The Best One Yet - “Elon goes full Kanye” – Tesla’s surprise profit/outburst. Microsoft’s Zoom killer. Figma’s $2B app blueprints.

Episode Date: May 1, 2020

Tesla’s profit surprise got overshadowed by Elon’s anti-everything rant, so we’re comparing him to Zuck. Microsoft’s sales surprised investors, but we noticed its passive aggressive ripping on a new enemy. And behind-the-scenes app design software Figma hits a $2B valuation, because software’s not eating the world, apps are.Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

This is Nick. This is Jack. And this is Snacks Daily. It is Friday, May 1st, also known as the first of May. Friday already, this is incredible. Feels good, feels better than the one we did yesterday. Is this the best one yet? It is. Weekly jobless claims, though, increased by 3.8 million people last week. That means total job losses since mid-March, now at a devastating 30 million. It's a brutal situation for the economy, but we're going to bring digestible financial news and make this the best one yet, as always. Happens, to be a T-boy. First story, Jack, whip it up. Tesla had a nice, simple, straightforward update for us all yesterday. Yeah, it was profitable last quarter. That's impressive. Congrats Elon. Then CEO, Elon Musk, went full Kanye and said a bunch of crazy things that got all the attention. Basically, got on the earning stage, told Taylor Swift to get off. For our second story, Microsoft. It's earning surprised everyone. The paperclip clip clipy, it's got stock options. Now it's about to buy like a quarantine island. But we're focused on one Microsoft product. Big T, we're talking teams. Third and final story. The unicorn of the day,

it's called Figma. Have you ever seen Figma? It's the design program, probably behind whatever app you're tapping on right now. It's the digital whiteboard of the 21st century. Sounds like an elusive magical creature. Just hit a $2 billion valuation, aka double unicorn. A.k.a. AKA unicorn unicorn. But first, before we get those stories, quick reminder, Today, Nick and I are going live on Instagram. You got to follow Robin Hood Snack so you can chat with us, and we'll take your questions at 4 o'clock Eastern Time today. Either Jack or I may or may not be wearing slamming salmon head to toe.

Oh, by the way, by the way, did you know the biggest tech breakthrough of the year happened yesterday? We got to talk about longtime snack or 89-year-old Warren Buffett, aka the world's arguably greatest investor. We call him the headmaster of the Wall Street School of Profits and Synergy. Maximus. Warren Buffett has a $20 flip phone because this guy hates technology and loves Coca-Cola. Snackers, we're not kidding on this thing. We're talking about a man whose fingers have literally never touched an app.

Get this, Warren Buffett just upgraded to his first smartphone ever. We're talking iPhone 11 now in possession by Warren Buffett. My dad was a late holdout on smartphones. His first one was an iPhone 8. Warren takes the pie here. My dad's still pushing the Palm Pilot as an option. I know what you're thinking. Did he get an orientation at the Apple store and asked the genius bar, how do I use this

FaceTime thing? Yeah, Warren, just put your name in right here and then sit at that lightwood table on the right. We'll have a genius come help you in a second. Well, Warren has like $50 billion of net worth. So they flew out to California and he got a one-on-one orientation with CEO Tim Cook. We're talking Timmy taught Warren how to code basically on this thing. Kind of makes sense because Warren's come.

company, Berkshire Hathaway, has more money in Apple than any other company. Warren, now he can send us a snack fact. Let's hit our three stories. You're tuned in to snacks daily. We spoke to the lawyers and we got to get something legal out the way. The snacks about to hear ain't food. It's air candy. They don't reflect the views of the robberhood family. It's all informational just so. You know, we're not recommending any securities. It's not a research report or investment advice. Not an offer or sale of a security. Right.

Snacks is digestible. Business news for you. Robberhood Financial, LLC, member Fenra slash SIPC. For our first story, Elon Musk overshadowed Tesla's quarterly profit, you know, by calling the country state-at-home order completely fascist. But that does highlight a debate about markets and the economy in COVID-19. Snackers, we got to get a go-fund to me going for the lawyers over a Tesla. We need to get them some of those, what were they called, Jack, life alerts?

We've got to get them a life alert. Elon is like a gremlin from the 80s comedy horror classic. Like half the time you're looking at him, he's fuzzy, he's furry, he's adorable creature, who's made billions of dollars for investors. You kind of wish he were some kind of a toy you could just like cug a night and have right next to him. Other times, you think he's going to bite you. He's a radic, untamable creature who says crazy, absurd things that have nothing to do with Tesla. No joke, Snackers.

You want to remain socially distant from Elon Musk because he will take a finger. off you. We're looking at Tesla's quarterly earnings, Facebook's quarterly earnings, and then we're comparing what their CEOs are saying. All right. So Jack and I'm going to keep this super organized for you, Snackers. Here we go. All right, we're going to start with Tesla. They notched a, get this, a surprise profit last quarter, no one saw this coming. It was a surprise because they built their first Beijing factory built Tesla and delivered it on January 7th. That same month, they had to close the factory because COVID-19 was ravaging China. And then two months later, the other factories of Tesla's over in Nevada and California, they had to close.

And yet, Tesla still sold almost 100,000 cars, mostly Model 3s. This is like that Friday Night Lights movie, Boobie Miles! And he can't pass! Facebook also had a profit, but that one wasn't a surprise at all. No, it wasn't a surprise, but we're talking some big numbers here. Facebook had $4.9 billion in profits, and 1.7 billion people logged in every single day. The key metric investors wanted to know about was the adpocalypse. How much ad sales is Facebook still selling during this crisis? And snackers, as fancy as Facebook may look, always keep in mind, Facebook is an ad company.

And businesses are buying fewer ads on Facebook because the economy's closed. You don't want to sell ads for your pizza joint when there's no pizza getting cooked. You're not going to sell ads for your life alert because basically Jack and I are apparently the only people talking about it these days. So Zuck told us that January and February, ad sales were fantastic on Facebook. Everyone was shocked here. And then in March, things got bad, but then the big S word said in, they stabilized. Right.

Stabilized. Stabilized. That means ad sales have not gotten worse in April than they were in March, and investors were relieved Facebook stock price jump. I think we can say investors were stabilized. So, Jack, what's the takeaway for our buddies over at Facebook and at 10? Tesla. Zuck and Musk, they represent opposite sides of the open the economy debate. Snackers, both profits for both companies were cheered by investors of Facebook and investors of Tesla. Everyone else who doesn't own stock of Facebook and Tesla, they're looking at these thought leader

CEOs and what comments they made during the earnings call about whether we should reopen the economy. Honestly, Snackers, this Tesla earnings call, this was insane. We'd never seen anything like it. Musk was showing data that deaths and infections are down, but was pushing. really hard to reopen. In fact, he said for the government to order people to stay at home is fascist. And then he did something we've never heard a CEO do on a public earnings call. He actually dropped a couple F bombs and then dropped a couple F bombs. Nick and I studied World War II and Europe in the 30s. We don't think this qualifies as fascist. Zuck, on the other hand, said more deaths and infections are down because we're not open. And that reopening would lead to more outbreaks,

which would make things worse for everyone. Zuck versus Musk, pick aside. For our second story, Microsoft's earnings reveal it has a brand new enemy. And Microsoft knows exactly how to beat it. But completely separate from that. Meanwhile, Bill Gates is running around in a hazmat suit. He's physically tackling the coronavirus right now. He's like Superman for scientists.

Throwing his glasses at this thing, whatever it takes. Microsoft, the company he founded and CEOed for years, is crushing it on Wall Street. Sales jumped 15% last quarter. You know, cloud's doing great. Xbox is doing great. Microsoft Word is doing great. Cloud's doing great because they always want you to remember. They still do cloud stuff because everyone does cloud stuff.

Bing's not doing too well. No. Big's the only company we could think of that started out as a verb and didn't succeed. But there's only one thing investors are looking at right now. Teams. Teams. It's all about teams. that's Microsoft's remote workplace tool,

aka the unsexy version of Slack. Jack and I like to think of it as like the Prius to Slack's Tesla. For the first time ever, Microsoft used Teams to run its entire earnings call and get analysts to call in and ask questions. That's right, Snackers. They finally used their own product that was meant for exactly this kind of scenario

to do the earnings event. The CEO's like, now if you Bing our earnings report, you'll find positive results. It was like awkward before because it'd be like going to someone's house. When they cooked you the lasagna, you went down to eat it, and then suddenly a guy comes with delivery and they eat that instead.

Snackers, Teams is like an alternative to sending somebody an email. It's kind of like Slack. You just quickly ping them the question you need, and you get the response. And when it comes to the numbers from Teams, we had some fascinating stuff come out of Microsoft. Turns out daily users jumped 75%

from 44 million in mid-March, like before the coronavirus, to 75 million users today. On one single day, in the month of April. One day. 200 million people logged into teams. Nick, that's like the entire working age workforce of the United States.

That's like that Super Bowl thing where everyone flushes the toilet during the first commercial. No one knew if the internet could handle this kind of stuff. I have never heard of that Super Bowl toilet bag. And then the CEO Satchin Adela revealed that apparently 4.1 billion minutes have been consumed on teams, which Jack and I were talking about this, we have no idea if that's good or bad.

How many lifts is that, Sotcha Nadella? That's all we want to know, Sacha. That's all we want to know. Now, what we noticed, Teams has a new, subtle enemy. Not Slack. No. Zoom. Snackers, Jack and I thought this was fascinating. There was a ridiculously passive-aggressive tone in this earnings. Satcha Nadella, the CEO of Microsoft, said, and I quote,

Teams is not just about having lots and lots of video meetings, which anybody can do. And then he went out to say, Teams is actually about, get in work done where meetings and video is one part of it. And then another executive doubled down on the Zoom shade by saying, video conferencing isn't enough for a whole company. Turns out the CEO of Microsoft is Regina George. So Jack, what's the takeaway for our buddies over at Microsoft? Being a one and only company is both a great strength, but it can be a weakness.

And that one and only company is one we've spoken about before. It's Zoom. And Zoom's adoption has accelerated because it does one and only one thing. video conferencing, which you need right now. But to retain corporate customers like both Zoom and Microsoft want to do, you might need to do more than just one thing. And that's where Microsoft's advantage comes in. Microsoft does what Zoom and Slack do plus more, much more, plus more. Your office is already married to Microsoft Office, Microsoft Word, Microsoft Excel, Microsoft PowerPoint, and Microsoft Outlook. Oh, and by the way, everyone who used to work there also was married to all those things.

So you may as well go use teams for video conferencing and messaging and sharing because you're already using everything else, Microsoft. It's an easier transition to Microsoft Teams than switching everything up and going to Slack or Zoom. That's why when Jack and I are in the gym with Microsoft, we notice it's got two biceps that loves to flex. Less friction. More options.

Snackers, if you're doing an in-in-out snacks challenge run, it's time to turn around. We're a little halfway over. For our third and final story, we get to do that. We got our unicorn of the day, Figma, it just snacked $50 million in fresh funding and hit a $2 billion valuation. Picture Don Draper showing Connie Hilton the new ad campaign for Heinz ketchup bottles. But instead of on a big whiteboard, he's got like a little app. He's like, zoom in by spreading your fingers. Donnie would have been all over this thing.

The founders of Figma worked on it for six years in stealth mode. No joke in stealth mode. And remember, entrepreneurs go into stealth mode when they don't want to tell you what they're working on, but they want to tell you they're working on something in stealth mode. Six years is too long to be in stealth mode. But that's what they were. Their significant others must have proposed breaking up many times. Now, these co-founders met at Brown.

One of them actually dropped out to pursue the Peter Thiel Fellowship, which is a fancy kind of fellowship. Brown, the University, not Brown the Color. The Peter Thiel Fellowship is basically, you are so smart, I will pay you to drop out in, like, venture investing companies for me. No joke, Snackers, if you're thinking of not return to school in the fall, You may want to look into this whole Peter Thiel Fellowship thing.

So Figma finally launched in 2015. It was a collaborative design software so that you could build and design what your app looks like on people's smartphones. Now, the latest fundraise was from Andresen Horwitz, the legendary venture capital firm that famously said back in 2011, software is eating the world.

Think they got to revise that based on this investment. Apps are eating the world. And this was a fascinating fundraise for them to be a part of, because Snackers, we never heard of this. This was a true corona race. All the negotiations, they were done on Zoom. Did you say we're worth $200 billion?

Sorry, my dog was barking. Oh, we're worth $300 billion. That's fantastic. I said $2 billion, sir. No, $20 billion. Great. Fantastic. Where do we sign?

Where do we sign against the papers, Aza? Snackers, Figma is part of the post-coding era of tech. When you're using Figma, you're not doing like the 110-1-1-1-1-1 thing. You're doing drag-and-drop to get all that info in so you can build a beautiful app. Picture a nice big whiteboard, but on a computer screen. You can drop in images. You can create iPhone mockups. You can figure out how to swipe on the Android.

And you're co-working through this thing remotely with like Johnny and Bulgaria and Susie back in Menlo Park. It feels like a Bob Ross TV show with a painting on canvas, but with dozens of Bob Rosses and no canvas. There's nothing we want more than more Bob Rosses in this life. Imagine we were building a Snacks Daily app. Snacks app. I might drag and drop a nice.

nice green e-commerce button to buy our T-Boy T-shirts. I might then bring in the image of those aforementioned T-boy T-Boy T-Sh shirts into the image on Figma. We would do all of this on Figma and like pretend our app was live even though it's just on our computer screen. Yeah, like a pageant parent basically. Figma's behind the scenes. You don't see them, but they're making sure your app is all dressed up and pretty to go. Every app, just like a house, every app has a blueprint, but that blueprint is a Figma file. So, Jack, what's the takeaway for our buddies over? at Figma. We got to ask, who could acquire Figma? That's the first thing Jack and I noticed when we saw this fundraise. The company's worth $2 billion. It's just about a quarter of a lift. That's not too big, not too small. We're talking Goldilocks style when it comes to acquisitions lately. Figma is a one and only company that could become a one of many company at a big software firm. So Jack and I were throwing things up on our own whiteboard, which would be in real life, not unfortunately a digital one. We're thinking who could acquire them? We got a few options. What's the basic option, Jack, for an acquirer of Figma? Adobe. Yes.

They're the creator of the PDF. They're the beasts of Photoshop. They could stay relevant as things move from desktop to laptop to smartphone. All right, so that's the basic option. Then we're thinking who would be like, you know, Jack and I pulled out some kombucha with like 2% alcohol, went crazy. And we're wondering who is the surprising acquirer who could acquire a Figma? Google. Stick it in the G Suite.

That sounds so inappropriate, by the way. Yeah, they could actually have Figma up and those little dongle areas at top. So you've got like my drive, my Gmail, and then Figma to design. Or finally, how about the mean option? Apple. We were thinking Apple could be a mean acquire. Boom, they ban Android app developers from using Figma for those Android apps. Only iOS apps can use Figma. That would be such an Apple move these days. Snackers, Jack and I went minorly crazy with this. We want to hear what you're thinking. tweet us your ideas at Robin Hood Snacks. Who could acquire Figma? Jack, can you throw on the slamming salmon spandex and whip up the takeaways for us before the weekend? Spandex. I don't have any spandex. We'll sweat wicking over here. All right, now first story, Tesla and Facebook both celebrated earnings yesterday. Then Tesla shareholders muted Elon on Twitter, aggressive. Second story, Microsoft's business has not been damaged at all by COVID-19.

And its slack killer is now also a Zoom killer. Third and final story, architect sketch blueprints. Oh, yeah. App developers sketch Figma's. Boom, it's worth $2 billion, which is just to write for a tech acquisition. We're just saying. Our snack fact today, this one's from Carter in lovely Troy, Ohio, Paris on the river. Go Wildcats. Congratulations on your recent graduation from the University of Kentucky.

Carter. It's the hissing right there for you. Carter points out that Sir Robert Cheeseboro, great name. He discovered petroleum jelly, which he marketed as Vaseline way back in the 1800s. And this guy was so on his game with this stuff. He would actually experiment on his own cuts, his bruises, et cetera, and then get this. This is how much he believed in the product. He loves Vaseline so much. He ate a spoonful a day like Mary Poppins. Turns out he lived to 96 years old, but we have no idea on the correlation causation situation.

We should point out full disclosure. I love, though, how all in on this product that Sir Robert Cheeseboro was. We're impressed, Rob, even though we know you're not around any. Quick reminder, Snackers, follow us at Robin Hood Snacks on Instagram. If you do, you'll get a notification that we're going live at 4 o'clock Eastern time today, and you can ask us questions. break, Jack and I right up on the screens, we want to be answering your questions. We just want to see you guys. We miss you guys. We miss you guys. Have a great weekend.

We'll see you on Monday. Can't wait. This is Jack. I own half a stock of Berkshire Hathaway. The Robin Hood Snacks podcast you just heard reflects the opinions of only the hosts who are associated persons of Robin Hood Financial LLC and does not reflect the views of Robin Hood Markets, Inc, or any of its subsidiaries or affiliates. The podcast is for informational purposes only and is not intended to serve as a recommendation to buy or sell any security and is not an offer or sale of a security. The podcast is also not a research report and is not intended to serve as the basis of any investment decision.

Robin Hood Financial LLC, member FINRA, SIPC.