The Rundown - Netflix Shatters Streaming Record, OpenAI Lays Out Plan for Transition to For-Profit

Episode Date: December 27, 2024

Stock market update for December 27, 2024.

Public.com presents the rundown. Your daily market update in five minutes. My name is Zadadmani, and today is Friday, December 27. In today's episode, we tell you about the big day for Netflix on Christmas. We also tell you about opening eyes plans to raise more money. Then stick around to the end of the show to find out what the most bought stock was for retail traders in 2024. Not really a surprise here. All right.

Let's go. Well, guys, it looks like the most. markets were pretty chill yesterday. Both the S&P and NASDAQ were technically in the red, but they were down less than 0.1%, so not much happening, which isn't very surprising because the week between Christmas and New Year's tends to be pretty low volume. I think the most notable thing that I saw yesterday was that Apple's stock hit all-time highs. Apple's market cap is now $3.9 trillion, which means they're now less than $100 billion away from being the first company to hit a $4 trillion market cap. You know, I make a $1,000.

lot of jokes about Apple for how bad Siri is or for how useless Apple intelligence is or how they don't innovate anymore. The stock has just ignored all of that and just continues to rip higher. Apple stock is now up almost 40% in 2024. And look, I'm not complaining. I own Apple stock, so I'll take it. But I'm not going to stop making the jokes either. Let's run through some headlines. Netflix and the NFL dominated Christmas this year, shattering streaming records in the process. This was the first year that Netflix broadcast live NFL games, and it seems to be off to a great start because games on Netflix reached 65 million U.S. viewers, according to Nielsen's.

And these two games were the most streamed NFL games ever. The first game between the Kansas City Chiefs and the Pittsburgh Steelers averaged 24.1 million viewers, while 24.3 million people watched my Houston Texans get embarrassed by the Baltimore Ravens. So pretty impressive viewing numbers from Netflix, especially given the fact that these games weren't very competitive. I mean, I said on Tuesday's show that I just didn't want the Houston Texans to get embarrassed. You know, I didn't think we were going to win the game because the Ravens are really good. But no, not only did we lose, we got demolished in 4K to a record audience.

Lamar Jackson was out here running all over the place. He even made history by passing Michael Vick to become the NFL all-time leading rusher at QB. I mean, he played like an MVP. And speaking of MVP, we have to talk about Beyonce because the viewership of the day peaked at 27. million viewers when Beyonce took the stage for the halftime show during the Texans Ravens game. Netflix reportedly gave Beyonce a big payday for the concert, which is on top of the $150 million they paid to the NFL to broadcast these two games. And I think that investment might have paid off given these viewership numbers. The previous streaming record for an NFL game was held by Peacock,

which was 23 million viewers for a wildcard playoff game back in January. And these Netflix games nearly doubled Amazon Prime's Thursday Night Football average for this year, which is just over 13 million viewers. Netflix just continues to crush it. This was the first of a three-year partnership between the NFL and Netflix to stream Christmas games. So we're going to get at least two more years of this. And there was concerns going into these games that Netflix might not be able to handle the live streaming traffic, but I didn't see any reports of technical issues. In fact, I think the picture was extra crispy. It looked like it was 6K or something. Let's shift gears and talk about Open AI. A couple of things that I've learned this year is that chat GPT will go down

at the most inconvenient time and that Open AI just needs a lot more money. to keep developing it. Open AI, which raised $6.6 billion back in October, say they need even more cash, and they're changing their corporate structure to make it easier to attract more investments. In a blog post this morning, the AI company outlined their plans to convert its corporate structure to a simplified for-profit public benefit corporation, or PBC. Remember, Open AI was founded as a non-profit back in 2015, but converting to a public benefit corporation would allow the company to pursue profits while still prioritizing social and environmental goals. I'll be honest with you, this whole open AI corporate structure thing is pretty complex,

and a lot of it is just over my head. But I think my big takeaway here is that they started off as a nonprofit. Then when they released chat GPT back in 2022, it became a lot more successful than they probably ever thought. And now they're trying to attract a ton of investors to keep growing chat GPT and all the other AI products that they're developing. But it's hard to attract billions of dollars in investments as a non-profit if investors can't get a billion. And big return on their investment. So Open AI is looking to convert to a for-profit company to raise all that money from investors, especially with all the competition heating up in the AI space. You got Claude from Anthropic. Meta seems to be a big leader in this space. You got Google's Gemini, which seems to be

getting better every month. Amazon's releasing their own AI models. And you also got XAI from Elon Musk. I mean, this space is getting competitive. And these companies are well capitalized. Like Elon Musk's XAI just raised another $6 billion on Tuesday. That brings the company's total funding to $12 billion. We've talked about this before, but even though Elon Musk co-founded Open AI, there is some beef between him and Open AI since he left a company back in 2018. In fact, Elon Musk currently has a lawsuit against Open AI to prevent them from becoming a for-profit company, arguing that it goes against the company's founding contract to put public good ahead of commercial interests. I mean, keeping Open AI as a nonprofit would limit Open AI's ability to raise more money,

which would mean less competition in the AI space for Elon. So we'll see how this all plays out. A lot of this lawsuit lawyer stuff is, again, above my head. But I think things will get pretty interesting in 2025. Let's talk about some stocks making moves today. Quantum computing stocks are soaring this morning. I guess the excitement from Google's quantum computing breakthrough from a couple weeks ago still seems to be alive. Remember, Google announced earlier this month that its Willow project is able to solve problems in minutes that would take a normal supercomputer, billions of years to complete.

So now it seems like any stock. with the word quantum in it is riding that hype higher. Righetti computing shares are up more than 50% in the past month. A company called Quantum Computing Inc is up more than 180%. And that's not stopping today. Righetti is rising more than 12% in pre-market trading while Quantum Computing Inc. is up around 7%. So if you're a struggling company right now and want to see a bump in your stock price,

just add quantum computing to your name. Remember back in 2021 when companies were just adding the word blockchain to their name and we see a big jump in their stock price overnight? We might see that with quantum computing now. On the flip side, shares of Tesla are down this morning ahead of the EV Giants release of its fourth quarter delivery numbers, which is happening next week. Tesla is expected to announce delivery numbers on Thursday, January 2nd, which is a perfect way to kick off the new year.

Estimates are expecting Tesla to deliver around 510,000 vehicles in the fourth quarter, which would be an all-time record for Tesla for any quarter. So we'll see what happens. Tesla slightly missed delivery estimates last quarter by a few hundred EVs. So let's see if they can get a win this quarter. Tesla shares are down around 1% in pre-market trading this morning. Let's wrap the show with a fun fact. The most bought stock by retail traders in 2024 was Nvidia.

That's probably the least surprising fun fact of all time. Retail investors piled in $30 billion to Nvidia, nearly double the net inflows for the S&P 500 ETF SPY. That's the one that tracks the broader index. Invidia also knocked off Tesla from the top spot. Tesla was the most bought stock by retail traders in 2023. The ETF SPY was the most popular in 2021 and 2022. Tesla is still the largest holding of the average retail investor,

followed closely by Nvidia. This is according to data from Vanda. So yeah, not surprising to see Nvidia as the top of this list, but I wonder what the most traded retail stock is going to be next year. Is Nvidia going to remain the number one? Are we going to have a new breakout, like maybe Pallantier? I don't know, but 2025 should be really fun. Well, all right, guys, that's the rundown for today.

That's the rundown for this week. Hope everyone's enjoying the last few days of the year. I know things can get pretty slow around this time of year. I haven't been very productive. But we do have a show coming out tomorrow. So keep an eye out for that. It's a weekend deep dive. So if you need something to listen to this weekend,

keep an eye on your podcast feed and give that episode to listen. And if you have like 12 extra seconds, consider giving us a five-star rating on Apple, on Spotify. Leave a comment on Spotify, vote into a Spotify poll. All that engagement, really does help us out. Thank you guys so much for listening. Shout out to Mike and Connor for all the help behind 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

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