The Rundown - Berkshire Hathaway Puts Cash to Work, Zuck Defends AI in New Manifesto

Episode Date: August 10, 2026

Market update for Monday August 10, 2026Check out the Public app for incredible investing tools and to support the show (LINK)Follow us on Instagram (@TheRundownDaily) for bonus content and instant reactions.In today’s episode, Zaid covers:Berkshire Hathaway’s earnings and how Greg Abel is starting to put Warren Buffett’s massive cash pile to workMeta’s new open-weight AI models and Mark Zuckerberg’s 6,500-word AI manifestoHPE’s analyst upgrade and Intel’s $15 billion stock offeringWhy more than half of Americans now have passports, and why American tourists are flooding Europe

Public.com presents the rundown. Your daily market update in 10 minutes. My name is Zaid Admani, and today is Monday, August 10th. In today's episode, we'll break down why stocks are back at record highs and what to look forward to this week. We'll also tell you how Berkshire Hathaway's new CEO Greg Abel is started to spend the company's massive cash pile. We'll also dig into meta's latest AI pivot and why Zuck is going all in on open weight. models. Then stick around to the end of the show to find out why Americans basically take over Europe every summer. We got a great show for you today. Let's go. Stocks are coming off a winning week.

The S&P 500 jumped 3.6% while the NASDAQ jumped 5.2%, both indices having their best weeks since April. Now, what's funny here is that the rally got a boost on Friday thanks to a poor jobs report. Friday's jobs report showed the U.S. economy lost 23,000 jobs in July, while economists were expecting a gain of roughly 80 to 90,000 jobs. On top of that, May and June were also revised down by 103,000 jobs. But despite the poor numbers, Wall Street was celebrating this report because a cooling labor market means the Fed probably won't hike rates anytime soon. Traders are now putting in odds of a September rate hike at around 45% down from 64% a week ago. But you know, I think the main reason that stocks are back at all-time highs right now is because of earnings. This earnings season has been absolutely insane.

More than 440 S&P 500 companies have reported earnings so far, and 86% of those companies have beaten estimates. And overall earnings are running roughly 50% higher than they were a year ago, which is the strongest earnings growth since the pandemic recovery in 2021. AI and energy companies are doing a lot of heavy lifting here. but even if you strip out some of the unusually large gains at Alphabet and Amazon, earnings growth is still tracking close to 29%. So I think the strong earnings numbers are the main story here. Now, we are getting close to the end of earnings season, but there's still some heavy hitters left like Invidia,

which reports in a couple weeks. So can't wait to see what they have to say. Now, as for this week, we are getting a July CPI report on Wednesday. That should give us more information on what inflation is doing. So we'll be keeping an eye on that, along with what's happening in the Middle East and oil prices. oil is creeping back up again as the Strait of Hormuz deal with Iran keeps almost happening, but never actually happening.

So there continues to be a lot of uncertainty there. We're going to stay on top of all this along with everything else happening in the market. So definitely get subscribed with the podcast and tune in every day to stay in the loop. Let's run through some headlines, starting with Berkshire Hathaway. Berkshire Hathaway reported earnings over the weekend. And the big takeaway is that new CEO Greg Abel is, finally starting to spend some of that massive pile of cash that Warren Buffett left behind. Berkshire ended June with around $365 billion in cash and treasury bills.

That's down from the nearly $400 billion they had three months earlier. In fact, this was the first quarterly decline in Berkshire's cash pile in nearly four years. And Greg Abel is putting this money to work in different ways. For one, Berkshire bought about $23.5 billion worth of stocks during the quarter and sold just 3.7. billion dollars worth of stock. That means that Berkshire was a net buyer of stocks for the first time after 14 straight quarters of being a net seller. On top of that, they spent roughly $4.5 billion buying back their own stock compared to just $235 million in Q1. So after years of Warren Buffett telling investors that he couldn't find many bargains in the market, Greg Abel takes over and

starts hitting the buy button immediately. And I think the buybacks might be the most interesting part because it's a sign that Berkshire thinks that their stock is undervalued. And here's the thing, Berkshire stock has lagged the market. Their stock is up only 3% this year compared with a roughly 13% gain for the S&P 500. Now, outside of the investing stuff, the actual business had a decent quarter as well. Operating earnings jumped 16% to nearly $13 billion with strong results for manufacturing, energy and BNSF railroad. Insurance was a weak spot though with Geico underwriting profits dropping about 45%. So I wonder if that means that our insurance premiums are about to go up soon. Overall, though, the takeaway here is that Greg Abel is going to be more aggressive than Warren

Buffett when it comes to investing. You know, he's kind of acting like a teenager who got keys to his dad's Ferrari and he's driving it 100 miles per hour down the highway. And here's the thing, Berkshire still has $365 billion in cash. So we'll see what Greg Abel decides to do over the next few quarters. And here's what I wonder, like, is Berkshire stock underperforming because it doesn't have the Warren Buffett premium anymore? Like, it used to be cool to say that you were a Berkshire shareholder, but now that Warren Buffett is no longer running the show, is it still cool to say that? I know it's silly, but I think that might be playing a factor on why Berkshire stock might be underperforming the rest of the market. I could be way wrong, though. Let me know in the comments

on what you guys think. Let's shift gears and talk about meta, because CEO Mark Zuckerberg just made a pretty big statement about where he thinks the AI industry should go. Meta released a new open weight AI model today called Muse Glimmer, which is a small model that users can download and run locally on a laptop. And more importantly, Meta says they will soon release the weights for their Mew Spark 1.2 model, which is their most advanced model, so developers can download it, customize it, and run it themselves instead of having to access everything through meta. And there's been a lot of noise these days about the rise of Chinese open weight models and how that will be the future of AI instead of closed models from companies like OpenAI and Anthropic.

And now META is putting their weight, no pun intended, behind the open weight movement by releasing their own open weight model. This is part of Zuck's overall vision for AI. He published a 6,500 word AI manifesto this morning laying out his vision for what he calls personal superintelligence. His basic argument is that AI should not be controlled by a handful of companies or governments. He thinks that superintelligence should be widely distributed so individuals can have their own powerful AI agents. Now, personally, I'm a little skeptical about people wanting to use AI. agents all the time, but I think this is a smart pivot for meta because they know they probably can't compete with open AI or anthropic when it comes to leading edge models. Now, I'm not sure

how meta will monetize open weight models, and that might be a problem because they're spending $145 billion on AI CAPEX. So they might still face some questions from investors if they can't justify all the CAPEX spending. For now, though, meta stock is up around 1% this morning at the time of this recording, but if you zoom out, though, meta stock has dropped 10% in the past month. Let's talk about some stocks making moves today. Shares of HP Enterprise are climbing this morning after Morgan Stanley upgraded the stock to overweight while admitting that they had been too cautious on the enterprise hardware trade. And Morgan Stanley had expected all the increased costs and components to put the brakes on hardware spending, but according to their latest survey, demand is holding up better than expected.

So Morgan Stanley now thinks that we're in a longer infrastructure spending cycle, and HPE is one of the companies benefiting from all this. because they sell servers, storage, and networking gear to businesses upgrading their data center infrastructure. And that's why Morgan Stanley is upgrading the stock. Now, funny enough, they actually lowered their price target from $71 down to $69 a share, but that still implies a 30% upside from Friday's close. HPE shares are up around 5% this morning at the time of this recording.

And if you zoom out, the stock is more than doubled this year. Now, on the flip side, Intel stock is falling this morning after the company announced a 15 billion billion dollar stock sale to fund their AI buildout. Intel plans to use the cash for general corporate purposes and pursue growth opportunities across areas like physical AI and purpose-built silicon. Honestly, it's a smart move by Intel because their stock has gone up 175% so far this year, thanks to the surge in their data center business, which grew 59% last quarter. And when your stock goes up like that, that's exactly when you want to sell shares to take advantage of the high stock price. The trade offer issuing new stock, though, is dilution by issuing new shares. By issuing new

Intel is increasing the number of shares outstanding, which reduces the ownership stake of existing shareholders. And that's why Intel stock is down around 4% this morning at the time of this recording. Let's wrap the show with the fun fact. The U.S. State Department issued a record 27 million passports in the last fiscal year. In fact, today, more than half of Americans have a passport. You compare that to 25 years ago, less than 20% of Americans had a passport. And all of this led to a surge of American tourists all over the world, especially to Europe. Americans took a record 24 million trips to Europe in 2025. And European businesses love American tourists because we tend to spend a lot of money.

For example, in Spain last year, American tourists spent nearly $350 per day. Compare that to German tourists was spent roughly $200 per day, or French tourists was spent around $150 per day. In fact, producer Mike just came back from Spain, and he can personally confirm the spending, by American tourists. So there you go. Also, shout out to everyone that let the recommendation

for Mike in the comments a couple weeks ago. Now, zooming out, I think there were a few reasons that Americans are traveling more. For one, social media definitely plays a role here, you know, when you see your friends or some influencer posting from Greece or Spain, and suddenly you get FOMO and start looking up flights. But also, I think international travel

has become a lot more accessible and less intimidating these days. You can book everything online now, you can use credit card points for flights, you can pull up Google Maps when you're lost, You can pull up Google Translate to help you communicate, and you can call an Uber to help get around. So traveling somewhere you've never been before just feels easier and less intimidating than it used to. And finally, I think we have to talk about the wealth effect here too.

The U.S. economy and stock market, for that matter, continue to surge, which has resulted in more wealth for Americans, especially the boomers. Older Americans are sitting on $110 trillion, and they're spending some of that money on experiences and travel. So yeah, that's why we have more and more Americans traveling internationally. and I don't know if that trend's going to stop anytime soon. Let me know the comments if you took an international trip this summer. And also let me know in the comments if you think that traveling might be a little overrated. Now, I personally love to travel. It's a little bit harder with kids these days.

But I'm hearing more and more that traveling just might be more performative these days than anything. So let me know the comments on what you guys think. Well, all right, guys. That's the rundown for today. I hope you guys enjoyed today's episode. Thank you guys so much for listening, watching, and commenting. Shout out to Mike and V for all the work behind the scenes. And we'll see you guys back here tomorrow.