may buy, sell, or hold any of the securities discussed on this podcast. Thank you all again, and we'll see you next time.