The Rundown - Perplexity Offers $34.5B for Google Chrome, Cava Plunges on Weak Sales

Episode Date: August 13, 2025

Stock market update for August 13, 2025. 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 Wednesday, August 13th. In today's episode, we'll talk about the upcoming bullish IPO and why this crypto company has Wall Street buzzing. We'll also recap earnings from Kava and why it might be the end of the bowl economy. Then stick around to the end of the show to find out why the sphere in Las Vegas continues to be the greatest invention of the decade.

We got a great show for you today. Let's go. Markets ripped higher on Tuesday after we got a surprisingly chill inflation report. The S&P 500 popped 1.1% and the NASDAQ jumped 1.4%, both closing at record highs. You know, the CPI report yesterday showed that inflation was at 2.7% in July, which was right in line with expectations. And that has traders betting the Fed will finally pull the trigger on interest rate cuts in September. Odds of a rate cut right now are sitting at 90%. And this would be the first rate cut of the year. Now, the Fed doesn't meet until September 17. So we've got another month of data and market drama to get through first.

In fact, we're getting another inflation report later this week, the PPI report, which comes out tomorrow. That measures inflation at the wholesale level. And economists like to pay attention to that for potential signs of future price. increases for consumers. So we'll break down that report on tomorrow's show, plus more earnings and whatever other curveballs come our way. So make sure you guys keep it locked into the podcast to stay in the loop. Let's run through some headlines. The AI search engine perplexity just offered Google $34.5 billion to buy the Chrome web browser. Chrome is the most popular web browser in the world and perplexity wants it. Now this offer is probably more of a PR move by perplexity. They've done this stuff in the past, but the timing is pretty interesting.

So the U.S. government is currently deciding whether to force Google to divest Chrome as part of the antitrust case that Google lost last year when a judge ruled that Google had an illegal monopoly in search. Now, realistically, Google is going to appeal that case and do whatever it takes that keep Chrome because the browser is the next front of the AI wars. Everybody uses a web browser, and integrating AI throughout the browser could be a crucial way to lock in users. In fact, Perplexity launched their own AI power browser last month called Comet to a select group of subscribers. But they want to buy Chrome and get access to the billions of people that use it every day.

Now that $34.5 billion offer is nearly double Perplexity's current valuation of $18 billion, but the company says that it has outside investors to help bank roll this deal. I would take that with a little bit of marketing salt, if you know what I mean. You know, Perplexity has made offers like this in the past. They made a $50 billion offer to buy TikTok earlier this year, but the that hasn't gone anywhere. But you know what? I respect the marketing because we're all here talking about it. Now, by the way, for some context here, Perplexity's AI search engine volume is such a drop in the bucket compared to Google's. Perplexity says they have about 30 million

active users and more than 780 million monthly queries, which seems like a lot, but then you compare it to Google, which has 13.7 billion searches a day. But you know what? I would keep an eye on perplexity because there are rumors that they might be an acquisition target, for Apple. Now, that would be interesting if Apple bought perplexity and integrated that into their Safari browser on their phones, it would get pretty interesting pretty quickly. Let's shift gears and talk about a big debut happening today in the crypto space. The bullish IPO is going live today. And there's a lot of hype around this crypto exchange. They're expected to raise more than $1.1 billion by selling 30 million shares. Their IPO is being priced at $37 a share, which is actually above the

expected range and it would give the company a $5.4 billion market cap. And there's some strong signals of investor demand. The IPO is reportedly more than 20 times oversubscribed. So similar to previous IPOs, we might see a big pop on day one. You know, the reason a lot of people are hyped about this company is that bullish isn't your typical crypto exchange. It's built specifically for institutional clients and they offer spot trading, margin trading, and derivatives trading. And since the company launched back in 2021, total trading volumes on the platform have all already topped $1.25 trillion. And they got some serious street credit at the top. Their CEO is Tom Farley. He was the former president of the New York Stock Exchange. Plus, they own the crypto media outlet

Coin Desk. And they're backed by big names like Peter Thiel. So I've been seeing a lot of buzz building up to this IPO. It'll start trading today on the New York Stock Exchange under ticker symbol BLSH. You should be able to find it on the public app. And we'll see if the IPO lives up to its name. Let's talk about some stocks making moves today. A big winner this morning is a company called ETHZILA. This is a real company. They trade under ticker symbol A.N.TF. The stock jumped over 200% on Tuesday after they revealed that Peter Thiel's founder fund had taken a 7.5% stake in the company. ETHZILA is a Ethereum treasury company, which means they buy and hold Ethereum as a company. They disclose they hold more than 82,000 ETH bought at an average price of $3,800.

That's worked out pretty well so far because Ether is up more than 20% from those levels. And that's why the stock continues to rip this morning. It's up another 40%. By the way, ETHZilla used to be called 180 Life Sciences. It was a mashup of an eye gaming company and a biotech company. But they've now clearly pivoted to go all in on being an ETH Treasury company, which, you know, explains that ETH Zill has. name change. I know what? I kind of like it. You know, it's very memorable. Now, speaking of memorable,

let's talk about Kava. Their shares are tanking this morning down more than 20% after they reported weak Q2 revenue numbers. The Mediterranean fast casual chain saw same store sales jump by 2.1%, which was way below the 6.1% growth that Wall Street was expecting. It seems like demand for Kava has fallen off a cliff. In Q1, same store sales growth was up more than 10%. And last year, same store sales had climbed more than 14% in part due to the introduction of a new grilled steak option. But now traffic to stores is flat and the outlook isn't much better. Kava lowered their full year guidance for same store sales to be around 4 to 6%, which is down from the 6% to 8% growth they had previously expected. So that's what's sending Kava stock lower.

And we're starting to see a trend here. Other fast casual dining spots like Sweet Green and Chipotle also reported drops in same store sales. We might be on the verge of the bull economy collapsing right in front of our eyes. Hopefully this means cheaper prices because, I mean, some of these places we're getting really expensive. And finally, let's talk about Circle. Their shares are also down this morning on the news that the Stablecoin company and a group of shareholders announced an offering of 10 million share. Two million of the shares will be sold by Circle to raise money for the company,

while the remaining 8 million will be sold by shareholders, including CEO Jeremy Aller, and three of Circle's top institutional backers. Now, the timing is pretty interesting because Circle Stock has jumped over 400% since their IPO just two months ago. So it looks like some of the insiders and early backers are cashing in on the rally. Circle Stock is down more than 3% this morning in reaction to this news. Let's wrap the show with a fun fact. You can now see a movie at the Las Vegas sphere. The sphere is planning to show The Wizard of Oz, the iconic movie from 1939.

Now, what's interesting is the sphere is owned by a publicly traded company called the Sphere Entertainment Company, ticker symbol S-P-H-R, and it opened back in 2023. But the sphere has mostly been home to bands, including U-2, the Eagles have performed there, dead in company, the Backstreet Boys were just there, and they've had some specially made documentaries for the sphere, but this is the first time they're showing an existing movie. And the tickets are going to be expensive. They're starting at over $100. Now, I was kind of surprised they're going with the Wizard of Oz as the first movie.

But the company says that they're going to enhance the existing movie to fill the sphere's massive warp screen. And there's going to be environmental effects and sense. And honestly, it sounds pretty awesome. And I guess that's why over 120,000 tickets have already been bought. And this is a bigger play by the sphere to expand beyond just concerts and nature documentaries. They want to be in all-purpose entertainment arena. I mean, the sphere did cost over $2 billion to make. So they need to recoup that cost.

But, I mean, that might be the best $2 billion ever spent, right? I haven't been to the sphere yet. I want to go so bad. Hopefully they'll show more iconic movies there. Like, imagine watching Jurassic Park on that thing or like one of the fast and furious movies? I think I would pay $100 for that. Let me know in the comments

if you guys have been to the sphere in Vegas and if it lives up to the hype. We might have to do a deep dive on the sphere and it might have to be like a field trip situation, you know? You guys have to convince Mike and Connor in the comments to make this happen. Well, all right, guys, that's the rundown for today. Hope you guys enjoyed today's episode.

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