Closing Bell - Closing Bell Overtime: Rare Interview With Meta Chief Product Officer Chris Cox On New AR Headset 9/25/24

Episode Date: September 25, 2024

Meta unveiled its long-awaited AR headset at its Meta Connect developers conference. Chief Product Officer Chris Cox joins for a rare interview to talk the company’s AI strategy, spending and election efforts. Micron jumped on strong guidance after earnings; CFRA analyst Angelo Zino on what to do with the stock. Our Pippa Stevens reports on the surge in nuclear energy demand thanks to AI while Cameco CEO Tim Gitzel discusses his company’s plans to meet that demand.

That bell means the end of regulation. Telecom Argentina ringing the closing bell at the New York Stock Exchange. The NASDAQ annual New York Climate Week conference doing the honors at the NASDAQ. Major averages taking a pause from their record rally. Closing mostly in the red. Small caps and energy faring worse. That's the scorecard on Wall Street. But winners stay late.

Welcome to Closing Bell Overtime. I'm John Fort with Morgan Brennan. Well, Micron earnings are just moments away as that stock sits around 40% off its June highs. We'll bring you the results as soon as they cross. Plus, a rare interview with Meta's chief product officer, Chris Cox, as that stock hits record highs. Well, he's going to join us

from the company's Connect conference where Meta just unveiled new AR, VR, and AI initiatives. And the booming opportunity in nuclear energy. The CEO of one of the world's biggest publicly traded uranium miners joins us to talk about the push by big tech and big finance for nuclear power. Now let's get to our market panel. Barbara Duran of BD8 Capital Partners and Adam Krusefouli of Vital Knowledge. Guys, good to see you.

We're still above those mid-July levels on the S&P, but just barely. So how do you position yourself as long as we're in this range, say, between around 5,700, 5,400? Well, I think the market is going to stay pretty much in range here at this point. You know, we've had the first Fed rate cut. People know we're at the beginning of an easing cycle. I think right now the November probabilities of another Fed cut is 100 percent. It's just a question of 25 or 50 bps. And by year end, the probabilities are from here another three quarters to a full percentage point cut. But the valuation is at 21. So I think investors are going to continue to see them looking, you know, for laggards or rotating, looking at the interest rate sensitive stocks and sectors, which have run up. And then, of course, going back to the mega cap tech, because they have

the longstanding growth. Bob, as you take a breath, I want to just note, and I'll let you finish, Micron results are out. We're going through and the stock is up almost 9% at the moment. Go ahead and finish your thought, please. No. Interesting. Can't wait to talk about Bicron. But anyway, so I think that you just, you continue to look for individual stocks. I think the sectors, you've had utilities at highs, financials at highs. You have the interest rate sectors, which should, interest rate sensitive sectors, which should continue to do well. Question is, we don't know, you know, what the earnings will be. And that's going to start in the next three weeks or so, you know, when the banks kick off. And that's going to start in the next three weeks or so, you know, with the banks kick off. And we're going to see what the forward guidance is, what

companies are seeing. And it should be optimistic. All right. Well, we're ready with those results. Bob, hang on. That's Micron. Seema Modi has the numbers. Seema. John, Q4 numbers in. $1.18 adjusted versus Wall Street estimate of $1.13. So it's a beat for Micron in the fourth quarter. Sales also topping expectations at $7.75 billion. Analysts were looking for $7.6 billion. We have comments from CEO Sanjay Mahotra. Micron delivering 93% year-over-year revenue growth in fiscal Q4. Robust AI demand drove a strong ramp of our data center DRAM products in our industry-leading high bandwidth memory. He goes on to talk about the opportunity in NAND revenue. And we are watching shares up over 10%.

Of course, John, we've been talking about how Micron has been an underperformer in the semiconductor sector, down about 40% from its June high. And expectations were on the lower side. So here we have Micron beating on the fourth quarter. We'll get you more details as they come in. Yeah, I was hearing some doubts about this quarter. They seem to have done well on these initial numbers. Tim Imodi, thank you.

Micron's CEO is going to break down these results tomorrow, 9 a.m., on Squawk on the street. Adam Christofouli, don't know if you want to reflect on Micron here versus the expectations. Or also talk about just sort of how the equal weight S&P is not doing equally well to the S&P overall? Yeah, so there definitely were some concerns around Micron, especially on the guidance front. So it looks like they exceeded what was a relatively low bar compared to other areas of tech. And I think the numbers, and I'll have to go through the details, but the numbers speak to the secular demand trends that are still in place for a lot of these AI levered companies. We saw it a couple weeks ago with Oracle and now with Micron.

And you have seen tech reassert itself, especially today, a little bit on the leadership front. And this should certainly help that momentum continue. And I think for the broader market, valuations are very expensive, certainly not appealing. But you do have these powerful macro forces, one of which is healthy corporate performance. You also have easing occurring globally. So you have the Fed and now you have China. The news out of China Monday night is going to be important. Also, this inflation and then relatively resilient growth and all those forces are going to are going to continue to act, place upper pressure on the market, even though valuations are an obstacle.

Barb, I want to get your thoughts on these results we just got from Mike Grun, especially as the CEO is talking about robust AI demand and a sentiment was pretty lousy. There's been a lot of de-risking in this name in recent weeks ahead of this report. Yeah, I mean, de-risking is the word there. I mean, as you mentioned earlier, the stock is down year to date almost 40 percent. It's trading at about 12.5 PE versus its last five-year average of about 21. So the risk-reward was very interesting. And of course, they're just coming off a cycle. And their product in general is very commoditized. So very good times. They do well. But it's really been about the AI and the server business and what the demand would be,

you know, in their DRAM business, which is going to interrupt you again. I'm sorry, but we've got more details from Sima Modi. We just want to get to her and then I'll come back to you. Well, Morgan, it's a nice transition, because as we talk about the commoditization of memory, one of the big topics has been gross margins. Can those be held up in this environment? And for the fourth quarter for Micron, gross margins adjusted at 36.5%. That is higher than the estimate of 34.6%. So Micron beating on gross margins.

And even when they look out to the first quarter, earnings, revenue, and gross margin guidance well above guidance. So they are feeling more optimistic about the near-term and longer-term picture here as we watch shares up about 9% in overtime, Morgan. Seema, thank you. Barb, I'll go back to you to finish your thought, especially as we do get that guidance. And perhaps it does imply that, you know, the memory part of the business, the commoditized part of the business is starting to do a little better here. Yeah, I think there's probably two parts to that. One is the commoditized. You may be seeing pricing firmer.

They also have different layers of pricing. But 70 percent of their business, you know, is in the DRAM part. But about 20 percent of the DRAMs are in the high memory, in the high bandwidth memory. And that's where you're seeing a lot more demand, you know, whether it's from smartphones and cars, PCs and data centers. So I think that's probably the exciting part of the call that they're going to talk about and the demand they're seeing there. I mean, the high bandwidth memory, apparently there's competition there, but their performance is about 30 percent better. So they've got a good lead and they're sold out there. So I think that's going to be really one of the big growth engines. So I think, again, this has

probably seen its low and the stock can continue to move higher from here. All right. Of course, shares are up right now, 9 percent in overtime. We've got more breaking news. This time it's on the Fed. Steve Leisman has the details. Steve. Thanks, Morgan. Fed Governor Andriana Kugler out with a speech at this hour saying she strongly supported the 50 basis point move and she expects more rate cuts to come. She says if inflation progresses as she expects and that progress continues, she will support additional rate cuts. No mention on how big a cut she would support. She said the Fed needs to balance continued progress on bringing inflation down with avoiding unnecessary economic pain and weakness. She says expect the consumers to moderate their spending a bit.

Notes the rising delinquency rates as the labor market has rebalanced. And she sees broad-based cooling. And just to put some meat on the bones of what Barbara was talking about earlier, yes, 100 percent chance of a rate cut in November, but now a 62 percent probability, guys, of a 50 basis point cut in November. And join us tomorrow, Morgan. We'll be talking to exclusively the Treasury Secretary Janet Yellen. We'll talk about risk to the economy, how the economy is going, the Treasury market, and all sorts of fun and interesting things like the debt and deficit. Oh, can't wait for that. Steve Leisman, thank you. Adam, I'm going to go to you with this because that last comment about broad based cooling in the labor market. How do you see that?

Yeah, so, you know, we've seen very delvish rhetoric from the Fed really going back to Jackson Hole with Powell's speech then and then, obviously, the recent decision with the 50 basis point cut. And the market's pricing at about 80 basis points over the final two meetings of this year. And we've seen a couple of officials speak since the meeting. Tomorrow, there's a lot more on the schedule. But nearly everyone has been quite supportive of the decision. Clearly, the bias has shifted towards the employment end of the mandate away from inflation. Next week, we'll bring a bunch of important labor data points with the September jobs report next Friday. That'll be a critical data point to watch. But like I said, I think growth is relatively

resilient. I don't think you're seeing it really crash. Growth is cooling more in the soft landing territory than anything more pernicious. And that's kind of the sweet spot for stocks. So that type of rhetoric from Fed officials, you haven't seen a lot of people come out, a lot of Fed officials come out and attempt to kind of second guess or push back against the the the dovish tone that the markets have adopted lately. So that's that's positive for markets. OK, Adam, Chris, Fuli and Barbara Duran, thank you both for joining us. It's also interesting because we've had some labor unrest to right. Boeing strike, text drawn strike and the possibility now that's growing that next week you could see East Coast and Gulf Coast port workers strike as well. Yeah, we'll see where that sort of tug of war ends up.

All right. Well, now let's turn to senior markets commentator Mike Santoli for a look at a divergence that's going on within the Magnificent Seven. Mike. Yeah, starting to treat these as individual stories and themes as opposed to one big kind of mega block as it was for much of the first half of this year. In particular, Meta, the clear winner, the only one of the mega cap tech names that has been really steadily making new highs recently. You see it relative to Apple, Microsoft and Alphabet, which all kind of look like the same chart at this point. So it shows you that the rest have been sidelined. Obviously, this is a year to date look. If you go back a couple of years, it's going to appear a little bit different. But it is interesting that you've seen this crowding effect into meta. And it also applies to its valuation is specifically relative to Alphabet,

kind of close in the same sector and and obviously both advertising-driven businesses. If you take a look at the premium that is now built up in Meta relative to Alphabet, it's something that hasn't really been the case for a little while. This is a five-year look. And, of course, when Meta was in its kind of early hyper-growth phase, it had a more higher valuation. But here you see pretty much in parallel. And then Meta's P.E. goes up to about 24 just in the last little while here as Alphabet's declines to below a market multiple.

And of course, what you've seen is Meta being viewed as less regulatory pressure on that company, perhaps a cleaner play on A.I. as opposed to being potentially disrupted by it. And I guess the question here is, is it going to be justified longer term by the business fundamentals? I don't think Meta looks like super expensive or anything here at 24 times from the overall markets at 21. But it does show you that maybe folks are hiding in that stock in the short term, Morgan. Yeah, I mean, you sort of already answered it. But I do think it's really fascinating, this idea that maybe this is more of an Alphabet struggling or at least the perception of Alphabet struggling story versus maybe a Meta just hitting it out of the park story. Yeah, that is the stark piece of it is

obviously Alphabet having its valuation compressed and feeling as if it's kind of hemmed in on a few different sides. Whether that's true or not, that's absolutely the perception of the company. And as I mentioned, they're both communication services. Investment managers want to maintain exposure to the broad themes of, you know, ad-driven social media businesses and all the rest. And so Meta seems like it has a cleaner story for the time being. All right. Mike Santelli, we'll see you later this hour.

Speaking of Meta, coming up, a rare interview with the company's head of product, Chris Cox, from the sidelines of the MetaConnect conference, where the company just unveiled new AR and VR products and updates around AI. And up next, analyst reaction to Micron's earnings as that stock takes a big move higher 10 percent get you set before the earnings call at the bottom of the hour overtime's back into welcome back to overtime Micron shares up, more than 10% now after reporting results moments ago. CEO Sanjay Mehrotra saying the company is entering the next fiscal year with the best competitive positioning in Micron's history while forecasting record revenue for the first quarter.

Joining us now is CFRA research senior analyst Angelo Zeno. Has a buy rating on the stock. Angelo, when I looked at the guidance here, I was like, wow, particularly on EPS, $1.74 plus or minus eight cents, I think, goes well above consensus expectations. What do you think is happening here? Yeah, you're absolutely right. I think it's all about the guidance here, specifically on the gross margin side of things. I think the guidance was about and a half on a non-gap side of things we were looking for actually about two percentage points below that so that kind of is why you have the upside to the eps number about 20 cents above

where we were expecting so it looks like you know at least from i i think it has more to do with the mixed side of things it looks like they kind of posted some really good solid state numbers on the nan side of things the uh you know clearly on the d-ram side of things. It looks like they kind of posted some really good solid state numbers on the NAND side of things. Clearly on the DRAM side of things, that high band with memory theme is something that's really going to play out here over the next couple of quarters, especially as we get into the second half of next year. So it looks like it's more along the lines of kind of them shifting towards these higher value offerings out there on the data center server side of things. And that's really contributing to the improved kind of pricing landscape landscape as well as kind of the margin outlook and earnings trajectory so is this pop here in overtime a reset to reality based on how good these numbers are in

the mix or you know more short covering yeah i mean listen i think i think the question right now is you know what is that kind of long-term view in terms of, you know, where the margins can kind of go to, where the earnings can kind of go to as we kind of go not only into the second half of next year, but into 2026. Our view is, you know, clearly when you kind of look at the guide here, at least on the revenue side of things, $8.7 billion, I think that already kind of passes the high watermark that they've achieved in the past, kind of in mid-week 2022. So you kind of look at where the revenue trajectory here is. With kind of still minimal high bandwidth memory kind of numbers this quarter, we think there's significant upside left here, both kind of on the margin side of things and that earnings trajectory relative to where consensus expectations are. Yeah, And you're really bullish on this name. I mean, your price target is 140 bucks a share. We just moved back above 100 here in overtime with a move that we're seeing in after hours trading.

But what actually propels us to that? Is it this AI demand surge? Is it the recovery in the other parts of the business that have been more beleaguered? Yeah, I mean, listen, Morgan, I think it has a lot to do with the fact that similar to in many respects where the street was underestimating the potential for NVIDIA, and I'm not necessarily calling this an NVIDIA story, but this is clearly a content growth story that we're seeing within kind of the memory side of things. When you kind of look at high bandwidth memory, by far the most complicated, you know, product that has ever been created on the memory side of things. And you're kind of looking at the need for a lot more supply to create this high bandwidth memory, 3x the amount relative to their traditional DDR5 memory. So when you kind of look going into the first half of 2025, we do think

the supply continues to tighten up. We think pricing continues to increase. You get that improved pricing mix as well. That'll support profitability. But we think the street continues to underestimate really the potential here on the shift towards these kind of higher value offerings. And whether or not the street kind of adds more value to this story, whether or not they're willing to kind of offer a higher multiple out there, I think remains to be seen. But when you kind of look at 2026 expectations right now, this is a name that's trading less than 10 times on a 2026 basis,

probably because the street right now thinks that it's probably a peak year in 2026, but that still remains to be seen. Okay. Angelo Zeno, thanks for joining us. With shares of Micron now up 12% here in overtime. And other chips names, including NVIDIA, moving higher in sympathy. When we come back, we will take you to Meta's Connect event in Menlo Park for an interview with the company's chief product officer, Chris Cox, as the stock hits a record high and the company unveils its latest bets on virtual and augmented reality. And an update on the activist battle at medical tech

company Massimo. Founder Joe Chiani, a past guest on the show, has stepped down as CEO after losing a proxy battle with activist Politan Capital Management. Massimo naming Michelle Brennan as interim CEO. She was nominated by Politan to the company's board last year. Shares finishing higher 6 percent. Over time, we'll be right back. Welcome back. Meta hitting a record high today. That's after today's MetaConnect developer conference, where the company announced its long-awaited AR glasses prototype,

along with a new VR headset and new AI features. Well, joining us now for a rare and exclusive interview is Meta Chief Product Officer Chris Cox, along with our own Julia Borsten. Julia. Morgan, thanks so much. Chris, thanks so much for being with us here today. You've been with Facebook since the very beginning, the very early days.

And today we just saw the unveiling of the most futuristic technology Meta has ever unveiled. These new Orion augmented reality glasses, they're lightweight, but there's no date or price tag on them. No sense of when they'll launch.

Why are you investing so much in this technology, and how will it eventually tie into your business? Yeah, so today we announced a prototype of Orion. We wanted to show the demo to people just to show what we've been working on. It's the most advanced pair of glasses ever made. It's lightweight. It's got really powerful computing in it. You can see through it so you can make eye contact, but they project a holographic display

so that you can summon a screen or you can look at your messages, you can watch video, you can have a video chat with somebody. We've been investing for this for a long time just because we are asking the question sort of what comes after the smartphone and what happens in a world where you're not sort of constantly checking a phone in order to understand how to interact with other people or to check whatever it is you're looking

at? So this is a major leap forward for technology. It's a big step forward for our sort of goal to help define the next generation of computing. And it was the most, I'd say, premium thing we showcased today. Yeah, it was really fascinating to see. What I'm curious, though, and I see you're holding a pair of the Meta Ray-Ban glasses. These are AI glasses, right? You can ask them questions.

They can give you answers or information or help you set reminders. When will we see those augmented reality features maybe incorporated into something like this? I'm trying to understand what the business potential is here. Are you going to be selling this type of AR capability for $1,000 or will it eventually in two years be $300? Yeah, so these things are doing pretty well right now in the market. You can buy them in just about any Ray-Ban store. You can talk to them. You can ask questions about what's happening in front of you. You can ask it to play music. You can make calls with it. They've been very popular. You can't tell us how many you've sold. We're not announcing that today, but we did announce a new model today.

So we're starting to be available in more styles and ranges. These look good. They're comfortable. They're easy to use. We've worked hard to get latency down, which is how long does it take for the assistant to respond? Can you interrupt it? In order for these things to be natural, you want the voice interactions to be really, really close to the way you'd talk to somebody else, which means you respond immediately, you can interrupt each other, etc. So a lot of big advancements coming there as quickly as we can. Chris, it's Morgan. It's great to have you on the show. I mean, one of the key messages or takeaways for me today from the Connect conference was the fact that AI is driving product value. And I wonder how you are thinking about that right now, if this is a situation where Meta goes it alone, or would you actually entertain the thought of

integrating into another platform like, say, Apple Intelligence? So the big announcement on the AI side for consumers today was Meta AI Voice. So you can now talk to Meta AI. It's got really good prosody, so it's very good at sort of a natural melody and a way of interacting with it. And as I mentioned before, the latency is really low. So starting today in the US, you can start talking to Meta AI and have a natural conversation in order to talk to it we have open sourced llama which is our large language foundation model so there are already think over 400 million downloads of folks who are integrating it into all kinds of different interfaces whether those be new types of devices whether they are different cloud providers, etc. So we've been very open about our approach.

I think that distinguishes us from others. And as I mentioned today, it means that our models get better faster. Hey, Chris, it's John Ford. I'm most curious about the MetaQuest 3S, which you announced today at $300, mixed reality, breakthrough price point. But my question is about the business model because often if you've got one of these subsidized hardware situations it's because if it's a gaming console a company expects to make money on the software. Otherwise it's kind of hard to scale, isn't it, without losing a whole lot of money if people want to buy, you know, hundreds of thousands or even millions of these. So what we're seeing there is there's a huge now growing range of apps so the same business model you see for a device category like a smartphone

applies here which is that we benefit when developers are using our systems we also know that more developers means that the toolkit for building in mixed reality gets better faster. We see that eventually applying to AR. So everything we talked about today with Orion will accrue benefit from all the stuff that's happening today in VR. So in that way, for the long-term business model of the company, it behooves us to have a toolkit, an active developer ecosystem, lots of folks making refinements and improvements, and then development in each category, whether it's entertainment, whether it's fitness,

whether it's gaming, whether it's utility, productivity we showed off today, some of the work that you can do to make your headset into a workstation. So the same business model will apply that you've seen in previous generations of hardware. And in the meantime, having an ecosystem building around it is going to be a big part of our long-term play. Now, Chris, putting all this into context here and the fact that today we saw announcements about entertainment, about enterprise, sort of integrating Microsoft OS, the fact that you have fitness and gaming and all of these different things. But you started off in the early days of Facebook inventing the newsfeed. And the newsfeed was totally central to what Facebook was

about. But more recently, we've seen Facebook really and meta really move away from news. And how did the elections move away from anything political? What's behind that decision? So the main change there is for years now, we've been hearing people say, you know what, I don't want my newsfeed to be full of political opinions. Some of that is good. If you want a lot of that, that's fine. But on the margin, people are interested most importantly in their friends and family. After that, in entertainment, being informed, hearing from creators they love. So most of this has been in the past in response to an evolving opinion from the people using our products on what they want.

On elections in particular, we're very, very focused, not just on the upcoming U.S. election, but on every major election we've had this year. This is the largest election year in human history in terms of people going to the polls. We've had India, we've had Brazil, Mexico, Indonesia, the Philippines. We're very focused on protecting those elections, making sure that we're proud of the way that Facebook, Instagram, WhatsApp, and our other platforms show up, keeping an eye out for anything that could go wrong and making sure we're anticipating it and being a great platform. Well, the company is certainly a lot more diversified and not just

away from news, but in general than it was when you invented the news feed in Facebook's early days. Thanks so much for joining us. Chris Cox, chief product officer for Meta. Appreciate your time. Guys, I'm going to send it back to you. All right. Our thanks as well to you, Julia Boorstin. Time now for a CNBC News update with Bertha Coombs. Bertha. Hey, John. Hackers linked to the Chinese government have broken into several U.S. Internet providers in yet another cyber attack. According to the Wall Street Journal, the campaign called Salt Typhoon breached cable and broadband infrastructure to gain access to data stored by service providers or launch a cyber attack. Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez is calling for New York City Mayor Eric Adams to resign as federal corruption investigations plague his administration.

Ocasio-Cortez told the New York Times it would be, quote, for the good of the city. The congresswoman is the most senior elected official to call for Adams ouster. Mayor Adams insists he will not step down. And Shohei Ohtani's historic home run ball that founded the 50-50 club is up for sale. Sports memorabilia auction house Golden will auction off the ball starting on Friday with an opening bid of $500,000. Or if you have $4.5 million to spare, a little pocket change, you can have it until October 9th to buy it outright. But the bidding needs to hit the reserve price of $3 million by that point. It will sell then to the highest bidder.

So you could get it for less than $4 a half if, you know, you wait. I have a feeling with all the excitement around him that it's going to do quite well. Bertha Koops, thank you. After the break, Mike Santoli is going to look at what the latest data and the moves in the bond market are signaling about the odds of a soft landing. And later, shares of uranium mining giant Cameco have been on a hot streak, rising nearly 20 percent in the last week as big tech and big finance get behind nuclear energy. The CEO of Cameco will Emily Wilkins has the details. Emily. Hey, Morgan. Well, Congress has taken one huge step forward to preventing a government shutdown

the House, just passing legislation that will keep the government funded at least until December 20th. Now, that bill will go on to the Senate, and the Senate has already agreed to limit debate to two hours, which means it is more than likely that they will pass that tonight and get that to Biden's desk well in advance of the September 30th deadline. Now, of course, this does not mean that the funding battle is over. This is merely sort of a Band-Aid to get us through the elections. That means Congress is going to have to come back and continue duking it out over what to fund the government at next year. And it's particularly important for defense spending.

I mean, that is really an area where we've seen a lot of lawmakers, conservative and Democrats, saying, hey, we are going to need to increase the amount of money that the Pentagon gets. Otherwise, the U.S. could be in trouble around the world. So that funding debate will resume as soon as Congress gets back. And of course, a lot of what we're going to see is going to depend on what the outcome of the November election is. Guys. All right. For sure. Emily Wilkins, thank you. And the news keeps coming. New headlines just crossing on OpenAI. Kate Rooney back with the details. Kate. Hey, John. So we have some new details, according to Reuters, around OpenAI's plan to turn into a for-profit business. Reuters reporting that OpenAI plans to remove nonprofit board controls and turn into what's known as a public benefit corporation.

That's what rival anthropic structure looks like and also what companies like Ben & Jerry's, Patagonia, for example, do. It's unlike traditional corporations. They need to consider impact on society, things like the environment. So PBCs are quite a little bit different than a for profit. They're taxed like other for profit entities, but also have sort of nuanced here. But again, a totally different structure here, according to Reuters. They're citing sources familiar with the matter. A source does tell me that no decisions have been made yet about the final structure and that this company is in the midst of closing a multi-billion dollar funding round. It's set to be the largest in Silicon Valley history in terms of a single fundraise and would value the company

around $150 billion. Reuters also reporting in here that CEO Sam Altman is set to receive equity in the company for the first time, which could be worth $150 billion after all of this restructuring. It will also remove the cap on returns for investors. The nonprofit, according to Reuters, will still exist and then continue to own a minority stake in the company. We did reach out to OpenAI, a spokesperson telling us, quote, we remain focused on building AI

that benefits everyone. They say they're working with the board to ensure that we are best positioned to succeed in our mission. The nonprofit is core to our mission and will continue to exist. Guys, back to you. Kate, did you say $150 billion with a B? B. That is a B. These numbers are eye-popping. $150 billion valuation, plus that's reportedly what Sam Altman's equity stake is set to be worth. All right. Kate, thanks. We'll see what percentage of that he ends up with. Let's bring back Mike Santoli now for a look at what the latest economic data and bonds are saying about the odds of a soft landing.

Mike. Yeah, John, check in on the city economic surprise index for the U.S. It shows you are up off the low. So this means that economic numbers are coming in below expectations in aggregate, but only slightly so. So it's below the zero line, but well off the recent lows from that growth scare we had back in, let's say, spring and midsummer. And it's consistent with this idea of a soft landing where you're kind of bumping between sustainable expansion and perhaps slipping into something worse. And the fact that you're coming in just a little bit below forecast when those forecasts are for relatively decent growth shows you that is the case. You also will note these major lows where we really thought the economy was in trouble. Now take a look at the 10 year Treasury yield. You're going to see some significant lows over the last two years also in those places. And you see us lifting

off the recent bottom right at the Fed meeting. We are kind of leaking higher in yield around three and three quarters percent, 380. Now, that's not necessarily a scary number. We were at 4 percent before the August 2nd jobs report that got everybody so concerned about the economy. But you will see here, of course, inflation expectations matter and all the rest. I still see this is also in a benign zone where soft landing is probably the underlying premise to where treasuries are trading at the moment, Morgan. Good thing to be watching, especially with the 210 yield curve continuing to steepen here. All right, Mike Santoli, thank you. Up next, why big banks and big tech are making a big bet on tripling nuclear energy in the U.S. by 2050. And speaking of nuclear, up next, an exclusive interview with the CEO of uranium giant Comico on how rising energy demand is impacting his business.

We'll be right back. Welcome back to Overtime. Surging demand to power AI data centers is generating a push for more nuclear energy, and big tank and big banks are leading that charge. Pippa Stevens has the details. Pippa. Hey, John. Well, there is already a lot of momentum behind nuclear, and now the world's biggest banks are on board with 14 financial heavyweights including Bank of America, Citi,

Morgan Stanley and Goldman Sachs throwing their support behind tripling nuclear output by 2050. Jim Schaefer from Guggenheim, which also signed on, told me, quote, Wall Street is ready to fund the growth of the new nuclear industry today and for generations to come. Now, that support is notable because nuclear projects have traditionally faced very steep price tags. Plus, tech companies are now interested in that emissions-free baseload power, even if it's at a higher price, which is what we saw with Constellation bringing Three Mile Island back online to power Microsoft data centers.

And investors are clearly taking note. Independent power producer Vistra is now the top S&P stock this year, leapfrogging NVIDIA with shares tripling in 2024. Other nuclear owners Constellation and Talon also seeing outsized gains. And while uranium stocks have faltered this year, the URA and URNM both up double digits on the month. Morgan. All right. Pippa Stevens, thank you. For more on the opportunities in nuclear energy, let's bring in Tim Gitzel, CEO of Cameco, a major producer of uranium. His company's stock has jumped nearly 20 percent

in a week. Tim, it's great to have you on Overtime. Welcome. Thank you, Morgan. So I realize that you own investments across a nuclear fuel cycle. You have controlling interests in quite a few reserves. But in terms of what you're actually pulling out of the ground with uranium right now, operations, the operations footprint doesn't seem to be very big. When we hear about the demand cycle and what this looks like over the coming years does that change well maury today we're matching demand we went through a 10-year period after fukushima that wasn't very pretty i have to tell you for our company or for the industry where we overproduced and so we took some tough medicine we shut down some of our largest high-grade mines and now we're bringing them back on as demand is calling for it.

And so we're matching the market now. But you see, and you just reported on it, the market's growing very quickly. It's very exciting times for us. So we will bring on more production as the market calls for it. Okay. And what does that timeline look like? How are you gaming that out, especially as a key region of the world, which is Russia, Ukraine, has some of the largest reserves and we're seeing that supply limited?

Yeah, well, that's, you know, since the Russians moved into Ukraine, it's really changed the game. The Russians were responsible for probably overall 30 percent of the fuel supply in the world. And so, you know, you can't turn those big ships on a dime. So countries continue to buy Russian materials, including in the U.S. But over time, looking to phase out of that. And as they phase out, they're coming our way and they're looking for more uranium and conversion and enrichment from the West. And so we're ramping up our facilities in Canada. We are wrapping up our MacArthur River mine. And we're looking at doing that over time and then Cigar Lake. And so, as I say, we will

match the demand as it comes. Tim, between Three Mile Island, Fukushima and Homer Simpson, I think in the popular imagination, nuclear's brand has been iffy for a while. Are we perhaps experiencing a rebranding of nuclear happening now? And if so, what will it take for it to stick? Well, you know, John, you see, and I just heard your report earlier on the data centers and the hyperscalers and the amount of energy they're needing. We were seeing that coming before with the, you know, the race to decarbonize and electrify everything. So people look at their options. People don't love coal. They maybe don't love oil, don't love gas, don't love nuclear, don't like damming up a new river, but they want the

lights to come on when they flip the switch. And so taking another look at nuclear, and we have 94 reactors in the US. We have 20 in Canada. We were good at it at one point. We built them and built them very well. And we need to get back to that again. And that's what we're doing. And so is your expectation that they are being built better or should investors expect that we're just sort of one earthquake away from having to question all this again? No, I don't think we are. I think we are. We've learned lessons just like any other industry. The airline industry learns lessons every time they have an incident. So have we. And so, you know, today there's 440 operating nuclear reactors.

There's another 60 under construction. China's building, I think China has at least 30 of those under construction. We just opened two new units in Augusta, Georgia, for Southern Company, the Vogel units. Real success. We need to keep going now and keep building because the world needs clean, 24-7 nuclear energy. And so we've talked about your stock and the stock of power players jumping on all the excitement investors have about demand, but uranium spot prices are actually still down something like 12 percent since the start of the year. What moves that?

Well, I think it just took a bit of a breather because we were on a bit of a tear. If you look back a few years ago, we were at about $20 a pound for uranium. Today on the spot market, it was 80 or 81. So we've been on a rip. We went up over 100 on some of the Russian news and other. So we're leveling out, but we see a really bright future. It takes us time to build new units, but we're seeing around the world, here in North America, over in Europe, Eastern Europe, China, India, all looking to grow their nuclear programs,

and that's great news for our company. OK. Tim Gitzel of Chemico. Thanks for joining us. My pleasure. Thank you. Well, Costco is the big name on tomorrow's earnings calendar. But there's also a ton of economic data that needs to be on your radar as well. You've got your Wall Street look ahead next. And another check here on Micron rocketing higher in overtime on strong earnings now up 13 percent. Overtime will be right back. Welcome back at CNBC's Women and Wealth event today.

I sat down with Teresa Nist. Now, you may recognize Nist from her appearance on a hit dating show last year featuring people of a certain age. But what you may not know is she built a successful career in finance after raising her kids. Her journey started as a stay-at-home mother who never finished college. I went to the library. I took every book out on investing. I read every single book. And then, I don't know what happened. We got a computer. We got on the library. I took every book out on investing. I read every single book. And then, I don't know what happened. We got a computer. We got on the internet. I started watching CNBC myself, and I started day trading. And I was hooked. I was so completely passionate

about the stock market. So if you asked me if I wanted to be on an island sipping a nice cocktail, I'd say, no, I want to research stocks. NIST actually interned at CNBC. She got her first job in finance at the age of 46. Now a senior compliance and operations liaison at World Investments, NIST advises other women who may be starting a new career or reentering the workforce to lean into their experience. The thing you have to do is key in on the skills that you already possess that are relevant to that field. And if you don't know that much about the field,

research it, go on company websites, attend webinars, read books, learn as much as you can, know the lingo of the industry, and just realize all of the skills that you have that are relevant to that position. And then maybe when you do your resume, you don't have to do it chronologically, you can do it in the order of the skill set that matches what the employer wants. And before you go into this interview, learn as much as you possibly can about the

job, about the company, and then go as you possibly can about the job, about the company, and then go in and really know what the job description is. Now, she also really stressed confidence and passion, how much passion can make up for what's on paper as well. And this process is a really inspiring conversation. All right. That advice is just golden. All right.

Key readings on consumer spending and the labor market could move the market tomorrow. Got details straight ahead. And don't forget, you can catch us on the go by following the Closing Belt Overtime podcast in your favorite podcast app. We'll be right back. It is time for your Wall Street look ahead. Costco is the big name on tomorrow's earnings calendar. We'll also get results from CarMax, Vail Resorts, Jabil and Accenture. And on the economic front, investors will digest second quarter real GDP, the August durable goods and pending home sales reports, as well as the weekly jobless claims data. And on overtime, don't miss the first on CNBC interview with Southwest CEO Bob Jordan from the company's investor day. It's the first time he'll discuss

Elliott Management's campaign to replace him as CEO. Yeah, that is a do not miss interview. That's going to be happening right here on overtime. Can't wait for that. In the meantime, really range bound and down for the markets. We hit all time highs for the down the S&P again today. This is the 42nd all time high for the S&P, but we still finished fractionally lower off of that. The NASDAQ, of course, slightly, slightly higher. And NVIDIA back above $3 trillion. I'm still just very curious about how much equity Sam Altman is going to come away with in this open AI company that's going to be worth probably between $100 and $ billion dollars, sort of like retroactively granted to kind of a founder who hasn't had equity up to this point. Never seen something like this before. No, it's unprecedented and certainly fascinated. And as we get more of

these details, of course, we will bring them to our viewers because it's one of the hottest startups in the world right now. That does it for us at Overtime.