Closing Bell - Closing Bell Overtime: Anduril Founder Palmer Luckey on Defense Tech and New Army Production Deal; Nucor CEO On Tariffs; DoorDash CFO on a Strong Quarter 2/11/25

Episode Date: February 11, 2025

We kick off a wild hour with Paul Hickey of Bespoke Investment Group and Jill Carey Hall of BofA Global Research breaking down earnings from Lyft, DoorDash, Gilead and more. DA Davidson's Tom White weighs in on Lyft’s results. Jon shares insights from DoorDash’s CFO Ravi Inukonda, including where the company is investing to continue scaling. Freshworks CEO Dennis Woodside joins to discuss earnings, and Anduril’s Palmer Luckey dives into defense under Trump, DOGE, and the company's latest news. Plus, Nucor CEO Leon Topalian on the impact of tariffs.

That's the under-regulation. Infinity Natural Resources ringing the closing bell at the New York Stock Exchange. SEAL SQ Corp doing the honors at the NASDAQ. Well, stocks trading in a very tight range today, though most sectors actually finishing higher for the S&P. It looks like the S&P may be just fractionally higher as Fed Chair Powell shares his outlook for the economy with Congress ahead of tomorrow's key inflation report. That's the scorecard on a lawsuit, but the action, it's just getting started. Welcome to Closing Bell Overtime. I'm Morgan Brennan with John Ford. And we have got earnings results coming this hour from Dillia, DoorDash, Lyft, Zillow, and Freshworks. Along with a business update from Supermicro, we're going to bring you all the headlines

and conversations with executives from DoorDash and Freshworks before they talk to analysts. Plus, a can't-miss exclusive interview with Oculus and Anduril founder Palmer Luckey as his defense tech startup announces plans to take control, potentially, of a $22 billion Army contract. And an exclusive conversation with the CEO of Nucor, which has seen a big boost this week as President Trump slaps fresh tariffs on foreign steel and aluminum. They are the biggest steelmaker in North America. As we await earnings, though, let's bring in Paul Hickey of Bespoke Investment Group and Jill Cary Hall of B of

A Global Research. It's great to have you both here. It looks like a mixed picture for the major averages, though, as we just mentioned, in a very tight range here. Jill, I'll start with you. What do you like here? As we have seen Treasury yields move higher again, we've seen the Russell 2000 under pressure. It's down about half a percent again today. Continues to hit resistance. What's compelling and why? I think it's been, you know, a decent earning season so far, but we have seen some bifurcated trends. So we've been actually cautious on the Russell 2000 in part because these companies have been struggling to get out of the earnings recession. And so far this earnings season, we haven't seen a lot of encouraging evidence yet. The companies in the Russell are still reporting weaker guidance. And, you know, when we look at corporate sentiment on earnings calls, it's been a lot weaker for small caps relative to large caps so far this earnings

season. So, you know, within SMID, we actually think mid caps look like the best positioned area. Their fundamental trends have been a lot better than small caps. And then they're, you know, we think the earnings recovery, as we see the market broadening out, could actually benefit mid-caps and also the equal-weighted S&P 500 rather than the cap-weighted S&P 500. So we like mid, but we do think this is an environment as well to pick stocks over just owning indices, given all the headwinds we see going on with policy and a lot of muddled macro signals. Well, we've got our first earnings report. Gilead results are out, and Angelica Peebles has the numbers for us. Hi, Angelica. Hey, Morgan. Gilead beating on the top and bottom lines. EPS coming in ahead at $1.90 a share adjusted versus the $1.70 that analysts were looking for. Revenue also beating at $7.57 billion. That's ahead of the $7.14 billion

that the street was looking for. And that beat coming across Gilead's HIV portfolio, also its cancer drugs. Its COVID antiviral did fall a little bit short. And on the guidance, Gilead's adjusted EPS guidance of $7.70 a share to $8.10 a share coming in ahead. Its product sales, we can't compare that to the estimate, but they're looking for a range between $28.2 to $28.6 billion. And Gilead telling me that that does include a $1.1 billion impact from the Medicare Part D redesign. And the company is also raising its dividend. You can take a look. That stock is up about 2 percent right now. Guys.

All right. Angelica Peebles, thank you. Paul Hickey, I'm going to go to you because whether it is the report we just got from Gilead as we await more or whether it is the fact that, yes, we're hired to start the year for the S&P 500 in general. And you've made this point. It does not look like the start of the past couple of years because we have seen a broader market participation to kick off 2025? Yeah, so I think it's really interesting to what Jill was just saying before. Small caps haven't quite picked up the broadening theme. But for the rest of the market, this year is completely different. We have the majority of sectors are up over 5% this year. Nine out of 11 sectors are outperforming the S&P 500. And coming into today, only tech was down. So this is exactly what people have

wanted for and been calling for the last two years. And we're finally getting it. And yet investors don't seem to be overly enthused about it. Now we're hearing that, you know, since the MAG-7 are faltering, is this a sign of weakness? But this is the broadening out among large cap stocks that a lot of investors have been waiting for. And I think it's a healthy signal within the broader market. Paul, we're expecting DoorDash numbers any second now. It's had a crazy run over the past six months from 100 bucks a share to 192. Stocks now at levels that are reminiscent of the pandemic hype of late 2021. You point out this is a company that tends to beat on revenue, not as much on EPS. Q4 tends to be a rougher stock reaction. So given that setup,

how should investors be prepared to respond? So I think if, you know, since they consistently beat sales forecast, management has made a, you know, a good track record of guiding the street. If those numbers don't beat, that would be a very weak signal. Their EBITDA numbers are usually the more pertinent metric as far as earnings are concerned. So we'll see how that goes. Go ahead. I said any moment, and this is the moment.

DoorDash earnings are indeed out. So let's give them to you. You can react to that. DoorDash Q4 earnings beat on the top line, met on the bottom line. Q1 guidance is a solid gross order volume beat, value beat. The Q1 earnings guide is in the range the street was looking for, but the midpoint of that guide is a little bit below consensus. Here are the numbers. DoorDash Q4 revenue comes in at $2.87 billion versus around $2.84 billion consensus. Non-gap earnings per share, 33 cents meeting consensus.

For the guide, Q1 gross order value is pegged at $22.6 billion to $23 billion. That's $22.8 at the midpoint, which is higher than the $22.4 expected. The guide for earnings before interest taxes taxes depreciation and amortization that's EBITDA that's in a range of 550 million to 600 million that's 575 at the midpoint versus a consensus of 585 we're going to hear from DoorDash's CFO Ravi Inukonda about these results before the call with analysts first here on overtime coming up. Paul, your reaction? Yes, just based on what you said, the sales numbers weren't quite as strong as maybe investors are used to seeing. Plus, the stock has had an incredible run.

Like you said, it's almost doubled, I think, in the last several months or last year. So, you know, it sets the stage for a sell the news reaction. And you're seeing a modest negative reaction in the stock now. So, you know, we'll have to hear more about what the CFO has to say later. OK. Meantime, lift earnings are out as well. And Deirdre Bosa has those numbers for us. Hi, Dee. Hey, Morgan. So they were initially higher by about 5 percent, but now they're down by about that much. And that is likely due to the guidance. Let me give you the headline numbers first, though. Revenue was basically in line at $1.55 billion. EPS of 15

cents gap. So we're seeing net income from the company. We don't compare that because analysts use non-gap. Adjusted EBITDA better than expected at $113 million versus $104 expected. Here's where it gets disappointing for investors. Stock now down, wow, more than 10%. That weak guidance, Q1 gross bookings coming in softer than expected, as well as Q1 adjusted EBITDA coming in a little light. The company is, however, issuing its first buyback of $500 million. I did speak to CEO David Risher on the results. He attributed the soft guidance to new pricing pressures that he says showed up at the end of last year. He says that they price competitively and reliably, but if someone takes it down, we'll match them.

He said that Waymo was not having an impact, right? They're gaining more share here in San Francisco because he calls it a premium product. We'll continue to dig into these numbers, but shares down more than 10 percent. That's pretty much erasing year-to-date gains. Okay, Dee. Yeah, all that action that was missing during the regular trading day, we're getting in overtime. A little bit different from the Super Bowl. Jill Carey-Hall, you say it's going to be a year for mid-caps. You mentioned that earlier. Traditionally, I understood mid-caps to mean market caps between $2 and $10 billion. But I find myself thinking of anything smaller than $50 billion these days as being a mid-cap. How are you

defining that for this year? Yeah, mid-caps have definitely gotten a lot bigger. So depending on whether you're looking at the Russell or the S&P, it could be anywhere more in the $5 to $15 billion range. Or within the Russell mid-cap, there are stocks in the $20s, $30s, even $40 billion range. So, you know, there are certainly a lot of mid-caps that look a lot larger than they used to be. And it's often this sort of forgotten size segment, but that's where, you know, this year they've been outperforming, and we think that continues just given they're, you know, a lot less rate-sensitive, better balance sheets than small caps, where now as more rate cuts have gotten taken off the table and our economists

expect rates to stay, the Fed to hold from here, you know, that smaller caps are a lot more sensitive to expectations around the Fed and rates. So better balance sheets, better fundamentals, you know, better margins. So small caps could be hit more from, you know, from a margin perspective, from higher import costs, from tariffs. So we think mid caps do look like a better space to be in right now. OK, hold on. We got some breaking news on Supermicro. Christina Parts Nevelis has those details. Christina. Well, what we're seeing right now, these are preliminary numbers. So I have to keep that in mind. It's not an actual concrete earnings report. So EPS for Q2, this coming from the company, 58 cents to 60 cents. That is lower than what the street anticipated on revenues for

Q2 between 5.6 and 5.7 billion. Again, this is a range that came in lower than what the street was anticipating. And we talk about Q3 guidance also lighter at 46 cents to 62 cents. That's lighter than the street. Five to six billion for Q3 revenue. They're cutting their full year guidance fiscal 2025 to 23.5 to 25 billion. So you're seeing lower estimates or lower range compared to all the estimates. And there's one line in this press release saying that with our leading direct liquid cooling technology, over 30 percent of new data centers are expected to be adopted in the next 12 months. So they're saying that there's a market for it and that they're positioned for

it. And yet you're seeing these estimates a lot lower than what the street was anticipating and why you're seeing the stock just all over the place. OK, it looks like there's also some news that we'll be looking at having to do with private placement of convertible notes and the 10K. They're working to file that by the middle of the calendar year. So that, I'm sure, investors will be reacting to as well, Morgan. Yeah, and I mean, this is a name we're seeing right now, bouncing between gains and losses. Paul, I want to get your thoughts on this,

because Supermicro was such a high flyer than we saw it fall so far. And some of the issues have been, I think, for the company specifically, despite the secular data center infrastructure build out and demand we see. Yeah, so it's become increasingly competitive in the space. But I mean, broader picture, if you can't get your financials in order, I mean, we tend to stay away from those names until they can get some numbers out. And so I would just stay away from it at that point, at this point, until you get to those numbers being published. Okay. Paul, Jill, thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Well, Zillow earnings are out as well. Our Diana Olick has those numbers. Diana. Well, John, a mixed bag for Zillow's Q4. EPS a little light at 27 cents a share versus estimates of 28 cents. But then a revenue beat of $554 million

versus estimates of 546 million. Residential revenue was the driver, benefiting from more buyers and sellers transacting with Zillow. Traffic to Zillow's groups, mobile apps, and sites in Q4 was up 3% year over year, as were visits, up 3%. Trouble was guidance. It came in a little short for Q1.

Revenue of 57575 to $590 million. That's versus estimates of $600 million. Adjusted EBITDA of $125 to $140 million versus estimates of $159 million. Now, in the shareholder letter, CEO Jeremy Waxman said, we expect a more challenging housing market in Q1, with industry growth remaining relatively flat year over year. And you can bet that's because mortgage rates are around 7 percent. Zillow and Redfin today also announced a partnership, making Zillow the exclusive provider of multifamily rental listings on Redfin and its sites, Rent.com and ApartmentGuide.com. This alongside existing Zillow brands, Hotpads and Trulia, as well as Realtor dot com, which was added last year. So, again, a mixed bag. Not great on the guidance, guys.

All right, Diana, thank you. Well, still ahead, much more on all of today's overtime action, including analysts reaction to results from Lyft and the first comments from the chief financial officer of DoorDash before he talks to Wall Street on the call. Plus, we'll be joined exclusively by Palmer Luckey, founder of defense tech heavyweight Andrel, which just announced plans to take over Microsoft's $22 billion Army contract to supply mixed reality headsets on the battlefield. Overtime is back in two. Welcome back to Overtime. Lyft shares are moving lower after earnings. Let's bring in Tom White. He is senior research analyst at D.A. Davidson. He's got a neutral rating on the stock, price target of $16. Tom, it seems like this is the kind of scenario that explains why you don't have a buy, why Uber maybe is a little bit stronger. But what do you see in these results, particularly in the guide that speaks to the position competitively that Lyft is in?

Yeah, sure. Thanks for having me. Look, I think with the fourth quarter results and the guide, the theme is that the top line kind of growth trends for gross billings are a little bit light. You're seeing a little bit better performance on the bottom line. Investors, they're a finicky bunch. I think with this stuff, they want to see a combination of kind of steady, sustainable growth with margin expansion. They want their cake and want to eat it, too. Here, you know, I thought the commentary about mid-teens rides growth for Lyft implied in the first quarter guidance was good, but it looks like they're expecting bookings to grow a little bit slower. Whether that's, you know, a focus on affordability or lower pricing. We'll have to learn about it on the call.

But, you know, I think investors were hoping for a little bit maybe more balanced combination of sustainable growth and kind of margin expansion. Can Lyft partner its way into sustained relevance? I mean, they've got this deal going with DoorDash and DashPass. They don't have all the different pieces that Uber does, but maybe they can compensate for that? Yeah, look, partnerships are certainly a big part of the strategy. DoorDash is an important one. They lost an important one also, though, over the last couple of months with Delta. Yeah, look, I think the ride share market in the U.S. is large enough to support two players. Obviously, Lyft has some disadvantages as it relates to scale. It's an online marketplace business. We're firm believers in online

marketplace business models that there are real advantages to scale. You see it in other industries when it comes to the leading kind of scale player having higher margins, sustainably higher margins. So, you know, that's something that Lyft is going to always kind of have to contend with. I think you see that reflected in the multiple. But, you know, we still think it's a large enough market and, you know, potentially even a larger market once autonomous gets involved. And it's interesting to see shares of Uber trading lower in sympathy right now, down 1% with Lyft. I want to shift gears here because you also

cover Zillow, and we're seeing that stock tumble here in overtime. And they're talking about a tougher housing market here in Q1. The guide seems to be pretty disappointing versus street expectations. We know mortgage rates are severally high at 7%. What do you think of the stock at this level? Yeah, look, we like Zillow a lot. The fourth quarter print looks good to us. I think what you're seeing in the guide is just the struggle that this management team is going to have getting too far over their skis with the outlook when the rate backdrop is as volatile as it is. Sometimes it can be volatile to the upside. We saw that actually this summer when rates kind of dipped low for a second. And actually, there was some housing market strength during the fourth quarter as a result of those dip in rates.

But it's just really hard to forecast exactly. I mean, it's always hard to forecast interest rates, but it feels particularly difficult to kind of get comfortable with that volatility. So, you know, on an absolute basis, it's really hard to say that Zillow's numbers are going to be X or Y over the next, you know, kind of couple of quarters. But on a relative basis, we think they're going to continue to outperform the housing market as the results that they put up today in the fourth quarter show. And of course, you know, per Powell and others today that the Fed's in no hurry to cut again, at least not anytime soon. Tom, wait. Thanks for joining us. Lyft CEO will break down those results tomorrow at 8 a.m. Eastern on Squawk Box.

We've got quarterly results from Upstart Holdings out as well. And that stock is surging. Earnings coming in at 26 cents per share versus estimates of a loss of $0.04 per share. Revenue also topping expectations at $219 million. That was versus expectations of $182.1 million. Revenue guidance strong as well. You can see those shares are up just about 22%. Yeah, we'll keep watching it. Wow, upstart indeed. Well, up next, access you're only going to get on over time. The chief financial officer of DoorDash delivers up his first thoughts on quarterly results as that stock trades higher by about 4 percent. And that's going to be before he talks to analysts on the call. And later, outspoken tech pioneer and Andral Industries founder Palmer

Luckey joins us exclusively to talk about plans to take over a massive army contract focused on putting mixed reality headsets on the battlefield. And another one for you, business software maker Freshworks just out with results, reporting earnings per share of 14 cents adjusted versus estimates of 10 cents. Revenue beat as well, coming in at $195 million, about $6 million above expectations. Guidance mostly in line. You can see the stock there up better than 6%. And coming up, we're going to talk to Freshworksartz, the CEO, about those numbers ahead of his call with analysts. Get ready for Dennis Woodside. Overtime's back in two. Welcome back. Let's get another check on DoorDash. Shares are higher right now in overtime by about 5%. I spoke with Chief Financial Officer Ravi Inukonda first on

CNBC about these results and CEO Tony Hsu's shareholder letter, which lays out more color on the strategy entering a new fiscal year. A big part of this story is expansion beyond takeout. 25% of our consumers today order from categories outside of our restaurants. Over 11 million products are listed on the platform today that are not from restaurants. And that's just an incredible amount of scale that we've built over the last couple of years. We've truly become a genuine utility.

Let's say you're building a dollhouse for your child on a Saturday afternoon. You forgot your wrench. Just door dash it from Home Depot. Over 42 million consumers are realizing the power of the platform, and that number is continuing to grow double digits. People are using us for all use cases. They're spending more on the platform. They continue to increase their order frequency on the platform as well.

And with DoorDash's Q4 EPS number in line, even as revenues beat, and with the Q1 EBITDA guide midpoint being a little light of expectations, even with a strong gross order value guide, I asked Inukonda where DoorDash is investing. Growth and profitability are two sides of the same coin for us. Our philosophy has always been we continue to grow the business, we continue to scale the business. Scale in our business ultimately drives density, which drives improvement in efficiency, which ultimately drives profitability in the business. If you look over the last couple years, we've driven exactly that. We're investing behind adding more categories, adding more stores, improving the quality of the product, making the product more affordable. This is exactly what we've been doing, which is driving

the strength in the business. And that's exactly what we will continue to do going forward. So no change in how we are operating the business. Well, in just a couple of minutes, you can watch the full 15-minute conversation with Uniconda on Overtime's LinkedIn page. You got to jump on the call, scan that QR code on your screen. All right. Well, let's get over to Bertha Coombs now for a news update. Bertha. Morgan, King Abdullah of Jordan said he would take in 2,000 Palestinian children from Gaza who are sick or have cancer, which President Donald Trump called a beautiful gesture. The king declined to say if he was willing to take in more refugees, but after the meeting, the king wrote on X that he reiterated to the president his, quote,

steadfast opposition to the displacement of Palestinians. Just hours after a federal judge ordered the Trump administration to unfreeze federal funding, a senior FEMA official appeared to violate that order, telling workers to freeze funding for a slew of grant programs, according to screenshots of an email obtained by NBC News. FEMA has yet to comment. And former Interior Secretary Deb Haaland announced today that she's running for governor of New Mexico. If she wins, Haaland will be the first Native American woman elected governor. Haaland was also the first Native American cabinet official in U.S. history when she became the head of the Interior Department in the Biden administration.

Morgan, back to you. Bertha Coombs, thank you. AIG earnings are out and we've got updated numbers from the company on the impact of those Southern California wildfires. Contessa Brewer has the details. Yeah, Morgan, they say half a billion dollars. That's how much they think the net loss will be on California wildfires. And when you're looking at that, it looks like the insurance industry as a whole is bracing for insured losses from the wildfires to be roughly about $45 billion, perhaps, maybe even as high as $50 billion. So to put that into some perspective, the fare plan, it looks like may become insolvent. And these insurers, including AIG and Travelers and Chubb and others, would be on the hook then to have payments to help bail out the fare plan. So we're watching for that. They say that it's early days still, so those numbers

could change. After all, we saw from Travelers today, $1.7 billion was the estimate on what they'll be paying out for the California wildfires. Guys. All right. Contessa, thank you. Well, shares of steelmaker Nucor have been on a tear in 2025 and got an extra boost this week following the latest tariff news out of the White House. We're going to talk exclusively with Nucor's CEO to find out how Washington policy is impacting his business. And speaking of Washington policy, we will be joined by Palmer Luckey, the founder of defense contractor Andrel Industries, for an exclusive conversation about the company's work with Washington, his expectations for the defense industry under the second Trump administration, and so much more. Stay with us. Welcome back. Supermicro just sharing a business update after a big rally for the stock in the past few sessions. Mike Santoli is taking a closer look at the ebbs and

flows of this, to put it mildly, volatile name, Mike. I was going to say less ebb and flow and more just like jump and dive. This is a two-year chart in which Supermicro has gone up 328 percent the hard way, which is kind of sleepy, you know, data center supplier over here. 16 times earnings, no big deal. We get the NVIDIA frenzy, pixie dust, because they are part of that ecosystem. Stock triples in a couple of months in the early part of 2024. And what's interesting is with this little rally, I mean, I don't know how much you want to make of that particular trend line. We'll see if it's trying to bottom and kind of liberate itself from that downtrend but I

also wanted to point out that right here was when the S&P decided to put Supermicro into the S&P 500 they really did chase it and buy it near the highs the index funds did here's how Supermicro has done since that date when it went into the S&P 500 replacing Whirlpool now Whirlpool hasn't exactly done much it's obviously down over that period of time, way underperformed the S&P. But obviously, Supermicro has been a significant drag on the index since it did go in there, down 63 percent, guys. Yeah, for sure. Mike Santoli, thanks. Well, Freshworks shares are popping after beating on both the top and bottom lines. And up next, the business software makers, CEOs is going to break down those numbers with us exclusively before he gets on the analyst call.

You can see it's up 10.5% now. Plus, Android founder Palmer Luckey on his company taking over a $22 billion Army contract from Microsoft. And on the escalating feud between Elon Musk and Sam Altman amid this evolving AI landscape. Stay with us. Welcome back. President Trump and Elon Musk speaking in the Oval Office just moments ago. Eamon Javers has the details. Hi, Eamon. Yeah. Hey there, Morgan. The president and Elon Musk are talking about Doge and its efforts to cut federal government spending. Elon Musk was asked by a reporter in the room if he's conducting a hostile takeover of the federal government and if this is being done with a lack of transparency, as a lot of his

critics say. Here's what Elon Musk had to say just a few moments ago. ELON MUSK, Former U.S. Secretary of State for the United States, Well, first of all, you couldn't ask for a stronger mandate from the public. The public voted, you know, we have a majority of the public voting for President Trump. We've won the House, we've won the Senate. The people voted for major government reform. There should be no doubt about that.

That was on the campaign. The president spoke about that at every rally. The people voted for major government reform, and that's what people are going to get. They're going to get what they voted for. And a lot of times, you know, people that don't get what they voted for, but in this presidency, they are going to get what they voted for. And that's what democracy is all about. Mr. Musk, the White House says that you will identify and excuse yourself from any conflicts of interest that you may have. Does that mean that you are, in effect, policing yourself? What are the checks and balances that are in place to ensure that there is accountability and transparency? Well, we actually are trying to be as transparent as possible.

In fact, we post our actions to the Doge handle on X and to the Doge website. So all of our actions are maximally transparent. In fact, I don't think there's been, I don't know of a case where an organization has been more transparent than the Doge organization. And so, you know, the kind of things we're doing are I think very, very simple and basic.

They're not, you know, what I mentioned, for example, about Treasury, just making sure that payments that go out, taxpayer money that goes out, is categorized correctly, that the payment is explained, that organizations on the do not pay list, which takes a lot to get there, that actually are not paid, which currently they are paid. These are not individual judgment decisions. These are about simply having sensible checks and balances in the system itself to ensure that taxpayer money is spent well. So it's got nothing to do with, say, a contract with some company of mine at all. But if there is a conflict of interest when it comes to you yourself, for instance... So you hear Elon Musk and the president there.

Fascinating moment, Morgan. Almost really evolved into a dual press conference with Elon Musk and President Trump sitting there in the Oval Office talking to reporters for just over a half an hour's time. Elon Musk here at pains to say that he's doing nothing more with Doge than a sort of good government effort to trim any kind of fraudulent spending, any kind of lax attention the Treasury might have had to payments going out that were in some way improper. And Musk really making an effort here to address his critics who have said that what he's doing is sort of under the cover of the dark of night, taking over the federal payment system in a way that appears to the critics to be malicious.

Musk here saying, no, nothing of the sort, guys. This actually reminds me, Eamon, of when you and I spoke to Vivek Ramaswamy, who's now the former co-chair of Doge, and he talked about fiduciary responsibility and treating it like a business. Really fascinating. Stay warm, by the way. I see that snow behind you on the screen. A little chilly here, yep. Amen, Javers. Coming up, we will have much more on Doge and defense spending when we are joined exclusively by Andrel founder Palmer Luckey. Meanwhile, shares of Freshworks higher in overtime by a little more than 9% after the company reported Q4 earnings results moments ago. And joining us now exclusively is Freshworks CEO Dennis Woodside.

Dennis, good to see you. So Freshworks shares have nearly doubled off of the summer lows. If they're trading here tomorrow, they'll be right near 52-week highs. I imagine investors probably wondering, is this pace sustainable? Tell us about the quarter. Well, John, thanks for having me on. And as you know, we build AI-powered software that makes IT and customer support teams more efficient and effective. And, you know, we have over 70,000 companies that have chosen us over larger companies like ServiceNow and Salesforce because we offer enterprise-grade alternatives that are incredibly easy to use, implement, and scale. And that's why businesses like DHL, S&P Global, and Airbus

have all chosen Freshworks over much larger competitors. You saw that in the quarter. You know, these companies, in particular in the mid-market, companies with under 20,000 employees, they're fed up with overpriced solutions and overcomplicated legacy software. And they're choosing us, and that's why you saw the growth that we had last quarter. We grew 22% year over year on a revenue basis. We grew free cash flow 46% year over year. And we added more customers than we have in four years. We had 2,600 customers. So we're doing quite well and we're pretty excited about 2025. Three months ago,

you said that Freshworks won 16 new and expansion deals over $100,000 in annualized recurring revenue. What does it look like for this most recent period? Yeah, so we continue to make really good strides in those larger deals in the upmarket. Just this past quarter, we landed big companies like New Balance and Rawlings. These are leading companies in their industry. And we're taking share everywhere. Over one third of Major League Baseball teams there with us. Over one third of NFL teams there with us. Over about one third of Formula One teams there with us. We're third of Formula One teams there with us. We're winning because we have enterprise-grade software that's fast time to value.

And that's just not as complicated as what our competitors provide. And what about AI feature rollout, your capabilities there? How is that going? What's the pace? Yeah, look, AI is an accelerant to our growth. Every customer I speak with wants to use AI to make customer support more efficient and their IT operations more efficient, especially in that mid-market. When I say mid-market, mid-market companies in the U.S. account for about $10 trillion of economic activity. So that's a huge opportunity for us. An example is a company like

Adapt Health. They have 11,000 employees, sophisticated company. They use our flagship AI product, which is called Freddie AI Copilot, to make their agents more effective so that they can spend more time actually delivering healthcare to their customers. And we're seeing that demand surging, especially in that mid-market. We have over 2,000 customers paying for Freddie Copilot today. We added 500 just in last quarter. So for 2025, we see that trend absolutely continuing. I appreciate you giving overtime viewers the early insight. Dennis, we'll let you get ready for that analyst call. Dennis Woodside, CEO of Freshworks. The stock up about 12 percent. Thank you.

Well, meantime, we have big news in the defense world. Startup Andral Industries is taking over production and future development from Microsoft of the U.S. Army's mixed reality headsets. This is pending Pentagon approval. The integrated visual augmentation system, or IVAS, is based off of Microsoft's HoloLens goggles. It's designed to be used by soldiers both for training and in combat. This is a $22 billion production contract. The change will keep Microsoft as the preferred cloud provider, but Andral would assume the IP, the manufacturing, the workforce, and perhaps most importantly, the accountability. I-VAS has not been without its issues over the past few years as it's been

developed. So joining us now in an exclusive interview is Palmer Luckey, Andral founder, and for that, the founder of VR company Oculus, which was sold to Facebook in 2014. Palmer, it's great to have you back on the show. And I mention that because in some ways this feels like full circle. I was very surprised to find out that with a $22 billion production contract, iVast represents the second largest investment in virtual reality ever behind Meta, which we know made their investments off of the products that you first made more than a decade ago. Your thoughts on what happens next, what this means to take over this contract? Well, you're right that it's a return to form for me in more ways than one. You know, yeah, I started Oculus VR and sold that to Meta before,

and I was there for a few years before they fired me. But even before that, as a teenager, I worked at the USC ICT Mixed Reality Lab at an Army project called Brave Mind that used virtual reality exposure therapy to treat Army veterans with PTSD. And that was really the first time I was exposed to how government technology procurement and development can be done and deployed. And it's definitely something that stuck with me for a really long time. You know, it's also interesting that, you know, some people said that Meta acquired Oculus, but given that they've spent, you know, I mean, what is this, $60 billion, $100 billion? They've, in a way, Oculus kind of sort of took over their company.

But for me, this is a really exciting moment. The idea of putting a heads-up display and a radio and a computer on a soldier is an old one. It's been around since Robert Heinlein's novel Starship Troopers in 1959, at least. And Anduril's been building a lot of the tools that actually make something like that useful. The AI platform that integrates data from all of our sensors, all of our weapons, over 100 existing DoD platforms into a model of the battle space in real time.

That's what you really need to make something like this as powerful of a tool as it should be. Not just the ability to see the thermal spectrum and the visible spectrum and the near IR spectrum, but the ability to see into a digital model of the past, present and, and to seamlessly team with large packs of autonomous weapons. What does this do? And you've, Andral's been growing gangbusters for a number of years now. You've made acquisitions, just recently announced that you're going to build the super factory, for lack of a better term, in Ohio as well. What does adding this contract and everything that goes along with it into the mix do to further expand Anduril? Well, Anduril builds a lot of different systems across a lot of different domains. So, air, land, sea, subsea, space, cyberspace, eventually subterranean. And IVAS and systems

like it are going to be the portal through which the warfighter commands and controls all of these different autonomous weapons, autonomous sensors. It really gets you to a much greater than one-to-one ratio of fighter to system. And I think that by giving people these types of systems, augmenting their view of the real world so that they can share data seamlessly with these robotic systems, so that they can all be working off one common shared view of the world, you can be a lot more effective, a lot more lethal, and keep yourself a lot safer than you would if you're working with the unaided eye, the unaided ear, the unaided mind. This comes as, and I reported on this last week on Friday, I reported that you're raising a series G up to $2.5 billion that would double Andral's valuation to $28 billion pre-money.

What can you tell us about that and how this builds on that momentum? Well, you know, lots of people report lots of things. When we have something going on doing a raise, I'd be down to talk about it. But you're right. Andral's had a lot of traction. We've been winning major fighter jet contracts, major submarine contracts. Now with this, we can continue my vision of augmenting the human form to surpass the limitations of our visual and cognitive systems. I'm one of those crazy people who believes we're going to spend all of our lives or at least a large chunk of our lives looking at the world through, you know, whether you call it AR, VR, augmented reality, wherever you want to call that continuum. I'm a believer that we're going to mediate our view of the world with technology. And this is a powerful step towards doing it for the military first. Eventually, that's going to come to everyone. But I think that the really

important thing here is we're expanding into an area that is directly built on top of human warfighters. We've mostly focused on building robots, robotics, things that are unmanned. We've actually had a warfighter systems business line for a few years now that we've never talked about publicly. And this is, we're going to be rolling into our warfighter systems division, which I've been leaning on the technological development side, kind of focusing on human augmentation, human performance, and what the future of that looks like. You didn't confirm that capital raise. I'm still curious about that. I want to shift gears, too, though, and I want to get your reaction to the comments we just got from Elon Musk in the

Oval Office with President Trump, where he basically talked about transparency around Doge and basically saying that there was an unequivocal mandate from the voting public to come in and reform the public sector. And so just want to get your thoughts on what we are seeing with Doge right now, especially given the fact that you do work so closely with certain aspects of the government. And I'd imagine you have thoughts about efficiency and productivity. I think that it's great. I mean, the first page of our first pitch deck for annual industries to investors said that we would save taxpayers hundreds of billions a year by making tens of billions of dollars a year, trying to go in and destroy spend that should not be spent and

replacing it with systems that are much more efficient. Because when you're spending taxpayer dollars, you have to be a good steward of the money. You know, I've been saying a lot recently, this push by certain politicians to frame this as, well, we didn't elect Elon Musk is nuts. Trump made making a Department of Government Efficiency a key pillar of his campaign. He specifically said he was going to have Elon Musk run it. This is really exactly what people voted for. And there are people saying, oh, well, you know, they're cutting too much. Shouldn't we be spending on this? Shouldn't we be spending on

that? My opinion is it's like a kid complaining that he's not allowed to go out with his friends to the movies when he hasn't done his homework, when he hasn't cleaned his room. You can argue about the merits about whether or not he should go out to the movie or not, whether it's at the right time, whether it's the right movie. But the real problem is that you got to do the work before you can have your fun. And the United States is trillions of dollars in debt. We're going deeper into debt every day. And I find it really hard for me personally to get worked up about any particular program being cut when we're doing so on a credit card. Palmer, lucky. We're going to leave the conversation there. Appreciate the time. Always great to get your insights.

I don't use credit cards. But a lot of people do. Up next, the CEO of Nucor on how President Trump's new imported steel and aluminum tariffs will impact his company's bottom line and other U.S. steelmakers. We'll be right back. Let's check in on some of the biggest overtime movers. Upstart Holdings is the big winner, surging after surprise earnings per share of 26 cents. Analysts had been expecting a loss of 4 cents. Zillow turning in a mixed quarter, beating on revenues but missing on the bottom line. And Lyft is lower after missing revenue estimates. Well, President Trump signed an executive order this week imposing 25 percent tariffs on all steel and aluminum imports, taking effect on March 12th. The news sending shares of U.S. steelmakers higher, including Nucor, which added to big gains

so far on the year. Well, joining us now exclusively is Nucor chairman and CEO Leon Tappalian. Leon, it's great to have you back on the show. Welcome. Thank you, Morgan. And that's exactly where I want to start. Why are blanket tariffs across the board on all U.S. imports necessary right now? You know, if you go back and you look at the backdrop of the steel industry over the last 20 years, we've been in a trade war with China and other nations for a very long time. President Trump understands that, understands the importance of steelmaking in critical sectors like defense, national security, aerospace, and others.

And so the glut of illegally dumped, subsidized steels, currency manipulated programs to find the shores of the U.S. has been a blight on our industry and it's cost tens of thousands of jobs, companies closing. And again, steelmakers like Nucor have continued to profit, but at the same time, we've invested heavily to continue to position ourselves for the future.

But again, it's not a free trade. It's a fair trade in creating a level playing field, and I believe these terrorists are going to do that. So when we talk about closing some of these loopholes on things like trans shipments and as you just mentioned, the dumping of steel by other countries that maybe make their way indirectly into this country, for example, I've heard conversations about, you know, how much steel is coming from places like China through Canada to then make its way here to the U.S., if you start to close those loopholes, what does that do to stoke domestic production? How quickly does that come online? And also, perhaps just as importantly, what does it do to domestic pricing?

You know, as an EAF producer, Morgan, which Nucor is exclusively, we have the ability to ramp up and down very, very quickly, like within minutes. So at the backdrop of the U.S. steel industry, we consume about 100 million tons. 25% of that today is coming in through imports, and that number should be closer to 10%. Of that 25% imports, about 38% of that comes in through Canada and Mexico. And again, it is just what you're saying, circumvention coming into our northern and southern borders where, again, we've got to stop that. We've got to create a level playing field where we can have the healthy steel industry continue to be vibrant, continue to reinvest in our domestic mills, continue to build facilities like we are in West Virginia, Lexington, North Carolina, Kingman, Arizona, and reinvest across this nation. You're already spending a lot on CapEx this year and next year. You just mentioned West Virginia. Does this change that math? Do you now make greater investments in anticipation of greater demand for your products?

You know, over the last five years, we're on about a $16 billion capital campaign that will culminate in next year, at the end of next year, with a startup of West Virginia. However, again, there's optimism. There's optimism with our customers and our customers' customers. So Nucor has the highest credit rating. We have cash on hand. We're in a very, very healthy position to be able to continue to grow both through M&A as well as organic. So, yeah, you can continue to expect that Newport is going to invest in our future. Investors seem to think that tariffs and all the trade policy that is coming out with President Trump is really negotiating tactics. And I wonder what you think the endpoint is with tariffs like this and policy like this? I mean, does it become an opening salvo to renegotiate USMCA?

And if so, how powerful could a renegotiation or amendment of that trade agreement be? Yeah, look, I think it's a fantastic question. And I do think there's a part of that. In his first term in office, we saw him implement the tariffs that turned into the USMCA and some tariff-free quotas. Well, over the years, those have been abused now. We see, for example, in rebar, a 1,200 percent increase of rebar volumes coming in from Mexico, slabs imported from Canada, a 4,000 percent increase in them bringing slabs into the country. So it's got to change.

We've got to create a level playing field and, again, I think a healthy trade relationship with both Canada and Mexico, but further beyond that, with Korea, Argentina, Brazil and the EU. Leon Topalian, it's great to have you on. Thanks for joining me. Thank you, Morgan. Thank you very much. Of Nucor for a very important and nuanced conversation. Indeed. You know, tariffs have been top of mind for a long time. We also had a lot of earnings this hour. DoorDash still up by 6% after initially dipping. Freshworks up by 11%.

And, of course, our viewers heard from them first before the analyst calls, which kick off in just a few seconds. Yeah, we got key inflation data, including CPI tomorrow as well. So that's going to be one to watch. Tight trading range for the major averages. Mixed picture. That does it for us here at Overtime.