The Rundown - SpaceX to Invest $2B in xAI, Google Snags Windsurf CEO Away from OpenAI

Episode Date: July 14, 2025

Stock market update for July 14, 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 Monday, July 14th. In today's episode, we'll get you ready for this upcoming week of earnings. There's a lot of major companies reporting. We'll also tell you about a potential merger between Tesla and XAI and Google's latest moves in the AI wars. Then stick around to the end of the show to find out the final numbers from Prime Day. It wasn't as bad at some as expected. We got a great show for you today. Let's go. Stock snapped a multi-week wind streak last week after President Trump continues to ramp up tariff talks again. The White House has been sending out tariff letters to trading partners,

setting rates which are similar to the rates from back in April. Trump is slapping Canada with a 35% rate and the EU and Mexico are getting hit with a 30% rate starting on August 1st. So the markets didn't love that. The S&P 500 dropped 0.3% last week and the NASDAQ was down 0.1%. Now, as for this week, we have a big week coming up because earnings season officially kicks off this week and we're going to hear from companies and how their business is doing and what kind of impact that tariffs have had on their business so far. And the timing of earnings is really interesting because just like last quarter,

there's still a ton of uncertainty in the air around tariffs. But unlike last quarter, the stock market is near all-time highs this time and not melting down like it was in April. So investors are going to be paying close attention to what executives have to say. According to Bloomberg, analysts are expecting profit margins to grow just 2.8% this past quarter. That would be the slowest increase in two years. And it could be a sign that rising costs from tariffs might be starting to bite a bit. So it should be an interesting few weeks.

This week we are getting earnings from big banks like JP Morgan, Bank of America, and Wells Fargo. We're also hearing from companies like ASML, United Airlines, and Netflix, which I can't wait to hear what they have to say. So yeah, we'll have a lot to talk about this week of not to mention that Bitcoin keeps pumping. It's now above $122,000 as I record this episode. So make sure you guys are locked into the podcast this week and over the next few weeks to stand the loop of what's going on during earnings season. Let's run through some headlines. Starting with XAI.

Elon Musk's AI company XAI is looking to raise more money at a $200 billion valuation. and one of the investors might be Elon's other companies, SpaceX and Tesla. The Wall Street Journal is reporting that SpaceX is investing $2 billion in XAI, which would be SpaceX's largest investment in another company. And this isn't really too surprising because Elon Musk has a history of using his business empire to boost his other ventures. He borrowed money from SpaceX to fund Tesla back in the early days, and he even used SpaceX's equipment to help launch the boring company.

Side note, I kind of forgot the boring company existed. Now, there's also talks about Tesla potentially investing in XAI as well. Over the weekend, Elon Musk posted on X saying that if it was up to him, Tesla would have invested an XAI a long time ago, but he also added that it'll be up to the shareholders to ultimately decide. So you may see a shareholder vote about this pretty soon. You know, XAI is playing catch up in the AI wars. They're trying to close the gap between Open AI, meta, and Google, all of which are spending

billions of dollars to build the best models. And while XAI's new GROC4 model, which they showed off last. week has gotten strong reviews. In fact, it was called the smartest chat box in the world by one of the benchmark sites. It's also been in the news for some wrong reasons as well. Grock went pretty rogue last week and started posting some very offensive stuff. XAI later apologized for that and blamed it on the model failure. So yeah, not exactly the kind of publicity you'd want during a funding round, but that hasn't stopped Elon Musk from doubling down on XAI. If you guys remember, he merged XAI with X earlier this year and he's already starting to embed

GROC into Starlink, Tesla, and even has plans to deploy Grogh into humanoid robots. Now, there's been rumors that Elon's ultimate plan would be to merge Tesla with XAI, but Elon has said that he would not support a merger of those two companies, at least for now. Now, speaking of the AI wars, Google just pulled off a major heist over the weekend. The tech giant swooped in to buy Windsor for the AI coding startup that OpenAI was planning to buy for $3 billion just a few months ago. But it looks like that deal is dead because Google. Google swooped in and hired Winsurf CEO Varun Mohan, their co-founder Douglas Chen,

and some of their top researchers to join Google DeepMine. Now, to avoid getting slat with any antitrust investigations, Google didn't acquire windsurf outright. Instead, they did what's called a reverse aquire. They're paying $2.4 billion to license windsurf's tech and bring the talent in-house. But as part of this deal, Winsurf will stay independent and they're free to make deals with other companies. But, I mean, it's clear that the main prize here for Google is the talent. talent they got from windsurf. WinServe specializes in agenetic coding tools, basically AI agents that can build software just by taking in a prompt or some instructions without any coding experience

required. This kind of coding is called vibe coding. It's gotten very popular recently. OpenAI has a tool called Codex that does that Anthropic has Claude Code. It's the hottest battleground in the AI space right now. So Google just loaded up talent in that department. With all the people they just hired from WinSurf, this could massively expand Google's developer offerings under Gemini. and help it compete more directly with OpenAI, Anthropic, and Microsoft. The Verge says that the windsurf team will now focus specifically on coding tools within Gemini. But I mean, the broader trend here is that AI engineers continue to get scooped up from big tech companies like their NBA free agents. Google, Meta, and Microsoft are handing out Max contracts right now.

Let's talk about some stocks making moves today. Canvu's shares are trading higher this morning after their CEO is stepping down as the Tanalong maker kicks off a strategic review. Kenview is home to brands including Listerine, Neutrigina, and Band-Aid. They spun off from Johnson and Johnson back in 2023, and they've struggled to find their strides since then. Activist investors have sworn Kenvue and they're pressuring them to make changes like a full-on sale or potentially splitting up their assets.

Last month, Reuters reported that Kenvue was considering offloading some of its skin health and beauty brands as it looks to simplify their brand portfolio. Now, the stock was up more than 6% this morning, but it's now down. So I guess investors must have quickly sold the pop. Now, Affirm's shares are also down this morning after BTIG downgraded the stock to neutral, citing increased competition in the space weighing on the company's profitability. BTIG noted that there are a lot of competitors offering credit cards and buy now pay later loans, including Kalarna, PayPal, after pay, and BTIG thinks that this will weigh on a firm's

margins. I mean, that kind of makes sense because the more players there are, shoppers are likely to go with whoever offers them the lowest rates. The whole business model could end up getting commoditized, so as a result, shares of a firm are down more than 3% on this news. Let's wrap the show with a fun fact. Amazon Prime Day is behind us, and the final numbers weren't as bad as some had expected. Amazon reported that it was their best Prime Day event ever, but the company reaching new records on sales and product sold. The event did start off slow for the first two days.

We talked about this on last week's episode, but it ended up kicking into gear on Thursday with a 165. percent sales jump year over year. Now, you have to keep in mind that Prime Day this year was four days instead of two, so it's not surprising to hear that Prime Day had more revenues overall than last year. But what's interesting is that other retailers like Costco, Walmart, and Best Buy also started offering discounts in the same period as Amazon. And they saw a bump in sales as well. So it looks like Amazon's not the only one benefiting from Prime Day anymore.

I think these retailers have successfully branded mid-July as a shopping season. Around $24 billion went to online retailers in the U.S. during the four-day period last week, which is more than 30% increase from last year. For comparison, only about $11 billion were spent online during Black Friday in 2024. So this mid-July Prime Day event has become bigger than Black Friday at this point. Well, all right, guys, that's the rundown for today. Hope you guys enjoyed today's episode. Now, if you guys are watching this episode on video,

which I highly recommend that you do on Spotify and YouTube, you can tell from my background that I'm not in my usual recording location. That's probably why the audio quality is a bit different than usual. I'm recording this on the balcony of the resort that I'm staying at in Florida. A quick little family trip. So yeah, I apologize for the audio quality, but it should get back to normal later in the week. By the way, if you guys want to support the show and have like eight extra seconds, consider giving us a five-star rating on Apple, Spotify,

wherever you listen to your podcast. And if you are listening on Spotify, don't forget the 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.