The Prof G Pod with Scott Galloway - Prof G Markets: Uber and Airbnb Earnings, Apple’s Debt

Episode Date: August 8, 2022

This week on Prof G Markets, Scott deciphers the market’s disparate responses to strong earnings announcements from Uber and Airbnb, and what it tells us about the importance of the narrative over numbers in stock valuation. Then we take a deep dive into Apple’s surprisingly large outstanding debt, and Scott explains why debt is a weapon, but one with two edges.  Uber Earnings Airbnb Earnings   Apple’s Debt Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

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cards, savings accounts, mortgage rates, and more. NerdWallet, finance smarter. NerdWallet Compare Incorporated. NMLS 1617539. This week's number, negative 75%. That's the return on investment you'd register if you'd bought one of Reese Witherspoon's World of Women NFTs a year ago. The return on watching Alexa in the film with Matthew Broderick, infinite. Will you please be quiet? Welcome to Prof G Markets. After a quick look at the news, we'll be discussing two interesting earnings reports from last week, Uber and Airbnb. We'll also take a deep dive into Apple and corporate bonds. Claire, our next young person, our next Gen Z millennial, what's up? Well, Robinhood announced its second

round of layoffs this year. It's letting go more than 1,000 employees, or roughly one-third of its workforce. Not too surprising, since customers are heading for the exit as well. Monthly active users have fallen 34% from a year earlier. Shares of Robinhood are down more than 40% year-to-date. Meanwhile, profits at biotech company Moderna fell 21%. That came after COVAX, the international initiative helping people in lower income countries get the jab, cut back its orders. Moderna took a $500 million inventory write-down for COVID vaccines that won't make it into anyone's arms. Here in the U.S., gas prices have fallen for seven straight weeks. The average cost of a gallon is nearing $4.

That's down 17% from June's record high of $5.02. As economic growth slows around the world and demand for oil falls, supplies are up. In other words, we've got more gas in the tank and drivers are paying less at the pump. There's some interesting stuff here. So first off, Robin Hood, my favorite collection of mendacious fucks addicting young men with a predatory app, laying off staff. What's even more impressive is that in Q2 of 2022, the average Robinhood

client, not investor, but client, lost 36% of the value of their portfolio versus I think it was 16 percent of the S&P decline. So on average, Robinhood customers lost double what the S&P shed. Now, granted, it might be that these investors are more in growth through stocks, but still, Robinhood's tagline should be the more you trade, the more you lose. I think this is an absolute disaster of a company and it's getting everything it deserved. What's interesting about the gas prices story is that no one's hearing about this story. Steven Pinker, the professor from Harvard, has a really interesting narrative, and that is you don't read in the headlines things that touch better globally today. It just doesn't sell papers. It doesn't sell clicks. So when gas prices go up, it's all we hear about. And when they go down, we barely hear about it. So evidence of this, the number

of New York Times headlines about rising U.S. gas prices in 2022 was 20. The number of times the New York Times had a headline about declining U.S. gas prices in 2022, one. And more good news, U.S. drivers have cut back gas consumption 5% to 10% this summer. I remember in the depth of COVID when everyone stopped driving and planes stopped flying, I physically noticed that the environment got more beautiful. I remember the water was clear, the skies were crisper, and I remember thinking, wow, maybe there was something to this whole notion of a carbon-free world. What else is going on? Uber announced earnings last week, beating revenue expectations and announcing a cash flow positive quarter. This is a big achievement for the firm, as historically, Uber has had negative cash flow totaling billions of dollars per year.

Shares spiked in response to the good news and closed the day up almost 19%. Yeah, so I have a love-hate relationship with Uber, and I used to hate it, and I'm starting to love it. I've always loved the app. I think it's a fantastic service. Uber Lux in London. And again, I just want to lean into my privileges and my douchebaggery here. But Uber Lux, you literally

get a 7 Series or Mercedes S-Class for what feels like the price of a London Black Cab. And I love London Black Cabs, but I like S-Classes and 7 Series more. Hello, ladies. Check out the dog living large. Anyways, I think Uber does an amazing job. So you got to give Dara Khosrowshahi credit. He's made some gangster acquisitions here, Postmates and Drizzly. There's now more food riding in the backseat by dollar volume than passengers. And their Q2 revenues were $8 billion versus $4 billion. They've doubled their revenues year on year. Their numbers are headed in the right direction. And as you mentioned, they've been cash flow positive. Why is that important? Simply

put, companies don't go out of business because they're bad ideas. They don't go out of business because they're unprofitable. They go out of business because they run out of cash. But even though Uber had positive cashflow, the company posted a net loss of $2.6 billion. Scott, which number should investors pay attention to? So do you pay attention to profits as evidenced or dictated by gap accounting methods, or do you pay attention just to cash flow? The answer is yes. They're both forward-looking indicators of a company's success. I would argue most people overlook cash flow versus earnings, but in the case of Uber, it had positive cash flow, but negative net income because it paid out almost a half a billion dollars in stock-based

compensation. Now, ultimately, that hurts shareholders because it's dilutive, but it's not a cash charge. It also wrote down about $1.7 billion in its stakes in other companies such as Omato, Grab, and Aurora. So again, that's bad for shareholders because their ownership in companies or acquisitions is worthless, but it's a non-cash charge. It doesn't immediately hit the company's ability to pay its bills. Uber's net loss in Q2 2022 was $2.6 billion. Uber has never been profitable on an annual basis as a public company. Its net loss in 2021 was half a billion. In 2020, 6.8 billion. And not to be outdone, in 2019, it was $8.5 billion. Uber has always been this company that looked like a giant incinerator, but it looks like it might be turning the corner here. It's a global platform bringing together buyers and sellers of services. It could probably extend into a lot of different areas. The stocks come way down. For the first time, I would say I'm sort of mildly bullish on the value of the equity.

Now, let's contrast this with another company that's capital intensive and is a mature business, and that is Boeing. In Q2 2022, net income was $193 million, but their free cash flow was a negative $182 million. Why? Because they had a large debt payment, and that had to come out in the form of $617 million in cash flow. So while that doesn't immediately hit their accounting profitability, it does hit their cash reserves. So the two can be in contrast with each other. They're both important. But again, cash flow is something you always want to keep

your eyes on. For most businesses, cash is in fact king. 82% of small businesses fail because of cash flow issues. The second quarter was also strong for Airbnb. The company beat expectations for both revenue and earnings. Like Uber, Airbnb posted positive cash flow and, unlike Uber, positive net income. Still, investors weren't satisfied. Airbnb's stock opened down 7% the morning after the earnings release. Though to be fair, shares did rally by the close. So stock prices are really driven by expectations, and that is about a third or

half of S&P companies have reported earnings, and two-thirds have reported beats. And Airbnb is an amazing company. Full disclosure, I'm a shareholder in Airbnb, and occasionally I advise the CEO, although I have not spoken to him this quarter. But I thought this was going to be the mother of all beats, people getting out of their houses, returning to Europe. Also, I believe Airbnb has more listings in Manhattan than there are apartments. What does that mean? It means that effectively Airbnb is now the largest apartment owner in the world. And if you look at year-on-year increases in apartment prices, you just got to think that Airbnb has incredible pricing power right now. So the combination, the perfect storm of post-COVID, pent-up demand to travel, pricing power,

a company that's well-managed, I thought this was going to be a monster beat. And so did the market. The stock began to move up in anticipations of a huge beat, but it was a mild beat. It wasn't a monster blow-off-the-doors beat, and so the expectations had gotten a little ahead of where the actual earnings were, and the stock was down, I think, 7% or 9%. Having said that, and you referenced this, the stock has more than recovered and is up. But again, stock prices are a function of expectations. The expectations for revenue here were 2.1 billion and reported 2.11, up 58% year on year. The expectations on earnings per share were 43 cents. They reported 56 cents versus negative earnings per share in Q2 2021. So one of the things we want to do here is we want to do some math.

For example, when Twitter reported that they had increased their user base by 16%, but the revenues had declined 1%, well, we can come to the conclusion that their ability to monetize each user has gone down substantially. More customers, less revenue means we're not getting the same average revenue per user. Now, in contrast, Airbnb missed its expectation around nights booked, but had a blowout in terms of earnings, meaning that their pricing power and the revenue they're able to get from each listing is going up or exceeded

expectations. So in one instance with Twitter, we had a lack of pricing power. In the case of Airbnb, we had increasing pricing power. It was also interesting to see how different media outlets reported Airbnb's results. Take these two headlines. Bloomberg wrote, Airbnb slumps after bookings missed analyst estimates. Meanwhile, CNBC went with, Airbnb reports record-breaking bookings, announces 2 billion buyback. It's almost as if they read two different earnings reports. Scott, what do you make of this? The peanut butter and chocolate evaluations is narrative and numbers. And it used to be numbers and narrative. It used to be kind of 80% numbers. If you were in a certain sector, they looked at your EBITDA, they put the sector multiple on it,

and they took it up or down 20% if they thought the CEO was a compelling guy. Now it's kind of flipped. And I would argue, especially with growthy stocks, it's more 50% to 70% narrative and call it 30% to 50% numbers. And that is Uber's always had a great narrative and people love it. So it's been able to kind of access cheap capital because the narrative is really strong. In other companies, the narrative is just so weak or they have such a bad brand that even if they have a decent underlying business, they never get that cheap capital. Whenever one of these CEOs is in town, I get a call from some PR flack saying that so-and-so wants to have dinner with you and share his vision of technology. No, he wants to kiss my ass and pretend that he's interested or gives a flying fuck what I think such that I will be kind and say nice things about this company. Because they recognize that if I can get everyone

to slobber all over me and say, this is the future, this isn't a real estate company, it's a movement, that this company can't be valued economically, it needs to be valued culturally, on and on and on, bullshit, blah, blah, blah, that we might actually be able to take a really shitty real estate company and take it public at $50 to $70 billion. So all of a sudden, the narrative has become key. The number of PR employees in the U.S. has increased 164% since 1997, and the number of journalists has decreased by 30%. That means the ratio of spin and bullshit to actual journalism has gone the wrong way. And the core competence of a CEO now is storytelling such that he or she can put out a compelling narrative, pull the future forward, raise cheap capital,

and survive long enough such that the numbers catch up to the narrative. Well, Scott, speaking of narrative, what did you think of your New York Times profile piece? Well, thank you for bringing that up, Claire. You never get the story you would write. I love the New York Times, and it was a nice moment. At the end of the day, it's not what the world thinks of you. It's that the world is thinking of you. It means you're having an impact. And as long as it's not outlining your crime, your life before you fled the country, it's a net positive. And this was a net positive. Having said that, you never like your own press, felt that they were sort of quick to gloss over our successes and used a lot of adjectives and

embellishments regarding my neuroses. So I was a little bit disappointed. What was reinforcing about the whole thing was the comment section. A lot of people weighed in and support. But immediately, immediately, within six hours of this article coming out, the Prop G pod, this pod, and our franchise was, according to Apple podcasts or Apple rankings, number one in the entrepreneurship category globally and number one in the business category globally and the 24th most listened to podcast in the world. Keep in mind there are 2 million podcasts. We have never achieved that level of downloads or listenership across Pivot, across Prop G. So the bottom line is people read it and whether they like me or don't like me, they thought this is an interesting

dude. I'll tune in and give the pod a try, falling under the general conventional wisdom that all press is good press. But again, your ability to craft a narrative ultimately dictates the numbers. The narrative is a forward-looking indicator of your numbers. All right, enough about us. We'll be right back after the break with a look at Apple's multi-billion dollar debt. The Capital Ideas Podcast now features a series hosted by Capital Group CEO Mike Gitlin. Through the words and experiences of investment professionals, you'll discover what differentiates their investment approach, what learnings have shifted their career trajectories, and how do they find their next great idea? Invest 30 minutes in an episode today. Subscribe wherever you get your podcasts. Published by Capital Client Group, Inc.

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would be taking on debt, up to $10 billion. These aren't companies that need the money. They're some of the wealthiest in the world. So why are they going into debt? For a look into that question, here's Prof G Media's editor-in-chief, Jason Stavers, with this week's Deep Dive. Apple is not only the most valuable company in the world and one of the most profitable, it's also one of the world's largest debtors. In fact, Apple owes its creditors over $120 billion. That sounds really bad. It does. But it turns out that when you're as rich as Apple,

some of the rules are different. To get into this much debt, Apple didn't take out loans from a bank. It issued bonds. A bond is a promise to make small interest payments once or twice a year, then at the end of a designated time period, pay off the bond in

a single large sum. Once companies issue these bonds to the public, investors can just buy and sell them as a way of getting access to a reliable future income stream. In fact, if you have shares in a mutual fund, such as through a 401k, you might own some of Apple's bonds yourself. All right, but why is Apple borrowing money from anyone? It's the richest company in the world. So Apple started getting into the bond game in a big way in 2013. Apple was coming off a historic decade of global growth and had been accumulating billions of dollars in profits overseas. So they wanted to bring the money back to shareholders, but they didn't want to bring the cash itself back into the United States because it would have been subject with 35% corporate income tax. So Apple engaged in some creative financial engineering.

It started issuing bonds, borrowing money, and then using the borrowed money to fund dividends and stock buybacks. It was able to borrow that money at very low rates because the market could see that A, Apple was a very profitable company, and B, if it hit a rough patch, it had billions in overseas bank accounts it could use to pay its debts. Apple's first bond issuance was for $17 billion, which at the time was the largest ever corporate bond sale. And it would go on to issue billions more. It's worked out really well. Apple's stock price is up roughly 10x since that first bond issue. But didn't we resolve the overseas cash problem with the Trump administration's tax cut? We did.

In 2018, U.S. companies were permitted, more or less required actually, to bring their cash home and required to pay just a 15.5% tax. Apple complied and paid a record $38 billion in taxes on the money that it repatriated. But it's still issuing bonds? Yeah. So a funny thing happened on the way to the bond market. Once Apple realized that bond investors would buy their debt at very low rates and that equity investors didn't mind the company taking on some debt, they kept at it. Because here's the thing. Apple is

seen as so reliable, it can borrow money at a lower cost than nearly anyone else. Only Microsoft and Johnson & Johnson have a credit rating as high as Apple. In fact, it can get such a low rate that it can borrow money in the form of bonds, then turn around and buy the bonds of other highly regarded companies and make money on the deal, since nearly every other company has to pay more interest on its bonds than Apple does. So since 2018,

Apple has maintained about $120 billion in bond debt. As the bonds mature and get paid off, it issues new bonds, which is what it's doing right now. Apple is the largest debtor in big tech, but it's not alone. Microsoft and Amazon both have about $50 billion in debt outstanding themselves. Alphabet has about $15 billion.

And now Meta plans on joining the club with its own debt issuance. Thanks, Jason. Scott, this is not how I think about debt at all. For me, debt is a last resort. Claire, I think that's good judgment. And debt plays different roles for different people in different organizations. So here at Prop G, our mission is we want you to be more economically and emotionally viable. And there's a relationship between debt and your mental health. And that is, if you're borrowing money to consume things, that's a forward-looking predictor that at some point you're going to have more stress

than you'd like. And it's a bad decision. So using debt to live a lifestyle that you can't afford is usually not a good idea. However, borrowing money to improve your earnings potential or improve the value of your assets or your currency or your credentials can sometimes be justified. For example, I borrowed money to go to UCLA. Now, granted, UCLA was a great deal. So I borrowed about $5,000 to go to UCLA over four years. I borrowed $15,000 to get an MBA from Cal. That was a great deal. And let me acknowledge that student debt was a no-brainer for me because college was so cheap when I went. And it may not be the right thing for everybody. I would be very thoughtful about how much debt your organization or your college is asking you to take out. Sometimes the

debt is greater than the upside or the increase in earnings potential that that university degree will get you. You want to go to someone who understands finance and say, this is how much it's going to cost me to finish my freshman year at this university. This is how much debt I'm going to need. Is it worth it? I can borrow against my stocks right now at about 2% or 3%. That is so cheap that it probably makes sense for me to borrow money instead of maybe selling stocks where I would right away have to pay 23% or 38% taxes on. I'm on the board of a fast-growing unicorn. If we were going to do a traditional venture backed around, we might have to give up 15% or 20% of the company to raise $50 or $100 million.

That is, we would have to issue shares that would dilute us all by 15% or 20% of the company to raise $50 or $100 million. That is, we would have to issue shares that would dilute us all by 15% or 20%, whereas interest rates are still fairly low. And because the company is cashflow positive, because the company has no debt, we can go out and raise debt at a very low cost. So there's a cost to raising equity and there's a cost to debt, but sometimes the cost of equity is greater than the cost of debt. With L2, when we raised $20 million from General Catalyst to Tier 1 VC, Comerica, a bank and a creditor, approached us and said, we'll give you $5 million in venture debt. What does that mean? It's debt. They're first in line. If you go out of business, they own your assets before anybody else. Debt takes precedence in the cap structure. But that was worth it because they said, we're so confident that this company is worth at least $5 million, as evidenced by the fact that General Catalyst invested $17 million, that we'll loan you $5 million at an interest rate of 3.25%, which is effectively free money. So I signed it believing that an

additional $5 million on the balance sheet was nice to have at a very low cost. And then if I invested it, if I used it to acquire companies or hire new people, that that money spent would get me at least 103 and a quarter cents on the dollar back. So debt can be an effective tool in your arsenal. I think the litmus test for a young person is, am I using debt to live a lifestyle I can't sustain, or am I using it to increase my forward-looking earnings? And that is college at a decent price, maybe buying a house that will increase in value and is somewhat subsidized by the government in the form of tax advantage, so I get a tax write-off on a mortgage. So debt can

be a weapon. As Jason referenced, it plays a critical role in corporate America, and it can also play a valuable role in your own personal financial well-being. I would also add that if you have credit card debt, if you get a raise or a bonus, sometimes the smartest thing you can do is to reduce your debt. And that is if you're paying 12, 15, or 18% in credit card interest, you're not likely going to get that return anywhere. The first thing you should do when you have additional money is you should pay down debt that is expensive. You're honestly just making me want to cut up my credit cards. I'm getting nervous now. That's a great idea. And there's a psychological problem with credit cards in that it doesn't feel like real money. I like to pay cash. I like to tell people your

age to pay with cash because it changes the decision model. When you're out with friends and you order $80 worth of mimosas, I don't know where I got that, you feel it and you may not order that next round. When you pay $200 for that Q-top to go to Coachella and you have to throw down 1020s, you feel it. Whereas credit cards give the illusion that it's not really costing you anything. All right, I have some Venmo requests to submit to my friends after we record this.

That's right, get on it. Okay, that's all for today's show. Claire, what's coming up in the week ahead? We will be watching the latest inflation numbers from the Consumer Price Index on Wednesday and earnings from Roblox, Coinbase, and Rivian. So, Scott, might be a good time to check in on that order you put in for a truck before you jet off to London. That's right. I ordered a Rivian. And when I posted my order on Twitter, someone said, rest in peace, Rivian. But I like it. I think I'm going to look very sexy. I think I'm going to look

56 again in my Rivian. It costs like 85 grand. And I immediately got an email saying, oh, supply chain issues. We've raised the price to 110 grand. And before I could even get angry, there was just an outrage in the community. And they sent another letter saying, just kidding. I think I'm going to get it in like 2028. But when I get it, it's going to be awesome. I'll be 70 and just back from the UK driving around in a douchebag electric SUV. Do you want a prediction? Let us hear it. So my prediction is that the immunities are kicking in around these growthy companies that never made any sense and had backers who were louder than they were honest. And we're seeing a lot of companies get hit hard. Robinhood is not only a shitty business,ator, was fined $62 million by the FTC for misleading sellers claiming they could get more for selling their house.

And that was not the case. An FTC investor said that defrauding customers is not innovation. Hello. We're going to see this across the growth economy, specifically these unicorns that were cash flow negative and had these very aggressive founders and a narrative that was quite frankly bullshit, aggressive, and also waving their middle finger in the face of regulation or any sort of concern for customers. This is a tip of the iceberg. We're going to see a lot of fines and a lot of pushback on these companies. Okay, that's it for Prop G Markets. Have a great week. I'm Esther Perel, psychotherapist and host of the podcast Where Should We Begin, which delves into the multiple layers of relationships, mostly romantic.

But in this special series, I focus on our relationships with our colleagues, business partners and managers. Listen in as I talk to co-workers facing their own challenges with one another and get the real work done. Tune into Housework, a special series from Where Should We Begin, sponsored by Klaviyo. Hey, it's Scott Galloway, and on our podcast, Pivot, we are bringing you a special series about the basics of artificial intelligence. We're answering all your questions. What should

you use it for? What tools are right for you? And what privacy issues should you ultimately watch out for? And to help us out, we are joined by Kylie Robeson, the senior AI reporter for The Verge, to give you a primer on how to integrate AI into your life. So tune into AI Basics, How and When to Use AI, a special series from Pivot sponsored by AWS, wherever you get your podcasts.