Power Lunch - S&P 500, Nasdaq hit new intraday record highs 9/10/25

Episode Date: September 10, 2025

Klarna makes its public debut. Oracle booms after strong results from its cloud business.  And Brian Sullivan sits down with Energy Secretary Chris Wright. We have it all here on Power Lunch. Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for advertising.

All right, welcome to Power Lunch. I'm Dominic Chu. We've got a huge, and I mean huge show for you today. Oracle right now, up a whopping 40% on pace for its best days since 1992. It's market cap, by the way, closing in on that exclusive trillion dollar club. CEO Larry Ellison on track to gain $110 billion, the biggest single day well surge in market history. We'll have more on that story in just one moment. And speaking of records, the S&P and the NASDAQ hitting fresh new highs today, softer than expected producer price data, boosting confidence in a rate cut next week. But your market's guest sees storm clouds ahead and will bring us some of his best investing ideas amidst all of that. Also surging today shares of Klarna, the Swedish fintech company up 20% following its first trade over the course of the past hour.

Our Leslie Picker is keeping a close watch and will join us for an update on that big. Klarna IPO plus two power players. We're going to hear from Service Now CEO Bill McDermott and also Energy Secretary Chris Wright all in this jam-packed hour coming up ahead. But we're going to begin with Klarna making its public debut at the NYSE, pricing at $40 per share above the initial range of 35 to 37 bucks. It even opened at $52. Even better. Our Leslie Picker is at the NYSE with more on Klarna's debut. It's been volatile, Leslie. We've seen both sides of that kind of 52 mark. Yeah, I feel like that's characteristic of these FinTech buy now, pay later companies. Clarna, no exception here, as you mentioned, Dom, losing a little bit of steam from the open,

opening around $52 per share, well above the $40 per share. Clarna priced at now trading around 47, but still up 17%. This IPO is one that has been in the making for quite some time. Clarna initially raised or had kind of planned to go public around the April time frame. And then there was the Liberation Day volatility that caused them to pause and ultimately make its debut today. But its private market valuation has been no less volatile. If you recall back in 2021, Klarna raised it a $45 billion valuation. A year later raised at a much lower valuation. This one's coming above that 2022 level.

At the $40 price range, it's about $15 billion on a fully diluted basis. And here it's just shy of about $20 billion in terms of this company's market cap. So definitely been kind of a volatile ride, a start and stop, but ultimately those shares off to the races as of today's debut. All right, Leslie Picker, with the state of play on Klarna shares right now. Thank you very much for that. Turning now to the other big market story and the big surge, it's Oracle. As we mentioned, the stock is surging to an all-time high today after the second. The company reported highly bullish cloud demand numbers for the coming years.

Shares are on pace for their best stay in over three decades. And the company is quickly approaching the $1 trillion benchmark for market value after the stock gained almost $300 billion in market cap just overnight alone. Our own McKenzie Sagalos is out in San Francisco and has all the details for us. Mac, I guess the initials, the letters we should be focusing on are RPO. said it, that is backlog and that is what investors are responding to. The company laid out blockbuster cloud demand numbers really cementing its pivot from legacy software to a pure AI cloud play. And what we're seeing today is that Wall Street really values the hard infrastructure

of AI. Now, Oracle confirmed that Stargate, its massive U.S. Data Center deal with OpenAI and others, is now baked into its $455 billion backlog that is the pipeline of its upcoming contracts and really the best proxy for future revenue growth. The street had been looking for around $180 billion. That is a huge beat. And 10% of it is expected to convert to revenue in the next 12 months. And then there is non-GPU cloud that is growing faster than the big three hyperscalers. But this massive growth narrative is coming almost entirely from new AI workloads.

They locked in four multi-billion-dollar AI contracts and committed to a $35 billion cap-ex spend. That is a stunning outlay that starts to rival the likes of Alphabet. Now, there is pressure on margins from the mix shift, but the long runway is clear, and it has analysts asking whether Oracle, like Broadcom, last week, is now part of an expanded trillion-dollar AI trade. Dom? This is big because this is a catch-up trade of all catch-up trades. Oracle kind of moving into that conversation with those hyperscalers. Cloud AI Cloud is at the center of a lot of this optimism.

How exactly is Oracle positioning itself within that broader, highly competitive race for cloud AI? So AI demand is the whole story here. And Oracle assigned major deals with OpenAI and Google Gemini, but it's also teasing new products, including the Oracle AI database, which will let customers run the large language model of their choice, whether that's GROC or ChatGBT, GBT, D.T, directly on their Oracle data. and that could be a big unlock for them in terms of enterprise AI adoption. And then looking ahead, they forecast $18 billion in cloud infrastructure revenue in its current fiscal year. They see that growing to $144 billion annually by 2030.

And that puts them firmly in the AI cloud race competing head to head with Microsoft and with Amazon. So that Mac, that infrastructure-as-a-service-type kind of concept that we're talking about here, Does this now mean that Oracle has become almost a default option in terms of infrastructure when it comes to AI, data centers, cloud computing for the next several years? Well, the narrative is that the Big Three can't handle all of the capacity from an open AI or an anthropic. So it's one of the extra plays. So if they've already maxed out what they can get from Azure or from AWS and they're going to go to Oracle.

But the point is that a rising tide lifts all ship and there is voracious demand. here. And that's part of why you're seeing perhaps secondary names. Oracle ranks fifth in the cloud wars, but they're coming up fast because there just isn't enough infrastructure to meet the demand from an open AI. All right. McKenzie Segalos out in San Francisco with the latest on Oracle and that 38% surge. Thank you very much for that. Let's now get over to one of the many, and I mean many analysts who put out bullish commentary on Oracle this morning. We're speaking with Tyler Radke, city's co-head of U.S. Software Equity Research. As you can see here, he called it, his words, Bookings Bonanza, an upgraded Oracle to a buy with a target price of $410 per share. Tyler, I guess

maybe the first question is, why was it a hold to begin with? And now it's a buy, I get it. But overall, this is one of those scenarios where every analyst out there got caught by surprise, just how bullish the forecast is for the next three to five years. Yeah, look, I mean, we We were neutral-rated on this stock for a number of years. I think our concern was around their ability to convert this backlog into revenue and particularly profitability. Obviously, this was a monster quarter from a booking's perspective. We were well above the street, but certainly weren't expecting $300 billion of new RPO added

to the business. But I think taking a step back, I mean, what's crazy about this move, I mean, our numbers for revenue and EPS for FY28, which is two years out, they went up by 25 to 30%, right? And so you look at this move in the shares up today, almost 40%, on evaluation basis, it's actually not that much more expensive than it was earlier this week. And certainly, pre-market, when we upgraded it, the shares were up only about 25%. So our view is, I mean, you're going to see revenue growth for Oracle at a consolidated level approach 50% in a few years out, which is really unheard of at this scale.

We think there's going to be a lot more exciting news to come, whether that's additional contracts. They talked about more bookings coming in the next few months, closing in on half a trillion of RPO. And then they have their AI World Conference next month in Las Vegas, where we think they're going to give additional surprises on margins. And so stepping back, yeah, the shares are up a lot, but they're just a lot. trading at kind of a mid-30s earnings multiple on our numbers for F-F-F-W-W-28, which is right about

where we value Microsoft. So I still don't think the stock is particularly stretched here. All right, 47 times, as we're showing on the screen here, 47 times forward or expected earnings for the next year. I also, Tyler, just want to put some numbers. You mentioned kind of like that compound annual growth rate for certain parts of the business. I just want to put some numbers behind it because they're pretty dramatic. When it comes to the cloud infrastructure business, OCI. The infrastructure revenue that they're expecting in 2026 is now $18 billion. It goes to $32 billion the year after that, $73 billion the year after that, $114 billion, and then $144 billion. So over the next five years, that is a massive ramp up. As we talk about just how fairly a company should be

valued with that kind of a growth profile for one of its fastest growing businesses, how exactly then do you model out what a price target would be? Yeah, well, and again, so the numbers I was quoting was on FY28. So the forward is kind of more looking at FY26. But I think in a year from now, we will be looking at FY28 for that valuation. And you're going to see revenue growth and earnings growth really accelerate in 28 as they get this huge amount of capacity coming online. So obviously the big question is, like, can they convert this RPO into revenue, right?

There's a lot of things that have to happen, right? They've got to get the power contracts. The sites and the data center floor space has to be there. The chips have to be there. And obviously, the customers have to ultimately pay for these things down the road. But again, these are super high-quality customers. You're talking meta, X-AI, Open AI, Microsoft, right? Some of the most well-funded companies in the world.

So we don't have a lot of concerns on that. But, again, I think it does become the exact phasing. and timing of these things is always a little bit trick to model. But I think, you know, big picture, we kind of know where this is going. It's accelerating top line growth, accelerating bottom line growth. And we still think there's a lot ahead in terms of new contracts and potentially additional raises to profitability as we get into next month's analyst day. All right, Tyler, you mentioned some of the micro kind of company-specific factors. Let's talk about the macro assumptions you're making. This is all under the

guise of a rapidly growing and perhaps not even stopping momentum for AI and cloud overall, what exactly does have to happen or not happen with regard to the macro big picture for how the total addressable market of cloud and AI starts to kind of work itself out over the day of the next two to three years? Yeah. Well, and I think it's just worth reiterating that not only did they issue those really upbeat revenue forecast that you mentioned, but you're seeing that on the backlog, right? So that gives those revenue forecasts a lot more credibility. But I think from a big picture perspective, I mean, we saw a large deal announced with Microsoft for additional capacity earlier this week. You know, we also cover CoreWeave. Those shares are

up, I think, 18% today on the back of this news. They're expected to basically double their power under management by year end. So I think there's a lot more of these deals coming. Microsoft has said they're going to continue to be capacity constrained into year end. So I think you'll see additional bookings contracts. And again, as you look across the space, whether it's on the private side, you're really starting to see the revenue take off for a lot of these private AI code generation companies that have gone from zero to a billion dollars in inferencing revenue very rapidly. So I think all the signs are pointing to this trend.

continuing. And so we think that as we go into your end, this should sort of rise a lot of the boats out there in the AI infrastructure space. All right. It's hard to see a company that was already worth hundreds of billions of dollars go up by 38%. I don't think I've ever seen that happened in quite some time. So Tyler Rackie. This is a pretty historic earnings event for the whole tech space. Yeah, absolutely. Tyler Rackkeet City with a big call out on Oracle today. Thank you very much. We'll see you again soon. Coming up next on this show, we've gotten an exclusive interview with service now, speaking of cloud and AI and everything else. The chairman and CEO, Bill McDermott comes up.

He's seeing who he's seeing winning the AI race and where big tech could go from here. That story coming up. Power Lunch is back after this break. Welcome back to Power Lunch. Our next guest recently called AI the quote unquote greatest opportunity of this century and has led his company to become an AI platform for business transfer. transformation. Morgan Brennan is at Goldman Sachs's communicia technology conference out in San Francisco, and she's joined by the chairman and CEO of service now,

Bill McDermott. Morgan, I'll send things down to you. All right, Dom, thank you. And Bill, it's great to be sitting here with you at this conference. Thank you, Morgan. Great to be with you. What a day to be talking about AI and tech more broadly. Obviously, this monster move in Oracle, speaking to the capacity constraints we're seeing in AI infrastructure. How does that translate to service now? Service Now is actually leading this Agenic AI revolution.

And one of the reasons that Agenic AI is so important in the enterprise is we have people that need machines to help them be more productive. If you look at the average company today, only one in four got positive ROI at a digital transformation. And you say, why is that? Lack of integration. Today, according to MIT, only 5% of the companies out there, are getting a benefit out of agentic AI in terms of productivity. Why is that?

A lack of integration. So what Service Now does is gives you an AI platform for business transformation that connects any cloud, any language model, and any data source so you can revolutionize the way you run your company. What you're talking about right now gets sort of right at the heart of what has been the debate for investors and honestly for corporate America too, and that is this idea of return on investment in AI and who the winners and losers are ultimately. going to be and specifically what that means for enterprise software.

Totally. And that's why I've been very clear. We don't live in a SaaS neighborhood. We are one of one. Our platform is a single tenant platform, meaning we customize it to run the way your company needs it to run. Today we made a major release, our Zurich release, 1,200 new agentic AI capabilities built into the platform. So now if you think about things like Vibe coding, now you can think about,

oh, how do I am on board all of my employees more simply? You simply speak to our machine. Now we organize HR, IT, and all field operations to organize that for you automatically. Or you think about Volt, our new security offering today. You know, not only can you protect your data, but you can also comply with all of the, all of the governance regulations in all of theaters of the world. So for example, in the EU,

that's a pretty important issue. We've already solved that for all of our customers. And then there's just autonomous business processes, which are based on how work flows. Because work flows east to west and north to south. Service now is the only system that goes across all functions to connect all data sources. So this is a major breakthrough for. For example, you know, today if your credit card gets invaded by a bad actor, that'll be caught. An autonomous, agentic AI agent will stop that card, ship you a new one, and flawlessly execute that process.

Now, if a human is required in the process, naturally, that's available too. So this is really AI in service to people, in service to productivity, and in service to making every company a best run business. So what does that mean in terms of how AI continues to drive the business for service now forward, especially at a time where I'm more broadly looking across enterprise software, there is this narrative out there of AI eating software? Totally. And that's why we're the leader in this space.

We've been at this now vigorously for six years. So we were first mover teaming up with my great friend Jensen at NVIDIA, and we took the market by storm, you probably saw last week the great deal we did with the United States government, where they're their AI platform for business transformation. And what you're looking at is massive business cases. Just in our core of IT revolutionizing the government is in multiples of billions in savings and cost takeout. What's happening now is cost is being reined in in the public and the private sector. Ninety-five percent of CEOs. and technical leaders want less platforms to do more work,

which spells ultimate success for service now, because as we revolutionize the way companies run, you can reduce the numbers of platforms, reduce the cost, and improve the productivity dramatically. Do you know something? In our company, we have taken out huge cost. 90% of HR cases, IT cases, customer cases and innovator cases are being run autonomously by agentic AI in our company while

we're hiring and increasing headcount to improve productivity. So it's possible to both grow, take costs down, improve your margins, and have a happy company with a powerful platform like service now. Yeah, and you and I have talked about the workforce piece of this, but first quickly, we've seen, you just mentioned Nvidia, we've seen the Nvidia moment. Today you could argue we're seeing the Oracle moment. When do we see the Service Now moment? Well, I think you're seeing the Service Now moment. The difference between Service Now and the other ones that you mentioned, and Viti aside, that's a very special situation.

Great company, great leader. In fact, I'm very proud of the teamwork that we have. You know, we're both on the Forbes most trusted company list. They're number one. We're number two. We feel like we're in pretty good company. But we've been the consistent performer, consistently growing faster than all of the other enterprise.

off our companies. We have the best margin profile. We have the most satisfied customer base, the most loyal customer base. We have the best retention in our employee scores and our shareholders have doubled their money in the last few years. So they haven't done too badly. And we see nothing but green shoots, Morgan, of growth and opportunity. And so you're going to consistently see Service Now show up. We are an elite level execution company and we're rolling. All right, Bill McDermott, CEO and Chairman of Service Now. It's great to speak with you here at the Cominocopia Conference. Thank you.

Dom, Bill, is about to take a stage with Goldman Sachs chairman and CEO David Solomon. And so we're basically bookending this because coming up on overtime, don't miss my exclusive interview with David Solomon of Goldman Sachs as well from here in San Francisco. We've had a big lineup the last two days. It continues. All right, Morgan Brennan, thank you very much, and to Bill McDermott as well. By the way, speaking of cloud and everything else, we've got a news alert on OpenAI and Oracle of all companies. Let's head back out to McKenzie Sagalos in San Francisco for more. Mack, what can you tell us?

So, Dom, we're getting fresh insight into Oracle's blockbuster cloud revenue numbers. The Wall Street Journal is reporting that OpenAI has signed a $300 billion deal with Oracle for cloud computing power. One of the largest such contracts that we've seen. That goes well beyond its current revenue. and the agreement spans roughly five years. Now, this news helps explain that surge in future contract revenue that Oracle reported as part of its earnings last night. I've reached out to Open AI for comment, but no word back just yet.

Don? All right, Mackenzie Sagalas there with more on Oracle and the AI race. Still ahead on this show, the record rally, the S&P 500 and NASDAG trading at all-time high, so why is our next guest worried right now? We're going to find out coming up. Keep it right here. All right, welcome back, the S&P 500, NASDAQ, hitting record high. highs after an encouraging inflation reading, which showed that wholesale prices fell in the month of

August. This has two well-known firms on Wall Street hike their S&P targets by year-end. Markley's going to 6450 and Deutsche Bank going to 7,000 the big figure. Your next guest is also optimistic in that group. He has some worries for the longer term. Chris Grissanti is the chief market strategist at MAI Capital Management, a friend of the show. You're also a value guy. We've kind of build you as such for years now at this point. So when you say worry, it's got to be vis-a-vis some of the record highs we're seeing and a 39% pop in the price of Oracle today. Right. Happy Oracle Day. Happy Oracle day. But I think that's a really good illustration of, so we had Oracle come out and give five-year definitive step-by-step revenue instructions.

And this so reminds me of when I was managing in the late 90s, these projections where you just take a ruler and you set it up and you go forward. Wait, am I hearing right? Are you likening some aspects of this to the dot-com era? Sure, sure. And in a couple of really compelling ways. One is that there's no doubt that AI will change the world as the Internet did. So it's a real thing and it's coming at us.

Where the disconnect, I think, comes is which companies are going to succeed? And will this huge investment yield the returns that are needed to justify? you know, 400 billion, 500 billion of contracts. And that's far from certain. So this is all happening with interest rates relatively higher than we've seen them over the course of the last decade and a half, which means that hurdle rates and project green lights are harder to come by, yet we are still seeing these valuations go. What exactly does it say then if, hypothetically, because I don't have a crystal ball,

but markets are pricing in and a Fed possible easing cycle coming in. What does that do to valuations? And then, if you're a value guy, should you be worried because interest rates could be a huge tailwind? Sure. So a bunch of questions packed into there. But I would say, look, I'm a value guy, but I respect this market. I mean, there's momentum like a freight train here. So I wouldn't get in the way of that.

But what I would do is look, so 300 billion of capital just went into Oracle today alone. So that's coming from somewhere. And it's coming from groups that I like, like health care. And so what I would say to your viewers is don't go to cash. That's crazy. What I would do is go to those groups that are underperforming right now, but have steady cash flow, investment grade balance sheets, and wait there. And then the second thing, and this is going to sound weird, is embrace the underperformance that you will experience if you go there right now and this tech rally continues. But because sooner or later, value will out, and you're just going to be safer. Your accounts will go up, maybe not as much as Oracle, obviously. but sooner or later, you'll recoup the benefit. That's always been the case with value picks, right? They have a higher floor, right? Not as high of a ceiling, but a higher floor.

You're kind of protected a little bit. So your statement begs the question. What exactly are those places? What types of stocks? What is the shopping list for those names that will insulate you a little bit on that downside? So I'm going to mention names that haven't been mentioned on Oracle days today all day. The health insurers, love the health insurers. I would buy UNH.

I'd buy Elevance. I would buy Cigna. And yeah, they've had a nice bounce off the bottom over the last couple of months, but they're still down 40, 50 percent from their highs of a year ago. So these are critical companies for an economy that even if the economy rolls over, you're going to need your health insurance. They're going to raise premiums, unfortunately, by the most they have in over decade, because they simply missed price things last year, and that's why they're down so much.

So I see that as an opportunity. I see farmers' opportunity. And if you want to be in tech and you like the data center, by Dell at 11 times earnings. They're going to put in all those servers to all those data centers. All right. Chris Grosanti is still a value guy in his DNA. Yeah, only one left.

All right. Thank you very much for that. We'll see you again soon. All right. Where we had a big treasury auction go off in the last hour here is the next subject of our bond report. $39 billion worth of nine-year, 11-month notes were sold. It's basically a 10-year treasury auction. The sale was met with relatively strong demand going off with a yield of 4.033%.

Now, the bid to cover came in at 2.65, which means $2.65 worth of bids for every dollar of notes up for sale. That is, higher demand than the last auction, and higher demand than the average demand for the past year. It's a combination of direct and indirect bidders. They took almost the entire offering. Dealers were only left with 4% of the overall sale, so there is still strong demand for that U.S. 10-year Treasury note. Well, coming up on the show, we're going to double back to Milan, Italy. Our own Brian Sullivan is still there talking to lots of folks at the Gas Tech Energy Conference. We're going to get some highlights from his exclusive sitdown with Energy Secretary Chris Wright.

That's coming up next. Welcome back to Power Lunch. Let's get out to Contessa Brewer for a CNBC News Update. Good afternoon, Contessa. Hi there, Dom. Senator Chuck Schumer moved to force a floor vote today to compel the Justice Department to release all records in the Jeffrey Epstein case. In a surprise move, Schumer filed that proposal as an amendment to a sweeping defense policy bill. Senate Republicans have largely avoided voting on the Epstein files.

This vote puts all senators on the record on this particular matter. The jury has been selected in the trial of Ryan Ruth, the man accused of attempting to assassinate then presidential candidate Donald Trump at his Florida golf club in September 2024. Ruth, who is representing himself and the government are expected to make opening arguments. tomorrow. And the NCAA says it has found three college basketball players were betting on their own games last season. The league says Fresno state players Michael Robinson, Jalen Weber, and San Jose states Stephen Vasquez, who's a former Fresno teammate, all accused of coordinating betting with intentionally underperforming in games. Betting a little more than $2,000 to win

nearly $16,000. A betting integrity monitor alerted authorities, all three players were released from their teams and have their eligibility revoked, the schools, Dom, are not being penalized. All right, Contessa Brewer, with the CNBC News Update. Thank you very much for that. Now let's get out to Brian Sullivan. He's still in Milan, Italy, where he again is bringing us another big interview. This time he sat down with Energy Secretary Chris Wright. Brian, what can you tell us about the Secretary's conversation with you? Well, I can say that the entire world, particularly Europe where we are right now, is betting on. United States liquefied natural gas to get them out of their energy crisis.

We've been covering this story, Dom, for four years since Russia invaded Ukraine. The Nord Stream 2 pipeline was blown up. Europe is in a race to get gas. We've called it the Marshall Plan for Energy, the U.S. selling a ton of natural gas to Europe, to Europe. And Secretary Chris Wright and Secretary of the Interior, Doug Bergam, who we spoke with yesterday, they want to sell more American natural gas to Europe. So today, we caught up with the Secretary of the Secretary of the Interior of Europe.

of energy, and I began by asking them about some of their big plans. Heady goals, $750 billion in energy. You guys want to sell it. You want to triple energy sales to Europe in the next three years. We talked a little bit with your colleague and friend, Secretary Bergam, about it yesterday. But realistically, how do we do that in the United States? How do the Schneers, the Venture globals, the Exxon, the shells, the Sempras, how do they accomplish those goals?

So number one, there's still a lot of gas from Russia going into Europe. 15% of Europe's gas supply still comes from Russia. A billion a year, I think, is the number, I think. Yeah. And they've set a date to end that in the next 18 months. So there's a big increased demand right there just for the United States to finish displaced on the Russian gas. I also think you're going to see demand for AI and increased demand for electricity in Europe. Europe has not been a growth market for energy the last 20 years, but their projections

are to be a growth market going forward. So we're going to grow our LNG exports here. We're going to grow our oil and refined oil products exports to Europe. Europe as well. And ultimately, we're going to bring nuclear technology and new reactors to Europe. I'm going to get to nuclear in just a second. Do you believe, and I know you're, I think you're heading to Brussels tonight or tomorrow morning, you've got a pan-European trip coming as well, do you believe that Europe will agree to either slow or stop, hopefully stop, all purchases of Russian liquefied natural gas? They've absolutely insisted they will, that they will, after the end,

by the end of next year, 2026, no more imports of Russian gas of any kind. You can still buy Russian spot cargoes till the end of this year. You can buy contracted gas in 26 from Russia. But once January 1, 2027 comes, no more Russian gas in there. What is that going to mean for prices? Have you talked to the industry? What are they going to say about it? Well, the reason they have a timed phase out is so that U.S. exports can ramp up to fill that hole.

There's a lot of new supply coming on for LNG that I think will hopefully keep prices in check. Okay. Oil. natural byproduct, gasoline or natural gas, about a third of the byproduct of oil drilling. The price of oil continues to go down. There's a lot of concern in the United States that U.S. production is going to fall because prices are falling. In your previous life, you ran Liberty Energy, right? Yes.

You helped drill for oil. Where is drilling going? Where are oil prices going? Continued evolution of efficiency. American producers are so innovative and with relief from the Trump administration. on burdensome regulatory regimes, we're doing everything we can to lower their break-even costs so that they can become profitable and ever lower oil prices. What are oil prices on the low end of a band right now? They probably are. They probably are. We've seen a lot of that spare OPEC

capacity come back into the market. That's been a little bit of a downward pressure on oil markets. But I think in the next few years you're going to see strong global economic growth, strong increase in demand for oil. Yeah, you'll probably see a little firming in oil prices. OPEC just raised output, though, again, very small margin. That's on the quota side, but they just raised it on Sunday. Do you worry that a price worker could spark? I don't think so. The demand for oil is growing at over a million barrels a day of incremental demand every year.

I worry more in the next five or ten years. Where is that oil going to come from? I'm happy to see that supply come on market. And when there's a lot of spare capacity sitting on the sidelines, that's overhead for oil markets. So think of it right now as we're shrinking the spare capacity that's on the sidelines. Yeah, we've got Chevron over here, Exxon's over there, shells over here. What are they saying to you about their concerns for oil and gas right now? Yeah, look, oil prices are on the lower end?

So are they going to add a whole bunch of rigs? No, not in today's environment. No, rig counts have been going down. Baker Hughes is right there. They would tell us that. Rig count's been going down, but American production hasn't gone down. The rate of growth has slowed. We may see a plateau in U.S. oil production for a little while,

But I am very bullish on the future of US oil production and of course US natural gas production is growing at a good clip now and it'll grow at a good clip for as far as the eye can see Okay, you're probably going to dodge the heck out of this question, but I'm going to ask you used to be on the board of Oaklo stocks up a thousand percent in a year nuclear startup new scale you're now the secretary of energy you've had to resign that position huge bullishness around nuclear in the United States is it over done in any way? No, I mean, nuclear was 6% of global energy in the year 2000. Today it's 4%. This is a technology nuclear.

If you look out 500 years from now, nuclear is going to be huge. In fact, we're going to use nuclear power to create hydrocarbons. Can't have a modern world without hydrocarbon molecules. We just might get some of them in a different fashion down the road. But no, in this administration is doing everything possible through four executive actions, reform of the NRC, reform of permitting across the board. I truly believe we're on the edge of a large nuclear renaissance. So you think maybe it sounds like you're kind of saying maybe traders have not gotten ahead of themselves?

I know you can't comment on individual. I'm not going to comment on stock prices. I know, but I bet there's only a couple nuclear stocks that are out there and then like this. Are we at the start of a new nuclear golden age? I strongly believe we are. Okay. Oracle, again, another single stock reference you can avoid. But Oracle's soaring today. Huge cloud infrastructure dreams.

AI is running the stock market, Mr. Secretary. You know that. Is there any part of you that thinks that America's AI dreams, half a trillion in capital spending is overdone? I don't believe it is, because I'm a firm believer that AI is transformative even beyond what people think. Not just for business, productivity and humans, for AI for science is going to be transformative. AI for national defense is going to be transformative. And it's critical that the United States stay in the lead in AI. So in Department of Energy and across the Trump administration, we're doing everything we can to enable.

rapid data center build out. And I think their returns on that are going to be exciting. Okay, wrap it up quickly with this. You've got pan-European European meetings tomorrow. Just combine the words Europe and meetings into one word. You're welcome. Some nuclear conversations. Anything you'd like to share with the CNBC global audience right now about the next few days, what's going to happen? What's the news going to be? We're going to go to Brussels for some very serious dialogues about energy. In that trade deal we did with the European Union, as you mentioned, they've committed to buy a lot more American energy. They have a lot of regulations, methane rules, CS triple D, that's sort of an ESG regulation that stands in the way

of bringing energy in. We need to reform that. And so we're working with the European Commission to get regulations more sensible, so it won't impede the flow of energy in Europe. That's not just good for American exporters. It's good for Europe and European people. I'm hoping we see a real energy pivot in Europe so that it starts becoming a growing continent again. Europe's energy production has declined. I mean, consumption has been on decline for 15. years. We want to see it growing again. So these dom, these are big goals, $750 billion, not just for the gas, but all energy and electricity. We'll see what happens. We name some names there. By the way, Shanir stock has doubled in three years. We also interviewed the CEO of Schneer,

Jack Fuscoe. We interviewed Lorenzo Seminelli of Baker Hughes. He was on last week. We talked about different things. Both those interviews will be on CNBC.com. So some very big goals. Watch Oaklo as well. I wonder if Secretary Wright regrets leaving Oklahoma. was bored because that stock is up 1,000% in a year. And by the way, because I'm here, this is random but interesting, Dom. You ready? We referenced Oracle. Oracle, Larry Ellison, Larry Ellison's son, David Ellison, is part of Skydance Media,

which is funded by Redbird Capital. Redbird Capital owns which soccer team? A.C. Milan. A. Right around here. See what I did. I took Larry Ellison and connected it to Milan in five steps. runs batted in and random but interesting a sully staple.

Enjoy the food out in Milan and we'll see you back in the studios here soon, Brian, okay? Ciao. Arrivede. I will see you on Friday. Thank you all. All right. See you then. Coming up on the show, Oracle's boom, putting CEO Larry Ellison on track to dethrone Elon Musk possibly soon as the richest person on earth. Just how much is his net worth now? We're going to tell you the staggering numbers after this short. Welcome back. It may not surprise you that one of the most red stories right now on CNBC.com is about one of the richest men in the world. We're speaking, of course, of Oracle founder, Larry Ellison. He's $110 billion richer just today after a blowout earnings report. He's the largest shareholder of the company owning more than a 40% stake of its outstanding shares, and that puts Ellison closer

to dethroning Elon Musk, fairly soon possibly, as the world's wealthiest individual. So joining us now as our wealth editor, a guy who knows all about these billionaires, Robert Frank, the numbers we were kind of going through them during the break. It's the number of zeros and commas is obviously staggering, but just how much put it in context for us is this Ellison one-day gain in market value? Yeah, so the one-day gain alone is a hundred over a hundred billion dollars and that is by far the largest dollar value ever gained in 24 hours. And what's interesting about Ellison is that he owns so much of that company still. You know, you look at guys like Zuckerberg and the Google guys and all these tech founders, including Jeff Bezos. They don't own relative to Ellison much of their company, but 41% of the company is still held by us. And that's why you can get, you know, a huge wealth gain off an also huge market cap gain.

But when you own nearly half of the company, that's what it can do. And Musk has been the richest person in the world for almost a year, where he was sort of trading places with Jeff Bezos and Bernard Arnault for a while. So now, until Musk gets his big pay package, that 2018 pay package that's going to be decided in the courts, I think Allison and Musk are going to be one and two for a while. Now, this is also a scenario because we talk about these founders and these big tech billionaires who have, over time, to your point, sold off incremental parts of their stake. But Larry Ellison really has it.

He's kept a whole bunch of it. This is betting on yourself, your company, and letting it ride, and this has worked out to his benefit. What exactly does this do for this next generation of these AI billionaires who are out there? Do you think they'll let it ride like Ellison did? Well, Ellison's strategy, you know, he owns Lanai, he bought Lanai, the Hawaiian Island. He owns a huge yacht. He owns one of the largest property portfolios in America, dozens of properties. So you wonder, okay, he hasn't sold any shares.

How has he spent all that billions of value? Well, he has borrowed against his shares. At certain points, 25% of his entire holdings were pledged for loans. At the time, people were like, you should never do this. This is terrible. This is risky for shareholders. It turned out to be very smart.

Unlike his CEO, Safra Katz, who has sold every Options Award that she's gotten. She just sold 5 million shares back in June. I don't know if she regrets selling those 5 million shares, But it shows that it's also kind of good to know that insider selling is not always based on insider information because if she had really known and acted on what she knew about the company, she probably wouldn't have sold. So you see someone like her selling shares to fund her lifestyle, takes some money off the table. Larry Ellison has been all in all the time until the age of 81. And I think you pointed it out in the commercial break.

It gives us all hope because it means that 81 years old we still haven't yet hit our peak. Exactly. All right. Robert Frank with the inside scoop there on what's happening. And by the way, subscribe to his inside wealth newsletter as well, a big deal there. Still ahead on the show, another fintech company, not Klarna, making headlines today, and it's partnering with Uber Eats. It's among our most read stories on CNBC.com. Stay tuned for that story and more coming up after this. All right, before we go, we want to highlight another hot story on CNBC.com. Pipe is teeming up with Uber Eats to add its embedded technology to the company's restaurant manager app. So eligible restaurants will see pre-approved capital offers from Pipe that are customized based on the business's revenue and cash flow that they see through Uber Eats.

Pike, which has a $2 billion valuation, uses artificial intelligence to determine capital amounts based on six months worth of anonymized credit card transaction history shared by Uber. Then within the Uber Eats Manager app, restaurants can choose to share their data with Pipe and submit their application and move forward with capital access. So keep an eye on that story. And let's get one final check on Klarna shares right now, higher on its market debut. Shares, remember, priced at 40 bucks. That was above the expected range. They opened at 52, and currently right now, the intraday low, 45, 44, and the high, $57.20.