The Rundown - Stocks Drop After Israel Strikes Iran, Meta 'Acqui-hires' Scale AI CEO

Episode Date: June 13, 2025

Stock market update for June 13, 2025. Follow ⁠⁠⁠⁠@TheRundownDaily⁠⁠⁠⁠ on Instagram.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 Zaid Admani, and today is Friday, June 13th. In today's episode, we'll tell you how global markets are reacting to increasing geopolitical tensions in the Middle East. We'll also tell you about the huge investment that Meta just made to improve their AI. Then stick around to the end of the show for listener questions. I really like the one about Apple.

We've got a great show for you today. Let's go. Markets were back in the green on Thursday with the S&P 500 jumping 0.4% and the NASDAQ adding 0.2%. You know, we're about halfway through the month of June, and it had been relatively quiet for the markets. There had been no big drama, no big moves. In fact, we haven't had a single 1% day movement in the stock market all month. But that streak might be ending today. Overnight, Israel launched an airstrike on Iran, and that has global markets rattled.

Oil prices have seen the biggest impact spiking more than 8% with crude hitting $73 a barrel. Gold prices also hit two-month highs trading at over $3,400 an ounce. And U.S. stocks are deep in the red. I'm recording this before the market opens, and the S&P 500 and NASDAQ are both down more than 1% in pre-market trading. So, yeah, investors woke up to some serious geopolitical tension and the markets are a bit on edge. We'll have to see how the situation develops over the weekend. President Trump has called for Iran to make a deal. So we'll see what happens. You know,

maybe boring wasn't so bad after all. Let's run through some headlines. Starting with Apple. Apple is now sending nearly every iPhone made in India straight to the U.S. This is according to new data from Reuters. Between the month of March and May, 97% of iPhones exported from Foxcon's India plant ended up in the U.S. with a total value of $3.2 billion. Just to give some context here, last year, only about half of India made iPhones were U.S. bound. The rest were spread out across Europe, countries like the U.K., Netherlands, and Czech Republic. So Apple has really diverted all their India production to the U.S. In fact, Apple has already shipped more iPhones from India to the U.S.

in the first five months of this year than all of 2024. And there's a very simple reason that Apple is doing this. It's tariffs. See, Apple is trying to sidestep the steep tariffs President Trump slapped on China. Tariffs on Chinese goods can go as high as 55%, while India only faces a baseline 10% tariff for now. So this move by Apple to ship all their iPhones made in India to the U.S. makes a ton of financial sense.

It's going to save them a lot of money on tariffs. But Apple could face more heat from president. Trump for doing this. In fact, Trump has already called out Apple back in May for manufacturing more in India, telling Tim Cook that he wants Apple to make iPhones in the US and not in India. So we'll see if President Trump tries to close this loophole or if Apple just doubles down on India. Personally, I don't think we're getting iPhones made in the US anytime soon. Let's shift gears and talk about meta because they just finalized a $14.3 billion investment into scale AI for a 49% stake of the AI data labeling company.

You know, this whole story is really interesting and kind of weird. For one, Meta isn't just outright buying Scale AI, likely to avoid regulatory issues, but as part of this deal, Scales founder Alexander Wang and some key employees are leaving the company to join Meta. So it sounds like to me that Zuck just dropped $14 billion to hire Alexander Wang and some AI experts. is going to be leading Meta's new super intelligence team.

Yeah, that's actually the name of it. And he's going to be helping Meta build out Lama into something that resembles artificial general intelligence. And it just goes to show you that Zuck is really serious about AI. He handpicked Wang for this role after Meta's Lama 4 launch got a lukewarm reaction from developers. So he's hoping that Wang can turn things around. I mean, we'll see if this hire pays off

because $14 billion is a lot of money. I mean, even people in the AI space are kind of confused by this move, especially since Scale AI and Alexander Wang aren't really known for cutting edge AI research. No, Scale AI is known for organizing data. They're basically the janitors of the AI world. They help companies like Meta, OpenAI, and Google clean, tag, and structure data so they can use that data to train their AI models. So I was kind of confused that Zuck wants the founder of that company to lead his super team or whatever he's calling it. So again, weird move by Zuck. I mean, he's throwing more money around than the Phoenix Suns,

but it's hard to bet against the guy. On a side note, how awesome must it be to be an AI engineer right now? I mean, some of these AI engineers and researchers might be making Bradley Biel money right now. It's a little NBA reference for my hoop heads out there. Let's talk about some stocks making moves today. Shares of R.H., the luxury furniture company formerly known as restoration hardware, are bouncing back this morning after the company reaffirmed its revenue forecast and laid out a new strategy to combat tariffs. See, RH gets a lot of inventory from China. So tariffs have been a major

headache. But now they're planning to shift more of their production out of China. And they're also delaying major new product concepts until 2026, basically waiting to see how this whole global tariff drama thing plays out. You know, R-H stock had been getting crushed lately. It's down more than 60% in the past six months, but investors seem to be liking this new game plan, and the stock is bouncing back more than 20% this morning. On the flip side, airline and cruise stocks are taking a hit this morning, with investors getting jittery after Israel launched an airstrike on Iran. There's concerns that rising geopolitical tensions can cause consumers to rethink their travel plans, not to mention the fact that oil prices just spiked 8%, which could directly eat into the

profits of these companies. As a result, their shares, are down this morning. Also, Adobe stock is taking a hit this morning, even though the company beat earnings and raised their guidance. Earnings per share came in at $5.6 and $6 with revenues at $5.87 billion. Both those numbers were ahead of Wall Street estimates. But the stock is still down 5% today, likely because investor sentiment around Adobe has been shaky with AI disrupting the creative software space. I see these insane AI videos pop up on my feed every day. So, Wallst, Street is looking for more than just solid earnings. They're worried that Adobe might get disrupted by AI. Let's wrap the show with some listener questions. That's right. We're trying something new today.

It's the summertime. I thought we tried to mix it up a bit. First question we have is from Mr. Garrison on Spotify. They asked that the end of the TikTok ban delay is coming up on June 19th. How do you see this playing out? Is Trump going to taco again? You know, I feel like this TikTok ban isn't getting a lot of attention right now. There was a report in the Wall Street Journal a couple days ago that Trump was planning to extend the deadline for a third time. I'm not sure how much longer this is going to drag out. There seems to be no reports that TikTok is getting closer to a sale,

which they have to do to avoid a future ban. So here's my hot take. I think that TikTok does get banned at some point again here in the U.S. The next question we have is from Kelton. Having just seen the WWDC announcement, Is it possible Apple will ship some focus from the consumer segment to the military? It seems like they aren't giving up on the Vision Pro, but instead adapting it to Enterprise. That is a great question, Kelton.

And I did notice the same thing while watching WWDC. Apple spent a decent amount of time on the Vision Pro and showed off some interesting business use cases for it. I mean, look, I've talked a lot of smack about the Vision Pro, but the tech in it is pretty incredible. The problem is that it's just too expensive for most people. So I think one day what might happen is that we're going to get two versions of the Vision Pro, a cheaper one for consumers that strips out some of the super high-end stuff, and then we'll have a pro version for businesses. And then maybe one day Apple might make up combat version too for the military,

because you know who doesn't care about price tags at all? The U.S. military. All right, we'll do one more question. This one is from Augustia. Can you explain more about stable coins and can you advise on circle stuff? Well, unfortunately, I can't comment on specific stocks and whether it's worth buying. I'm not trying to get in trouble from our compliance people. But we are going to talk more about stable coins and circle on our weekend deep dive episode,

which is coming out tomorrow. I've actually already recorded a part of it. It might be one of our best ones we've ever done. So if you want to learn more about stable coins and circle, keep an eye on your podcast feed this weekend and go give that episode a listen. Well, all right, guys, that's the rundown for today. That's the rundown for this week. If you guys enjoy our show and have like eight extra seconds, consider giving us a five-star rating on Apple or Spotify.

And if you do listen 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. Also, let us know in the comments if you guys enjoyed listener questions, if you guys want us to keep doing that moving forward.

Thank you guys again for listening. Shout out to Mike and Connor. For all the help behind the scenes, and we'll see you guys back here this weekend for the deep dive.