The Rundown - Musk's Net Worth Hits $400 Billion, Warner Bros. Discovery Stock Pops on Restructuring Plan

Episode Date: December 12, 2024

Stock market update for December 12, 2024.

Public.com presents the rundown. Your daily market update in five minutes. My name is Zadmani, and today is Thursday, December 12th. In today's episode, we tell you about the historic day in the NASDAQ yesterday, with multiple companies hitting record highs. We also tell you about how AI is making investors nervous about Adobe's business and how the IPO market this year compared to previous years. Then stick around to the end of the show to find out why Elon's net worth jumped past

$400 billion yesterday. And no, it's not just because of Tesla. All right, let's go. Stocks were back to pumping on Wednesday. After two straight red days in a row, we finally saw some green yesterday. In fact, it was a pretty memorable day for the stock market. The S&P 500 was up 0.9%, but the NASDAQ really stole the show, adding 1.8% and closing above 20,000 points for the first time ever. The Dow, on the other hand, did a have a down day, but nobody cares about the Dow. So it was a big day for tech stocks, especially big tech stocks. That sounds kind of confusing. But what I'm talking about is the Magnificent Seven Stocks. Five of the seven Magnificent Seven stocks hit all-time highs. When's the last time that's

happened? Tesla, Google, Amazon, Meta, and Microsoft all hit record levels in the same day. And we have to talk about the one that NASDAQ has been on this decade, because this is like LeBron and his prime, all right? It's unbelievable. The NASDAQ first hit $10,000. points back in the summer of 2020. So in less than five years, the NASDAQ has literally doubled, which is incredible. So for those of you that have a tech heavy exposure in your portfolio, over the last few years, you're probably feeling pretty good right now. I bet Bitcoin investors are also feeling pretty good today because Bitcoin is back above $100,000 after dropping under $96,000 earlier in the week. So yeah, this week really started off pretty slow, but things

seem to really pick back up yesterday. Now, we did get another inflation report today, the PPI report, which measures inflation of wholesale prices, and this one came in a bit hotter than expected. Wholesale prices in November were up 0.4% compared to the previous month. Economists were expecting a 0.2% increase, so this number came in a bit high. Now, the PPI doesn't get as much headline as the CPI does, so I wonder how the markets will react to this. We'll do a full recap of the stock market on tomorrow's show, so get subscribed to the pod and tune in tomorrow. Let's run through some headlines.

Let's start with Adobe because they've had a pretty rough year so far. Their stock is down for the year. They're being sued by the FTC. And now to make matters worse, they're expecting their business to go slower than expected. The company reported their Q3 earnings last night. And while the company did beat on revenues and profits for the quarter, their sales forecast looking forward wasn't so great. Adobe makes a lot of software in the creative space,

you know, Photoshop for photo editing, Adobe Premiere for video editing. And the creative space right now is changing quickly because of AI. There's so many AI image generation tools out there. On top of that, AI video generation is starting to become a thing now. There's tools out there like Open AI released their SORAV model earlier this week. Now, Adobe's not sitting on the sidelines here. They're trying to get ahead of this AI stuff. In fact, they offer their own AI tools with Adobe Firefly, which can generate images and video.

But all this AI stuff isn't helping Adobe's business. In fact, it might be hurting it, you know? If people can use AI to just, generate videos and images, that might lead to less usage of tools like Photoshop and Adobe Premiere. And I think that's what's making investors nervous right now. Adobe stock is down around 11% this morning in reaction to this news. Let's shift gears and talk about a company that is IPOing. A software company called Service Titan is going public today at a price of $71 per share, which is above the expected range between $65 and $68 a share. Now, if you've never heard of Service

Titan before, I'm not surprised. The company makes software for contractors in areas like plumbing, electrical work, HVAC, you know. So unless you work in that industry, you probably haven't heard of them. But it's a pretty big industry. And at this IPO price, the company would be valued at $6.3 billion. Now, just looking at the IPO market overall, IPOs did have a decent comeback this year. There's been a total of 121 companies that went public in 2024 so far compared to 101 that IPOed in the same period last year.

And if you compare that to 2022, I mean, we're 34% higher. So nice to see a little comeback. but we're nowhere close to the whopping 416 IPOs we had in 2021. I hope we can get back to that next year. You know what the market is the way they are? Hopefully more companies are going to be looking to IPO in 2025. By the way, service Titan will be listed on the NASDAQ under ticker symbol T-T-A-N. Let's real quick talk about Warner Brothers Discovery.

They're making some news this morning. They announced plans to restructure the company to split it into two divisions. One is going to be streaming in studio, which will include their streaming service max, and their movie studio, and the other division will be linear networks, which includes their cable channels like CNN, TNT, Food Network, and more. These cable channels have been a declining business for years now, while streaming in the movie studios seems to be growing. By splitting the company into two separate divisions, Warner Brothers can better show the growth in streaming to investors. Investors seem to like this move. Shares of Warner Brothers Discovery are up around 10% this morning in reaction to this move.

Let's talk about some stocks making moves today. Shares of the Bitcoin, mining company riot platforms are up this morning after reports that activist investor starboard is taking a stake in the company starboard is reportedly pushing riot to convert some of its mining facilities into space for large data centers which could have incredible demand from hypers like amazon web services and google cloud because of ai these big tech giants have been rushing to build out their data centers and riot could potentially provide that that could be a way for the company to turn things around because riot shares have lost about a quarter of its value this year, even though Bitcoin has had a monster rally. Shares of riot are up around 10% this morning in

reaction to this news. Now, on the flip side, we're keeping an eye on health insurance stocks, especially health insurers that own pharmacy benefit managers, also known as PBMs. Their shares took a hit on Wednesday and they continued to trade lower today after a law was introduced that would force health insurance companies to sell off their pharmacy businesses. This affects companies like CVS, Cigna, and United Health, which owns health insurers. And they also control the majority of the PBMs in the U.S. Those stocks all fell around 5% on Wednesday and they continued to drop today. The bipartisan bill came as the healthcare industry is under intense scrutiny right now

over business practices that lawmakers, patients, and doctors say are making drugs less affordable. And that criticism has become even louder after the killing of United Health Care CEO Brian Thompson. Let's wrap the show with a fun fact. Elon Musk is the first person ever to reach a net worth of over 400. $100 billion. Elon hit that mark yesterday thanks to Tesla stock hitting all-time highs, but also SpaceX's valuation jumped to over $350 billion as well. SpaceX is still a private

company, but investors agreed to buy insider shares valuing the space company at $350 billion. Elon is a CEO of both those companies and he has a significant stake in both those companies, so when those companies reach higher valuations, his net worth as a result goes up. According to estimates from Bloomberg, Elon's net worth is currently sitting at $400,000. and $47 billion. And I'm looking at this Bloomberg billionaire list right now. He's so far ahead number one that his net worth is almost more than the second and third richest person combined.

The second richest person is Jeff Bezos with a net worth of $250 billion. And Mark Zuckerberg is third with a net worth of $224 billion. So Elon's net worth is worth almost more than both those dudes combined. And you know what's also crazy? Is that Elon's net worth has gone up more than 70% since the election. You know what? That's enough, Elon glazing for today. Well, all right, guys, that's the rundown for today.

Hope you guys enjoyed today's episode. We got one more episode for you tomorrow to wrap up the week. It's been a pretty good week so far, a lot of AI and tech news this week. So we'll see what tomorrow has in store. If you guys enjoyed today's episode and you have like 12 extra seconds, consider giving us a five-star rating on Apple and Spotify. Vote in today's Spotify poll. Leave us a comment on Spotify.

All that engagement really does help us out, and it helps other people find the 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. This is the rundown, your real-time resource for news events and trends in the markets. All views presented in the show reflect the opinions of the guests. You should not take any mention of a publicly traded security as recommendation to buy, sell or hold that security.

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