The Rundown - Micron’s Monster Quarter Sends Stock Ripping, Olive Garden Spoils Darden Earnings

Episode Date: June 25, 2026

Market update for June 25, 2026. Check 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:Oil prices falling back near pre-Iran war levels and what that could mean for inflationMicron’s monster earnings and why it may have just saved the AI tradeQualcomm pops on AI data center pushWendy’s meme-stock rally stays alive Darden falls on Olive Garden weaknessFun Fact: CEO pay hitting record high

Public.com presents the rundown. Your daily market update in 10 minutes. My name is Zadadmani, and today is Thursday, June 25th. In today's episode, we'll break down Micron's monster earnings and why it saved the AI rally. We'll also tell you about the big moves coming from Qualcomm. Then stick around to the end of the show to find out who the second highest paid CEO was in 2025, and I guarantee you've probably never heard.

of this guy. We got a great show for you today. Let's go. Markets are coming off. Another down day of trading. The S&P 500 fell 0.1% yesterday, while the NASDAQ fell 0.4%. So not too bad, I guess, compared to what we were dealing with earlier in the week, but tech stocks continued to be under pressure on Wednesday. Things are starting to turn around today, though. Tech and AI stocks are rebounding after a monster earnings report from Micron last night. We'll talk more about that in a bit. Outside of stocks, though, the major story continues to be oil as prices keep falling. Brent crew dropped more than 4% yesterday to around $74 a barrel, and the U.S. crew, WTI, fell to around $70 a barrel. Oil is now back to where it was before the Iran war started, and it could continue to move lower as more ships make their way through the Strait of Hormuz.

So that should give investors and consumers some relief. You know, the surge in oil prices from the war was a major contributor to rising inflation over the last few months. In fact, we got some more inflation data this morning. the May CPI report came out, which is the Fed's preferred inflation gauge, and it showed that inflation in May rose 4.1% compared to a year ago. That's the highest year-over-year increase for PCE since April of 2023. And if you look at core PCE, which strips out food and energy, that rose 3.4%, the highest level since October of 2023. So inflation is running hot, but lower oil prices should help cool things off going forward. The big question, though, is what

is the Federal Reserve going to do next? Kevin Warsh was very clear in his press conference last week that he is focused on getting inflation down to the Fed's 2% target. And that's why the market right now is pricing in a 30% chance of a rate hike for the Fed's next meeting on July 29. So we'll have to see what happens. Maybe the Fed waits a little bit longer now that oil prices are starting to come down. We'll stay on top of this development along with everything else happening in the market.

So make sure you guys are to subscribe to the podcast and tuning in every day to stay in the loop. Let's run through some headlines. And we're talking all things, Micron. Micron reported earnings last night, and they might have single-handedly saved the AI trade. The memory chip maker absolutely crushed expectations across the board, and some of these numbers are just insane. Revenues hit $41.5 billion last quarter,

which is four times what it was in the same quarter last year, and way above the $35.7 billion that Wall Street was expecting. On top of that, the company's profits came in at $28.2 billion, or about $24.46 per share. That also beat expectations, and it's a massive increase from the same quarter last year where the company made about $1.9 billion in profit. So the company's profits literally went up by 15x in the past year. I mean, I've never seen anything like this before. And the company sees no signs of things slowing down.

They expect revenues to come in at $50 billion this quarter. Wall Street was expecting something closer to $43 billion. So they beat on guidance as well. And it's all thanks to AI and the memory supply crunch. Micron makes memory chips that are needed for literally everything in modern computing from your iPhone to laptops to gaming consoles. And of course, AI data centers. That's the main driver of demand right now is the high bandwidth memory or HBM.

HBM is the super fast memory that sits next to AI chips and it helps these AI chips process huge amounts of data. And because of the AI build out right now on the insane demand for HBMs, there is a supply crunch, which means that Micron literally can't make enough memory to meet demand, and that's allowed Micron to raise prices substantially and boost their profit margins. This is the stat from the earnings that made my jaw drop. Micron's gross margins hit 84.9%. So that means after removing the cost, of actually making the chip, Micron kept nearly 85 cents of every dollar in sales as gross profit.

Now, to be clear, that's not the same thing as net profit. Micron still has to pay for R&D and overhead and taxes and all that fun corporate stuff. But still, 85% gross margins for a memory chip company is absolutely wild. Just a year ago, Micron's gross margins was 39%. So that just gives you an idea of what kind of pricing power Micron has right now. And today, they have the highest gross margins of any major. U.S. tech company. It's higher than metas at 82%, and higher than Vythias, which is at 75%. So yeah, that just gives you an idea of how AI has completely changed Micron's business. You know,

historically, the memory industry has always been a boom and bus type industry and essentially treated like a commodity. And look, there's still a concern from the market that that could happen this time. Investors still don't fully believe that this is sustainable. That's why micron trades at around eight times forward earnings, while Nvidia trades closer to 20 times forward earnings. But Micron's management says that this time will be different, at least for a while. The company has signed 16 long-term supply deals with big customers worth $22 billion in committed orders, and crucially, these deals have price floors. So even if supply floods the market, these floors are designed to keep margins high and break the boom bus cycle. And look, Micron is

working to add more supply as well, but CEO Sanjay Marotra says there is no line of sight to when supply catches up with demand. In fact, he thinks that tightness could last beyond 20s 27. So that might be great news for micron investors. That's not great news for anyone trying to buy some RAM right now, or any tech product for that matter. In fact, Apple just announced this morning that they're raising prices for their MacBooks and iPads because of the rising memory prices. But look, zooming out, what this earnings report did is give investors some relief that the AI trade still has some juice left. As a result, Micron stock is up more than 15% this morning, and it's pushing up other tech and AI stocks across the board. And the timing couldn't be better given that tech stocks

were selling off hard over the last few days. You know, you can make the case that Micron has now become the most important company in the world. Micron is kind of like what Nvidia was in 2023 and 24. It's seeing a meteoric rise in their business, and investors are looking to them to get a gauge on whether AI demand is actually real. By the way, I don't usually share what my personal portfolio looks like, but I actually did buy some micron stock about a year and a half ago. But I sold most of it earlier this year when the stock hit $1,000. And now shares are up closer to $1,200. Let's talk about some stocks making moves today.

Qualcomm shares are getting a nice pop this morning after the chip maker laid out their AI plans at their Investor Day event yesterday. Most people know Qualcomm as the company that makes chips for smartphones, but Qualcomm is trying to become a serious player in AI infrastructure. The pitch from Qualcomm is that they are experts in making energy efficient chips for smartphones, and with AI data centers running into power constraint these days, energy efficiency is pretty crucial. The company showed off a new data center CPU called Dragonfly C-1000, and the big headline

is that meta has already agreed to use this chip in their data centers when production starts in 2028. So Qualcomm is getting pretty serious about this stuff. They raise their long-term targets as well. the company now expects non-handset revenues to hit $40 billion in fiscal 2029 up from the previous forecast of $22 billion. So investors are finally looking at Qualcomm as more than just a smartphone chip company and shares are up around 10% this morning at the time of this recording.

Sticking with the winners here, Wendy's stock continues to go up after becoming a meme stock yesterday. There was a viral post on Reddit's Wall Street bets that tried to manufacture a short squeeze and Wendy's stock jumped 25%, which was the biggest one-day jump for the company since 2021. And shares are up another 10% this morning at the time of this recording, so it looks like this meme still has some juice left in it. Now, on the flip side, shares of Darden Restaurant are down this morning after the company reported earnings.

Darden is the parent company of some of the best chain food restaurants in the world. I'm talking Olive Garden, Chewies, and Longhorn Steakhouse, just to name a few. While the company reported mixed earnings, revenues were up 13.7% to $3.72 billion, which slightly missed expectations, but earnings per share came in at $3.66, which was slightly above expectations. And overall, same store sales rose 4.6%, which also beat expectations. But the stock is still down this morning because the problem was the weakness from Olive Garden, which is Darden's biggest chain. Same store sales rose just 2.4% which missed expectations. On top of that, Darden's guidance for the next year also came in on the lighter side. So investors are a bit nervous about the weakness there as a result, shares of Darden are down around 3% this morning in reaction to the earnings.

Let's wrap the show with a fun fact. CEO pay hit a record high in 2025. According to the Wall Street Journal's annual rankings, nearly a dozen U.S. CEOs received pay packages worth more than $200 million last year. Elon Musk was at the top of this list and pretty much in a tier of his own. His 2025 pay package from Tesla was worth $158 billion, billion with a beat. Just to put this into context, Elon's pay package is so high that it's 16 times the combined pay of all the other 391 CEOs in this Wall Street Journal ranking.

So Elon's on a tier of his own, but the number two guy on this list is, Shank Mitra. He's the CEO of a senior housing real estate company called Well Tower, and his pay package in 2025 was $821 million. But here's the part that I want to clear up a bit. Most of these CEOs that you see on this list are not getting paid this money in cash, and they're not getting paid this money all at once either. Essentially, many CEOs these days are getting moonshot packages, but they only get that giant payout if the company hits some sky high targets. So in theory, the CEOs are only cashing in if shareholders cash in as well. Well, all right, guys, that's the rundown for today.

Hope you guys enjoyed today's episode. Thank you guys so much for listening, watching, and commenting. Shout out to Mike for all the work behind the scenes. And we'll see you guys back here tomorrow.