The Rundown - Apple's WWDC Event Kicks Off, Meta Makes $10B Investment in Scale AI

Episode Date: June 9, 2025

Stock market update for June 9, 2025. Follow @TheRundownDaily on Instagram.This video is for informational purposes only and reflects the views of the host and guest, not Public Holdings or its subsidiaries. Mentions of assets are not recommendations. Investing involves risk, including loss. Past performance does not guarantee future results. For full disclosures, visit ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠Public.com/disclosures⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠.

Public.com presents the rundown. Your daily market update in under 10 minutes. My name is Zadadmani, and today is Monday, June 9th. In today's episode, we preview this upcoming week, including Apple's WWDC and an inflation report. We also tell you about Warner Brothers plans to split up the company. Then stick around to the end of the show to find out about a big milestone for chat GPT.

We got a great show for you today. Let's go. Markets are coming off another solid week. The S&P 500 added 1.5% last week, while the NASDAQ was up 2.2%. You know, it's now been two months since the markets bottomed back on April 8th. And since then, the S&P 500 has rallied over 20%.

In fact, we're now 2.5% away from hitting all-time highs. So despite some uncertainty around tariffs and trade policy, there are other factors that are pushing up the markets. For one, hiring remains pretty strong. On Friday, the jobs report showed us that there was 139,000 jobs added to the U.S. economy for the month of May. So there seems to be no noticeable slowdown in the labor market. And I think the second factor pushing the markets higher is that corporate earnings have

been pretty strong. Q1 earnings season is pretty much in the books now, and S&P 500 companies saw their profits grow by 12.5% year over year. So according to the earnings data, companies are still crushing. Now, looking ahead a bit, we are getting a CPI report on Wednesday morning, which will give us a fresh read on inflation. Inflation has been trending lower for months now, but there are some concerns that tariffs could reignite inflation. We haven't seen any signs of that yet, but we'll find out more this week. And speaking of inflation, the Fed meeting is next week.

And depending on what the inflation report says, that could impact the Fed's decision on what to do with interest rates. Now, as of this moment, investors aren't expecting Jerome Powell to make any changes to the interest. rates, even though President Trump hopped on truth social on Friday morning to blast Jerome Powell to cut rates. According to the CME Fed Watch tool, there is a 0.1% chance the Fed cuts rates. So it's probably not going to happen. But then again, Carlos Alciras probably had the same odds when facing three championship points at the French Open yesterday. And he still ended up winning. Shout up to my tennis fans out there. That was an incredible tennis match yesterday. So I guess anything is possible, but I wouldn't be getting my hopes up for a rate cut anytime soon.

You know, the labor market continues to stay strong and the stock market is near all-time highs. Jerome Powell has no real reason to pull the trigger on cutting rates right now. We'll find out pretty soon. And I'm sure the president is going to have something to say about that as well. Let's run through some headlines. Starting with Apple. Apple is kicking off their worldwide developer conference today. And everyone from tech enthusiasts to investors are hoping to see something special from Apple.

See, a lot of the AI features that Apple showed off during last year's WWDC still haven't shipped yet. And Apple Intelligence has essentially become a laughing stock. At this rate, investors are starting to lose patience too. Apple stock has dropped more than 18% this year, making it the second worst performing Mac 7 stock after Tesla. And unfortunately, it looks like this year's keynote might not bring the AI heat either. According to earlier reporting from Bloomberg's Mark German, who I call the Woge of Apple, NBA fans know what I mean. it sounds like Apple isn't planning to make any major AI announcements, which is pretty disappointing. To make matters worse for Apple to hit pieces keep coming. This time it was the Financial Times

they published an article over the weekend where they interviewed ex-Apple employees that talked about Apple struggles with AI, especially Siri. And in this article, Bank of America said that Apple was three years away from a truly modern AI assistant that could match the likes of Google or Open AI. Three, I mean, three years in tech is a lifetime. ChatGBTGPT didn't exist three years ago. So yeah, I wouldn't get my hopes up too much for this year's WWDC. Maybe Apple announced some sort of strategic AI partnership with OpenAI or Google. That would be interesting. But don't expect Siri to get better anytime soon. The WWDC keynote starts at 1 p.m. Eastern. I'll be tuning in, not just to watch what they announced, but also to keep a close eye on Apple stock and how it reacts

during the keynote, we'll break down all the highlights for you on tomorrow's show, assuming there are any highlights. Now, sticking with the AI theme, let's talk about meta, because they're in talks to invest over $10 billion into Scale AI. And if this deal goes through, it would be one of the largest private funding deals ever, and Meta's biggest external AI investment to date. Now, Scale AI has quietly been a key player in the AI boom. Their whole business is turning raw data, like images, video,

and texts into clean, labeled machine readable data. Think of them like an AI chef. They turned the raw data into digestible data, which then gets fed into AI models to help with training. And they got some big-time clients, including Microsoft, OpenAI, and, yes, of course, meta. Scales valuation hit $14 billion last year after a funding round, which included both Meta and Microsoft,

and the company's revenues are growing fast. Last year, Scale made $870 million in revenue, And this year, they're on track to more than double that to over $2 billion. And by the way, Meta and Scale already worked together on something called Defense Lama. Yes, that's an actual name. It's a military-focused version of Meta's Lama AI model designed for defense use. And as we've talked about before, Meta is pushing hard into the defense industry. Last week, they announced a partnership with defense contractor and a role to build AI-powered helmets for the military.

So yeah, this just continues to show that meta is going all in on AI. and making big investments. CEO Mark Zuckerberg has said he's willing to spend up to $65 billion on AI projects this year. And meta has had some early success too. They claim that their meta AI chat box now reaches over 1 billion users, even though, to be honest, I don't think I know anyone that actually uses it. I mean, at this point, the company is so AI focused that they might have to consider changing their name from meta to AI or something.

Investors' source seem to be loving this. Meta stock is up nearly 20% this year. In fact, they're the best performing stock out of the Mac 7. Let's talk about some stocks making moves today. Warner Brothers Discovery shares are popping this morning after the media conglomerant announced plans to split itself into two separate companies. One company will be called Global Networks, and this will house all the legacy media brands, including CNN, TNT, TBS, and the rest of the old school TV lineup. And the other company is going to be more like Netflix. It's called Streaming in Studios for now,

and it's going to include HBO Max and Warner's film and TV production business. Now, Global Networks, the TV Network Company, will take on a good chunk of the $34 billion in debt that Warner's currently has, and this group will also hold a 20% stake in the streaming business, which it'll use to help pay down the debt. Now, the company says they're doing the split

to give each business a sharper focus and strategic flexibility. Essentially, though, they're hoping that Wall Street values the parts of this business, business more than the sum. They're trying to get their streaming business to have the same multiples that Netflix has. And so far, the market is into this move. Warner Brothers stock is up more than 8% this morning, but we'll have to see how long this enthusiasm lasts. Now, on the flip side, shares of Robin Hood and App Lovin are taking a hit this morning after they got snubbed by the S&P 500 committee. You know, last week, there were rumors flying around that both of these companies might

get added to the S&P 500 index, but then on Friday, the S&P 500 announced that no companies were being added to the index this quarter. So as a result, both stocks are down around 4% this morning on this news. You know, Robin Hood, I don't think I've heard of them before. Let's wrap the show with a fun fact. Traffic to ChatGPT has overtaken Wikipedia. U.S. site visits to chat GPT soared to a record 780 million in April, which is a 14% jump from March. Compared that to the 716 million U.S. visits to Wikipedia. This is according to data from similar web. You know, what's crazy is that chat GPT's traffic

had just crossed like 300 million in the back half of 2024, while Wikipedia's has been flat in the same time period. To be fair, Wikipedia still has more than double the unique visitors that chat GPT has, but it just goes to show you that people that use chat GPT are coming back multiple times a day and have become super users.

Well, all right, guys, that's the rundown for today. Hope you guys enjoyed this episode. By the way, if you guys are looking for some bonus content to listen to, check out our weekend deep dive episode. A little fun fact about that, we filmed that episode at the NASDAG Studios in Times Square.

Go check out that episode. Watch it with video if you can on Spotify or YouTube so you can see the cool studio that we were filming at. I'll be honest, it was a big moment for the podcast because I was there

with Mike and Connor and we had a great time. By the way, we're going to try something new this week. We're going to answer some listener questions on Friday's episode. So if you guys have any questions for us,

leave us a comment on Spotify, on YouTube, DM us on Instagram, on Instagram and we'll try to answer some of those questions on Friday show. Thank you guys so much for listening. Shout out to Mike and Connor for all the help behind the scenes and we'll see you guys back here tomorrow.