Prof G Markets - Who Will Replace Jerome Powell? Tesla Hit with Securities Fraud Suit & AMD’s Q2 Earnings

Episode Date: August 6, 2025

Ed breaks down the potential candidates in the running to replace Jerome Powell as chair of the Federal Reserve. Then he explains why Tesla’s shareholders have filed a class action suit against the company and Elon Musk. Finally, he is joined by Patrick Moorhead, Founder, CEO and Chief Analyst of Moor Insights and Strategy, to break down chipmaker AMD's second quarter earnings.  Check out our latest Prof G Markets newsletter Order "The Algebra of Wealth" out now Subscribe to No Mercy / No Malice Follow Prof G Markets on Instagram Follow Ed on Instagram and X Follow Scott on Instagram Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

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That's this week on Explain It to Me. New episodes every Sunday, wherever you get your podcasts. Why isn't the Justice Department releasing the Epstein files? Because the political winds shifted. DOJ is supposed to be independent. And now that principle is so far gone and so far degraud. We don't even talk about it. We don't even talk about it, right?

I'm Preet Bharara. In this week, lawyers and former government officials, Mimi Roka, Ellie Honig, and Asherangappa join me on my podcast, stay tuned with Preet, to discuss the perplexing questions raised by the Epstein Files saga. The episode is out now. Search and follow, stay tuned with Preet, wherever you get your podcasts. Today's number 54. That was the percentage return of Nancy and Paul Pelosi's

investment portfolio last year more than double the return of the S&P 500. When asked what her secret is to being a great investor, the Speaker Emeritus said, quote, it is illegal for you to ask me that. Money markets, Matt. If money is evil, then that building is hell. Welcome to Proftery Markets. I'm Ed Elson. It is August 6th. Let's check in on yesterday market vitals. The major indices declined after weaker and expected data showed growth in the services sector flatlined in July. The data stoked stagflation concerns and further complicates the Federal Reserve's path forward. Oil also fell as Russia weighed an air truce with Ukraine. And finally, Snap shares tanked 15% in postmarket trading after reporting earnings that missed

expectations, particularly on the global average revenue per user metric. Okay, what else is happening? Who will be the next Fed chair? That is the question that Wall Street is asking this week, as Trump continues to complain about Jerome Powell and the Fed's decision to hold rate steady. With Powell's term ending next May, Trump is expected to select the next chair, quote, soon.

There's been much speculation over the potential candidates for the job, many from within the current Trump administration. However, in a CNBC interview yesterday, Trump confirmed that there is a list of four candidates for the job, and Scott Bessent is not one of them. Trump explicitly mentioned, quote, both Kevin's, referring to Kevin Hassett and Kevin Walsh, but he left out the names of the two others on the list. It has been widely rumored that Christopher Waller, a current Fed governor, is one of the other candidates running. So, who are any of these people, and why should we care now?

Well, apparently Trump is weighing whether to install his pick to replace Powell in a soon-to-be vacant Fed governor seat. That move would effectively create a shadow chair, someone auditioning for the top job, turning up the pressure on Powell to cut rates and giving Trump a preview of his next Fed chair without the hassle of a full confirmation just yet. So let's go through these candidates, and let's start with Kevin Hassett. So Kevin Hassett's history with the Fed dates back to 1992, when he first started as an economist in the Research and Statistics Department. From there, he also served as a consultant to the Treasury Department under Clinton and Bush. Around this time, in 1999, Hassett co-authored a book called

Dow 36,000, the new strategy for profiting from the coming rise in the stock market. The book argued that equities were significantly undervalued and predicted that the Dow would more than 3x by 2004. Ironically, this came out right before the dot-com implosion. We, of course, did not see a 3x in the Dow. Instead, it created about 25%. And the book was ultimately described by Fortune as the, quote, most spectacularly wrong investing book ever.

So not a great start. I'm sorry to lead with that, but that is what happened. and it was a really bad book. He basically claimed that stocks were way undervalued at a time when they were basically the most overvalued they had ever been in the history of the stock market. So he got that one very wrong.

Anyway, what else did he get up to? Well, he was later nominated by Trump to lead the Council of Economic Advisors. One of his highlights in that role was a challenge he made to a BLS report. Hassek claimed that wage growth under Trump was actually higher than had been reported, and now is suddenly to get a sense of why Trump likes this person.

A year later, he stepped down from this position. He laid low for a while, and then COVID hits, and Hassett is tapped again by Trump this time to deal with the pandemic. His job specifically was to help figure out how many people are going to die from COVID. Did he have any experience with infectious diseases? No. Did he know anything about pandemics? Probably not. But anyway, that was his job.

So he does his research, he builds his model, and he ultimately concludes that COVID deaths will peak in April and then zero out by May of 2020. Obviously turned out to be completely incorrect. And then when this model was released to the public, he again became embroiled in controversy for being so wrong. So anyway, after that, Trump reappoints him to lead the National Economic Council again, this time as director,

and now he is one of the frontrunners to be the next chair of the Federal Reserve. So that is Kevin Hassett, the author of Dow 36,000, and the creator of the model that said that COVID would basically end by May of 2020. Next up, we have the other Kevin, Kevin Walsh, who is also no stranger to the Fed.

He served as a member of the Federal Reserve Board of Governors from 2006 to 2011, after being nominated during the Bush administration. Before that, Walsh worked at Morgan Stanley in the M&A division for seven years. He is most known for the role he played in response to the financial crisis. In 2008, when the markets crashed, he was known as the liaison to Wall Street. He was essentially the guy who communicated between the Federal Reserve and the big banks. He's also been described as the bridge between Ben Ben Ben Bananke, who was the former Fed chair, and Wall Street. And according to most reports, he did that job pretty well. His big mistake, though, was his prediction on inflation. Throughout 2008,

he kept predicting that inflation was going to explode, and instead, the opposite happened. We had deflation, and a lot of economists have argued that it was partly our failure to recognize that that contributed to the crisis. Anyway, he finishes up his Fed career. He goes to the Hoover Institution to be a lecturer. He joins the board of UPS, and he also joins a business forum to advise the Trump administration on economic policy. Fast forward to 2025. He's now on the Fed share shortlist, and he definitely knows it. He's been very quick to criticize Jerome Powell, to criticize the Fed. Here is what he said on CNBC just a couple of months ago. If I were the president, what I'd be worried about is a central bank that is stuck

with models from 1978, governance from a prior period, and don't recognize we could be at the front end of a productivity boom. And if I were the president, I'd be worried that they might not see it. And they might think economic growth is somehow going to be inflationary. I think we were probably in the early innings of a structural decline in prices. Ken sees it on the front lines of real businesses. And I think if you look over the period of the next year or two, it's a pretty special moment. So that's Kevin Walsh, definitely more qualified than the other Kevin, but definitely a bit of a panderer, too. I mean, that is exactly what Trump wants to hear right now, especially on TV. And I'm sure Kevin Walsh knows it. Final detail, he's also married to Jane

Lauder, who is the heiress of the S.A. Lord of Fortune. I don't have much to say about that, but do with that what you will. Okay, final candidate, Christopher Waller, who currently sits on the Fed's Board of Governors, not officially confirmed by Trump, but he is widely regarded as a top contender. So why does Trump-like Waller for this job? Well, this should give you an idea. What does it mean to wait six weeks? Is it that critical? And the answer is probably not. It could be. But it's also the reverse. Why wait until September if it's just six weeks? Right now, the date of the last few months has been showing that trend inflation is looking pretty good, even on a 12-month basis. So I've labeled these good news rate cuts when if inflation

comes down to target, we can actually bring rates down. I've been saying this since about November of 23. So I think we're in that position that we could do this as early as July. I've always said if you worry about long and variable lags, which everybody always talks about, the whole point of that is to get ahead of it, not wait for it to happen. And then take a policy action. that takes quarters or months down the road to actually have any impact. So there you had it. Christopher Waller, he's basically been going on Bloomberg and CNBC and taking pretty much any TV hit saying that we should lower rates for months now. He was also one of the two governors that dissented on the Fed's decision to hold rates last week.

And so this, of course, will very much put him in the running in Trump's book. As for his resume, before joining the Fed, he was a research director at the Federal Reserve Bank of St. Louis. And before that, he was a professor. He taught at Notre Dame, the University of Bonn, Wash U.S. St. Louis, and Indiana University. So, those are your candidates. Kevin, Kevin, Christopher, and someone else, we don't know who. The two Kevins are the frontrunners. Christopher is just a rumor right now. Our pick would probably be Kevin Walsh right now, the second Kevin. He's probably the most qualified. Yes, he is a sycophant. But, you know, they're all sick of fans.

That's sort of the job here. If you want to get the job, you don't really have much of a choice. But we'd also like to hear what you think. Who do you think the next Fed chair should be? Let us know in the comments. Tesla just got sued for securities fraud. The claim, led by shareholders, is that Elon Musk and Tesla knowingly overstated its robo-taxies abilities

and concealed major safety risks all to prop up the stock price. They say Tesla sold the idea that its robotaxy service was fully autonomous and ready to scale. In reality, the vehicles still required a safety driver and the public launch was filled with failures. And according to the complaint, when those failures were exposed, Tesla's stock dropped more than 6%. So another shareholder lawsuit filed against Tesla.

This is becoming something of a theme for the company. Tesla's been involved in roughly 2,000 lawsuits all around the world now. Here we have another, once again being filed by a shareholder. This time it's not about Elon's compensation. This time it's about the robotoxy, or perhaps the lack thereof. As I said, the claim is that Elon and Tesla misled investors. They're saying that Elon overstated the capabilities, understated the safety risk.

They said it was fully autonomous when it wasn't, et cetera. et cetera, and as a result, shareholders got burned. Those are the allegations, at least. The question, however, the question we would like to answer is whether or not those allegations are valid, whether or not they will actually hold up in a court of law. So to help us answer that, our producer Claire spoke with Professor John C. Coffey Jr. at Columbia Law School. They're selling for an immense amount of money, multiple, multiple billions of dollars. There were many obstacles to a successful suit. First of all, we should recognize this case has been brought in the Western District of Texas. It's part of the Fifth Circuit. And the Fifth Circuit

is a little bit notorious who bring the most hostile circuit in the country to securities fraud litigation. They very much are skeptical of securities plaintiffs, and they dismiss a significant percentage of those cases at the outset. To get further, it's not hard here to see. say that these facts might be material. But that's done enough. You have to show to succeed not only that material misinformation was misstated or omitted, but you also have to show that it was done with an intent to defraud. And that requirement of showing an intent to defraud, or see enter in lawyer's language, is very difficult, and it's usually the primary obstacle. What shows that they just weren't careless? You have to show more than that. You have to

show that they had clear evidence of an intent to cause damage and injury to the planet's class. That's usually the death nail for those suits that are dismissed. I'm not saying they can't succeed, but that's their principal challenge. They also have another problem. The stock price after this demonstration was given in Austin only fell about 6%. Let's assume that the stock, the demonstration was something. of a disaster. But the stock only fell 6% in many stocks, rise or falls 6% in a single day or two.

So there is not clear that that client was caused by the Austin demonstration, or that the demonstration really shows that the market was totally displeased and totally giving up on the company. It may be that a variety of factors, economic conditions, and other factors who angered Tesla, then it calls that relatively minus 6% to climb. So, if you had to put money on it, I think you'd probably bet that this lawsuit isn't really going anywhere. Yes, Elon hyped it up. Yes, he probably over-promised.

But to Professor Coffey's point, there is a line between over-promising and defrauding. And in the eyes of the law, it really all comes down to intent. and also the plaintiff's ability to prove that intent. So can they prove that Elon was actively lying about the robotaxis capabilities to defraud the Tesla investor base? Probably not. This was another case of Elon making vague promises

about what is probably possible or potentially achievable. It's the same language he's used throughout the years about many of his other projects. It's a vision about what might happen. but it's also, you know, hard to say with any real certainty. That's always how he's pitched his ideas, and that's how he's pitched this one too. Now, having said that, the lawsuit does draw attention to a larger point

that investors should probably think about, and that is, so far, this robo-taxie has been really underwhelming. I mean, to the plaintiff's credit, there is no question. This was one of the most hyped vehicle events of the year, and, yes, you know, Yet, as of today, as of August 6th, with six weeks into the Robo Taxi launch in Austin, we've still got fewer than 20 vehicles on the ground. They're still only available to a very select group of fans and influencers. And most importantly, they're still being supervised by safety operators that sit in the front seat of the car.

So put another way, they're not actually autonomous. They still require a human. And we know that because we can just look at the vehicles in Austin, but we can also look at Tesla's own user-submitted data, which tells us that the Tesla system still requires human intervention at least every 340 miles. So sure, no one is sitting behind the wheel, but someone is sitting in the front seat, and the same can't be said for Waymo. And why are they sitting in the front seat? Well, because someone needs to be there when things go wrong, which, by the way, they have. You know, we haven't seen any real crashes yet, at least not in Austin. We haven't seen anyone get hurt, but we have seen these issues that were stated in the lawsuit, speeding, driving over curbs, stopping in the middle of an intersection, breaking foreshadows,

etc., etc. All of those complaints are real. Now, the Tesla Bull might say, oh, you're nitpicking, you're arguing over nothing, and, you know, maybe that's true, but I would also argue that when you're, you know, you're at 20 vehicles and your competitors at 1,500 vehicles, or when you're in one city and your competitor is in five, when you're doing a few hundred rides a week and your competitors doing a quarter of a million rides a week, I would argue that under those circumstances, yeah, it's okay to nitpick. It's okay to look at what's happening and say, you know, this isn't that impressive. What is the plan here? What is the path forward? So look,

This lawsuit probably won't go anywhere. It's probably just a money grab, to be honest. But it does raise a valid point about Tesla, which is that the robotaxi simply has not lived up to the hype. And that isn't a value judgment. All you have to do is look at the numbers or look at the videos or just look at the safety operators in the front seat, and it will be very clear to you that that is simply the truth.

After the break, a look at AMD's second quarter earnings. Stay with us. Support for the show comes from public.com. You might already use AI tools to refine your emails and streamline your workflow, so why not see if it can optimize your investing as well? For that, you can check out public.com. Public.com is the investing platform that takes your money as seriously as you do. With Public, you can build a multi-asset portfolio. have stocks, bonds, options, and more. You can also access industry-leaning yields, including the 4.1% APY you can earn on your cash with no fees or minimums. But what sets public apart, AI's in just a feature, it's woven into the entire experience. From portfolio insights to earnings call recaps, public gives you smarter context at every touch point. And the best part, you can earn up to $10,000 when you transfer your existing portfolio over to public. Go to public.com slash provG to fund your account in five minutes. That's public.com slash provg.

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We're back with Profty Markets. Chipmaker AMD delivered mixed results in its second quarter earnings report. The company narrowly missed on EPS, however, revenue was a beat up 32% year-over-year, with data center sales up 14% to $3.2 billion. That is solid growth. They're also modest, when you compare it to Nvidia's $80 billion in data center revenue last quarter, up 73% year-over-year. U.S. restrictions on advanced chip exports to China

also impacted gross margins, leading to $800 million in inventory-related charges. As we previously discussed, those restrictions have been lifted, but AMD's application to resume selling into China is still under review. Looking ahead, AMD offered a strong forecast, guiding revenue nearly 5% above estimates, and that's excluding any sales of advanced chips to China. However, it warned that its access to the Chinese market remains uncertain. The stock is down around 3% after. hours at the time of this recording. For context, AMD is the best performing chip stock of

2025, up 45% year-to-date. Prior to these earnings, it's outpaced Nvidia's 30% rise. Still, it's got a long way to go. Invita has roughly 95% market share in the GPU market. AMD is just 5%. So, joining us now to break down these earnings and what they tell us about AMD's path forward is Patrick Moorhead, founder, CEO and chief analyst. of more insights and strategy. Patrick Moorhead, thank you for joining us. Great to be here. I did your show, a long version of the show, Proffieldy Markets, and it's great to be back.

It's great to have you back. We loved having you, and we're glad you're coming back. So we wanted to get your views on these AMD earnings, which just came in. Let's just start with your initial reactions. What did you think of the report? What jumped out to you? Yeah, I think the biggest thing is that jumped out is, first of all, they beat on the revenue side by about $300 million. It's interesting, depending on whether they're using FACSET or LSEG, they either hit or missed on EPS, but they upsided on the guide. So I think all in all, a really good quarter.

And, you know, I think, you know, the challenge and the opportunity for AMD is that everybody's comparing you to Invidia. Yes. But, I mean, listen, revenue was up 32%. They had record CPUs across Epic and Risen, which is on the client side. They had game console growth, which that has been elusive, right? there was this huge build-up prior to the pandemic, and inventory is being burned off. You mentioned that it's being compared to Nvidia,

and that's certainly what I do. I think of AMD as the other chip company. Yeah. Is that a mistake? Should we not be comparing it to Nvidia? That's certainly how I think of it. I mean, listen, when it comes to data center AI GPUs, there are two players.

There's Nvidia and there's AMD. Absolutely, we should be comparing that. And then on gaming GPUs, an AMD is, you know, more successful on the console side. NVIDIA is more successful on the discrete GPU side. But when it comes to the CPU business, which is very, very much still an important and growing business, Invidia is kind of in that market related to, you know, the arm-based processors that they put up in their GPU racks. But there isn't as much overlap from a business point of view as most people would think. But what comes to markets, absolutely, because everybody wants to talk about hyperscaler, capex, and GPUs for AI.

Yeah, it sounds like we're getting so obsessed with. GPUs, we're forgetting that there is this other thing called a CPU, which is also pretty important in our economy. Having said that, though, you know, I just look at the valuation of AMD. One, best performing chip stock of 2025. It's actually outperformed Nvidia. Yeah. And two, trading at a higher forward P.E. multiple. It's at 45, compare it to Nvidia at 40. So even if they're behind in terms of the GPU and even if their growth on the data centers is slower and they're doing a lot less than revenue, Wall Street still is very excited about this company. So what is that all about? What are all the investors so excited

about when it comes to AMD and seemingly more excited about than they are when it comes to Yeah, I think it's from a growth perspective. The big pop from AMD came after their advancing AI event that I had attended personally, where they came out with not only gave more details on this MI350 and MI355, but they also gave more details than them entering what's called the rack scale. So where instead of, you know, a fungible, unit of sales being a GPU block, it is actually a complete rack, which, you know, about one generation behind Nvidia, but investors got super excited about that. The one thing that was weighing on the stock prior, where it, you know, saw the big bump is before the big bump was

AMD stopped distinctly calling out the size of their data center GPU business. So in 2024, they went from pretty much zero to about $5 billion, but there was nothing else. There were no details for 2025. So people were a little hesitant to go in it. And, you know, from a revenue perspective, well, a market cap perspective, invidia is more than 10 times the size of AMD, but the revenue disparity is lower, which just, let's say you're doing evaluations

on a multiple of revenue or momentum, you can make the case that AMD still has some room to grow. Is a trillion-dollar market cap in the cards with AMD? Is that something that investors are thinking about? that the idea to become and join the leagues of invidia or is that too far off so i'm sure it is but to do that uh amd would need to so just in terms of raw numbers amd is about five percent market share of the enterprise data center either GPU or accelerator market right now it looks like this year amd is putting enough uh capacity

and to get about 10, 11% market share. And even though Invidia is still growing, I believe that they are planning to take market share. But to get to that trillion-dollar mark, I believe that not only would the market have to grow, which I do think it's going to grow for the next 18 months and within hyperscalers, but he would have to take additional market share

away from Invidia, which would likely have to happen in the 2026 time frame when AMD is bringing these rack-scale solutions to the table that not only contain the CPU, but CPU, GPU, networking, and all of the rack to go with it. In a very similar way that NVIDIA is doing today with Blackwell. Just before we wrap up here, I'd like to get your thoughts on the CEO that we don't hear as much about.

We hear all about Jensen Huang all the time. We hear a lot less about Lisa Sue, who is the CEO of AMD. She's been the CEO since 2014. I'd love to just hear more from you about who she is, about the direction she's taking the company. And final thing that I want to get your reaction to, which I also learned recently, is that Is that Lisa Sue is Jensen Huang's cousin. What is that about? Yeah, so, yeah, there's a lot of market cap in that related family tree, right?

Okay. And here's the thing. Lisa, I've known Jensen since, me see, 1998, and I've known Lisa for about 15 years. And Lisa is very conservative. She is a show me person, meaning she's not going to make boisterous claims that she doesn't have a very high confidence. And this is why, quite frankly, I think that she's not giving a specific number for GPUs in 2025 because she doesn't know for sure yet. And there are these bakeoffs, right? with the hyperscalers.

She's very execution-oriented, and this is, I think her and Jensen are very similar in that, and she's very command and control, meaning she will very quickly make decisions that are important. Now, very disciplined you must execute in the Lisa Sue world,

and this is why, quite frankly, one of the reasons that AMD went from almost bankrupt, okay, with three months cash. The story said six, but I'm here to tell you, it was three months cash. They came out with an architecture called Zen architecture on CPUs that literally brought them back from the dead. They used to just have a game console business. servers. They stopped selling those chips. GPUs were nominal. But, you know, she was the leader who brought this company back from the dead. And a lot of people don't remember that side of AMD. They much

rather say, well, wait a second. Why aren't they up there with NVIDIA? Well, when NVIDIA was developing Kuda for the past 15 plus years, A&D was trying to survive. Yes, exactly. And I think we're going to have to have another conversation at some point about what this cousin relationship is. I'm still suspicious. I don't understand how that's possible. But for now, we'll table at least as a great person. And we love her and Jensen.

Thank you very much for joining us again, Patrick. I hope to have you on again soon. Thanks. Bye-bye. Bye-bye. That was Patrick Moorhead. more insights and strategy. Okay, that's it for today.

Thanks for listening to Profi Markets from the Vox Media Podcast Network. I'm Ed Elson. I'll see you tomorrow. as the world