Motley Fool Money - Travis Kelce’s Six Flags Activist Role & the Rise of Celebrity Investors

Episode Date: October 22, 2025

We discuss the growing prevalence of celebrities being involved in big investment moves by VC and hedge funds, including Travis Kelce taking a role in Jana Partners’ 9% stake in Six Flags. We also debate the launch of ChatGPT Atlas and a potential deal between Warner Bros. Discovery and Skydance. Travis Hoium, Lou Whiteman, and Rachel Warren discuss: - Six Flags activists - ChatGPT gets a browser - Interest in a Warner Bros. Discovery buyout Companies discussed: Warner Bros. Discovery (WBD), Alphabet (GOOG, GOOGL), Six Flags (FUN). Host: Travis Hoium Guests: Lou Whiteman, Rachel Warren Engineer: Dan Boyd Disclosure: Advertisements are sponsored content and provided for informational purposes only. The Motley Fool and its affiliates (collectively, “TMF”) do not endorse, recommend, or verify the accuracy or completeness of the statements made within advertisements. TMF is not involved in the offer, sale, or solicitation of any securities advertised herein and makes no representations regarding the suitability, or risks associated with any investment opportunity presented. Investors should conduct their own due diligence and consult with legal, tax, and financial advisors before making any investment decisions. TMF assumes no responsibility for any losses or damages arising from this advertisement. We’re committed to transparency: All personal opinions in advertisements from Fools are their own. The product advertised in this episode was loaned to TMF and was returned after a test period or the product advertised in this episode was purchased by TMF. Advertiser has paid for the sponsorship of this episode. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠megaphone.fm/adchoices Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Travis Kelsey is taking an activist role at Six Flags. So are we going to get Taylor World next? Molly Fool Money starts down. Welcome to Motley Fool Money. I'm joined today by Lou Whiteman and Rachel Warren. Look, the big news over the past 24 hours has been Travis Kelsey taking an activist role. At least that's what the headlines say at Six Flags. Jana Partners is actually the one I think fronting a lot of this money.

But Lou, this is at least interesting. the interest here is that, you know, he has a background going to six flags, but we also have Dolly Wood, Dolly Parton, is this going to be Taylor Swift building her own theme parks? Is that the next thing here? I hate to say it would probably work, right? But no. Absolutely it would work. Yeah. I go. I don't think that's what's going here. But look, at the end of the day, I love activists. I've worked with activists my whole career. And a lot of it is activists is just a piece. are campaign at heart, okay? You can have correct ideas about a company, but if you can't get those ideas out into the world, into the, you know, to the shareholders, you're still going to lose,

even if you're right. So there is always an element of trying to attract attention to yourself. A lot of times it's with really over-the-top language. It's about accusations. There's a lot of ways to do it. But, look, Jana has used celebrities before. They used Dwayne Way to the NBA and picture of Cecee Sabathia when they went after Fresh Pet. Famously, Starboard Value, another firm. They used Shaquille O'Neal to go after Papa John's. That at least seems more successful. Do you see Shaq in those commercials? Well, but, you know, it all works. And yeah, no, I mean, so this is just a way of going at it. I think if you look at Six Flags, very, very ripe for an activist here. It's been a disaster.

The stock's down 50% year-to-date. No one is going to these parks at the, in the volumes that were supposed to. They did a merger with Cedar Fair that was supposed to solve this. It didn't. So, you know, Jana, I don't know if Janna wants to say, you need to improve marketing. You need to improve your customer experience. In a way, Six Flags already tried that. We're going to, you know, have fewer people coming through, but we are going to treat them better and they're going to spend more. So I don't know if this will actually work, but I do think that this is just, this is the classic activist campaign with just a little twist from, from the Swifty world. Yeah, Rachel, this seems interesting in the sense that celebrities or influencers

seem to be more involved in investing. I think Ryan Reynolds, if we can go to more kind of the startup VC world, he's brought a lot of attention to the businesses that he's involved with. He's on the commercials. You know, it's implied that he's a huge owner. Sometimes that's not necessarily the case. Magic Johnson, you know, I at one point thought he actually. He owned the Dodgers. He owns like 2% of the Dodgers. Right. You know, Jay-Z, that was the thing.

He bought the Nets. He owned a teeny tiny portion of the Nets. He got courtside seats. But, you know, these celebrities do bring attention. And in an attention business, like theme parks, that seems like a valuable thing to bring to the table. Yeah. I mean, it's an incredibly smart marketing strategy that we have seen replicated by numerous

firms. This is not new, you know, for Jana Partners. It's not new in the space. I mean, you could also go back. You think about how well-known figures like movie star George Clooney back in the day was involved in the activist campaigns like the one led by Daniel Loeb against Sony over a decade ago. He even tried to build a casino at one point. Right.

So this is something we've seen before. But I will say for Janet Partners, I think the addition of Kelsey to this is a really smart marketing move. They have a very successful track record of shareholder activism, as Lou was talking about. And they've driven, you know, significant changes at major companies, a few other examples. You think about how they took a stake in Whole Foods. they push for changes before Amazon ultimately acquired the company, right? You know, they had a role in the acquisition of Petsmart back in 2014.

And I think that this is something that is very much needed at this point in time. Yes, there's this, you know, presence of Kelsey, but they also, the hedge funds brought in experienced executives from consumer and tech industries to advise on improving marketing, you know, the guest experience technology. This is very needed by six flags right now. You know, they are reporting steep net losses. They have over $5 billion in debt. A lot of that's tied to the Cedar Fair merger.

They had a roughly 9% drop in attendance in the second quarter. And their CEO that had come in from Cedar Fair as part of the merger, he announced he's stepping down by the end of 2025. So there's a real role here for Janna Partners to play. And I think that's one of the key takeaways. Lou, is this the kind of thing that we should be paying attention to? Six Flagstock up 26% over the past week. but you look out over the past five years, shares are down over the past one year.

They're still down 35%. So is our activists the kind of thing that we should kind of follow? Or is this just kind of noise for regular investors? Somewhere in the middle. You know, look, activists like short sellers, I think, play an important role. I think it's case by case. Again, just like short sellers. In this case, like I say, I do think that the target makes sense, whether or not the

solution makes sense or how the solution evolves. That's something that an individual investor has to look at. I'm a little, I want to hear more from Jana here, because like I say, Selim Basul was in here before the Cedar Fair merger and who's trying to do a lot of what he was doing sounds a lot like what they're talking about, and it didn't really work then. So I'm not convinced, like I'm not ready to put my money into chasing this, but generally speaking, activists have done a lot of good work cleaning up companies that were in desperate need of it. And this does look like a good target. So I'm curious to follow it and see how it develops. At least it's something we could maybe do a research trip, go on a couple roller coaster rides. Let's do it, guys.

Might add some value to the show. But Travis is welcome to come along, right? When we come back, we are going to talk about Chatchip T's new browser. You're listening to Motley Fool Money. Some of the best lessons don't come from a classroom. They come from experience. On The Power of Advice, a new podcast series from Capital Group, you'll hear from CEOs, investors, and founders about how they built careers, took risks, and reinvented themselves. If you're starting your own journey, this is the kind of advice you won't want to miss. Available wherever you get your podcast, published by Capital Client Group, Inc. Welcome back to Motley Fool Money. ChatGPT yesterday introduced a new browser, ChatGPT Atlas. I had a chance to try this.

It's not available everywhere, just MacOS. But, Rachel, I just want to go high level. Is this something that we need? Now, the browser is pretty established. We're going on, what, 30 years of it kind of looking the same. We've moved things like the search bar into the actual address line. So kind of melded those. Google really owns this market, something like 60% market share with the Chrome browser.

They've already introduced a lot of AI features into it, but AI isn't taking over. So is this something that's going to be successful? Or is this just another spaghetti at the wall thing from Open AI? I think it's too soon to tell. As a Mac user myself, I'm very curious to try this one out. I haven't had a chance yet. I do think that there is an element of Open AI as trying all sorts of different things to see what sticks. But I also think that they are very strategically trying to build out their ecosystem.

And I think one of the biggest things that I'm curious about right now is what would the business model? be, right, for this browser. I mean, there's kind of this idea that there could be a bit of a hybrid approach where they could make some money from subscriptions, from sort of a new type of advertising network. So the browser allows... We talked about payments a couple of weeks ago, too. That seems like something they want to integrate into this. Maybe it's easier if you own the browser. I think so. Well, and you think about how the browser allows open AI to embed their AI right into the user's web experience. So that gives them unprecedented access to valuable real-time data. that's obviously something that would be really valuable for advertisers.

I think it's very much designed to gather data in a way that's fundamentally different from traditional search engines. And we're already seeing, you know, they're being integrated with platforms like Shopify and Etsy, so maybe users could complete purchases within, you know, the chat bot. But you have to think about the fact that Open AI's model, as it is right now, is hemorrhaging costs and losses. And so they're on this very aggressive monetization push. And I think that's what a lot of this goes back to. Now, we might see some really valuable tools come out of that, right?

But I think it's far too soon to say whether this is going to be something that's going to be broadly adopted by users. I mean, how many of us are going to switch from Chrome to this? That's what I'm not sure about. Yeah, the idea in tech is generally that the new product has to be 10 times better than the old product for people to actually switch. So, Lou, that was sort of the context in which I started trying Atlas. And let me tell you, I didn't get very far, and I had multiple pop-ups asking me to upgrade to a paid version or an upgraded version of ChatGPT.

That's the kind of thing that's going to turn people off. So I appreciate it, like Rachel said, they're trying to figure out their business model. But here you have Chrome that is free, that is basically just helping Google's ad business. And it's a 100% consumer surplus. us, and then you have a new product that comes out that basically does the same stuff with AI stuck in it, and now they want you, it's sort of an upsell machine. I just don't know if that's what people want. It's a shame they couldn't come out with this, I don't know, six months ago, a year ago,

when there was like all around Open AI glittered, right? And maybe you would have gotten more then, but I think that shine is off of it. This is a move, and look, I feel like a broken record here with Open AI, and I don't mean to pick on them. But all of their moves, from their funding moves to what their products, their announcement, the kind of some of the pivots they may be doing in terms of what business they're chasing, which, you know, fine. But these are moves of desperation, not of strength. They're all understandable. And I do think, like introducing a browser, it does make sense. But they are in a position of weakness because they don't have the customer right now. They are the ones trying to get the

customer. So they have when you say they don't have the customer? Because They do have something like 5 million paying customers. You're saying that Google has a bigger business? Google had all things ready to go, and they're just layering this in. Microsoft has its giant office suite that they can just layer these in. Quite annoyingly, I might say. I'm not enjoying having an Open AI prompt every time I go into Excel. But it's there.

Yes, Open AI has customers, but they still. started from zero. Google started from billions. So they need to backfill so much just to get to the starting line. So they're trying things. But to your point, I look, Firefox is sitting on my machine. Bing is sitting on my machine. I still kind of just go to Chrome because I go to Chrome. It is going to take something that just, wow, this is a ton better, not just it is the same to get me to switch. From your reports, I'm quite happy. This is another thing that little old me as an Android Windows users have to miss out on. That's fine with me.

But yeah, I don't blame them from trying all this. I also don't think it's going to be very successful. Rachel, the other thing I keep going back to is something Brian Chesky said recently about OpenAI and ChatGPT are actually not AI native. And we'll see exactly what he means, I think, over time, because that sounds sort of, explosive, but, you know, it's an application, it's access in the internet. It's not, it's not a new piece of hardware. It is not quite as disruptive or, you know, the change is not the same as going from, you know, a PC to an iPhone or a mainframe to a PC, those kinds of disruptive layers.

This is an area where this is not really disruptive at all. It's just taking the old thing and making your own version of the old thing. So that's what I kind of struggle with here is seeing, is this, what we're dancing around is this, is this just a sustaining innovation that Open AI is trying to make into a disruptive innovation? Yeah, I mean, I don't think when you look at some of the products, right, if you will, that they've launched recently, it's not as though they're recreating the wheel. They're taking, I think, a lot of existing technology and presumably trying to make it better with their own AI innovations. And I think it kind of remains to be seen whether that's going to be effective or not. I mean, you even take this example of the browser that we've been talking about here. You know, is this its own monetizable product within the broader open AI ecosystem?

Or is it going to serve as a sales funnel back to chat, GPT, right? I think there's still a lot of open questions as to what that's going to look like and how effective it's going to be. But again, I'm going to stress, I mean, they need to monetize in a more effective way. I think we're really just starting to see what that's going to look like. I think they are rolling out all of these different products, some of which are, I think, quite familiar to us, right? A search engine is nothing new. And I think they're trying to see if they can make it better and if consumers want that. And that's still we don't know. Maybe I'm being too cynical, but I would love to. If I could like get Sam Altman,

moment of truth, was a browser really a priority a year ago, or was this something? We all know that there was talk that Chrome would have to be split off as part of Alphabet's antitrust settlement. Oh, interesting. This feels like, and I've been in so many boardrooms where this has happened, where you start talking about an idea. And that idea sort of made sense because Chrome had its ready-made audience, right? You would have gotten all those customers with that. But you spend so much time on that, and that didn't happen.

And then suddenly that is the shiny object you're chasing now. So it's like, okay, we need to build our own browser then. I wonder, absent all of that talk, if browser would have really been like this, the North Star they were guiding towards. We'll never know. But I'm just kind of curious how much of it is after the fact with those discussions, them kind of talking themselves into how great it would be if they had a browser. One of these products is going to have to stick. Or Open AI is not going to meet the revenue targets that they have promised to investors. And that's what all of this trillion dollar buildout is based on, is them actually turning us into revenue. So we will see

if this is a help or a hindrance to that. When we come back, we are, We're going to talk about Warner Brothers Discovery, potentially not splitting itself in two and getting bought out instead. You're listening to Motley Full Money. These days, I'm all about quality over quantity, especially in my closet. If it's not well made and versatile, it's just not worth it. That's honestly what I love Quince. The fabrics feel elevated, the cuts are thoughtful, and the pricing actually makes sense. Quince makes high-quality wardrobe staples using premium fabrics like 100% European linen, silk and organic cotton poplin.

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Now available in Canada, too. Don't keep settling for clothes that don't last. Go to QINCE.com slash motley for free shipping and 365 day returns. Quince.com slash motley. Welcome back to Motley full of money. Warner Brothers Discovery is back in the news. There are now rumors that Skydance is going to be, or Paramount Skydance after that merger is interested did buying the company. Look, Lou, we've been talking about this one for a long time. It makes

all the sense in the world. Doesn't necessarily make the company's profitable or, you know, businesses that are going to be competing with the giants and streaming. But what did you take away from this? So the news is that definitely all the rumors are true, that Paramount did approach Warner Brothers and they were rejected. And I think it's worth looking kind of both of these companies separately because there's kind of two separate dynamics going on. I don't know which one is investable right now, but they're both interesting. Warner Brothers' discovery is a mess, and Paramount is really being aggressive. And which knife do you want to catch here, Travis? For Paramount, they realize that for all the billions they have and all the billions they've spent so far,

they are still second tier. Their solution, and I think it's the correct one, they're not going to invest in so much content that they get the next stranger things. They get the next knives out. they are going to just try to consolidate the second tier. They have the cash to do it. So this is just them saying money's not going to stop us from. When you say they have the cash, Larry Ellison is behind this. Yes. The cash is that kind of the area? Larry and his son, yes, yes. Until I see otherwise, I think that this project will be funded, right? For Warner Brothers' discovery, it feels like a question of just what price can you get. This hasn't worked. It didn't work pre-merger. It did. Even now, like we're joking about this. They're trying streaming. They launched CNN All Access. But ironically,

all-access CNN does not include access to CNN if you're not a cable customer. So they're just a mess. I feel like there will be a deal here. Whether it's Paramount Skydance, Netflix says they're not interested. I think Comcast Peacock might be in a similar boat to Paramount, so maybe they get involved. There's a lot of bad assets out there. Somebody wants to put them all together. Absolutely. Rachel, you know, what's the thought here? I want to put some numbers behind this. Warner Brothers Discovery has a $77 billion enterprise value as of today. $4 billion in free cash flow. They've got debt. I don't know. This just seems like there's a lot of,

if none of these companies had debt, we'd be having a different story, but, you know, somebody's got to pay for all this. Is it just Larry? I mean, it's possible. Honestly, I think if we're looking at this, this speaks a lot more to kind of the consolidation of the media industry among some of the few big players. I kind of look at Warner Brothers Discovery and I tend to think they're better as part of a bigger entity than two separate public companies.

But it is kind of interesting to think about, right? I mean, a major acquisition could really reshape the media landscape. And as you noted, Netflix, they've said, oh, we're not interested in the legacy assets, but could they be interested in the remainder of the business? There is, I think, a strong case for that. I mean, Comcast would face some potential really high antitrust hurdles, but they've been seen as a really strong possible contender. I think also one has to recognize any kind of potential deal that would involve an acquisition versus the split of Warner Brothers Discovery.

That's probably going to attract scrutiny from the U.S. government. There's going to be a lot of competition and antitrust concerns. So if in fact this goes the route of an acquisition, I think this is going to be a much longer-term story than we would have expected if in fact the company should just split. into two public entities. So, not investment advice because they have to do it right, but I actually do think that there is a successful play here from consolidating all of this second tier or also ran. Paramount is not a standalone service, but I subscribe. They do have assets that are of interest to people. If you can collect all of those, I do think that that is a viable path to

joining Netflix and joining Disney in this top tier. The issue is execution. MNA is really tough and it's really expensive. So I'm not interested in investing myself right now at this early age, but I do think that there is a path to success there for them. I don't know what the path to success is for Warner Brothers Discovery app. Well, what about price, though? Because, you know, Disney has the theme park business. They have the second biggest streaming service. They're worth $240 billion from an enterprise value perspective. Wonder Brothers Discovery, you know, 77 billion is a lot, and their business is going down.

Their business is moving in the wrong direction. So I don't disagree, but if these assets are not cheap. That's the execution question, right? You know, it's harder to do. It looks a lot better on paper than it does. And who's going to want to pay that much for those assets when they are dwindling, as we see right now? That's also a question.

Even for someone like Larry Ellison buying. a $100 billion company is at least notable. It's not nothing. As always, people on the program may have interest in the stocks they talk about, and the Motley Fool may have formal recommendations for or against, so don't buy ourselves stocks based solely on what you hear. All personal finance content follows the Motley Fool's editorial standards and is not approved by advertisers.

Advertisements are sponsored content and provided for informational purposes only to see our full advertising disclosure. Please check out our show notes. for Lou Whiteman, Rachel Warren, our production leader Dan Boyd, and the entire Motley Fool team. I'm Travis Hoyam. Thanks for listening to Motley Fool Money. We'll see you here tomorrow.