The Rundown - Tesla Abandons Dojo Program, Sweetgreen Tanks as Sales Plunge

Episode Date: August 8, 2025

Stock market update for August 8, 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 Friday, August 8th. In today's episode, we'll tell you why some investors are worried about tech companies dominating the stock market. We'll also tell you why Tesla is winding down their supercomputers and OpenAI's latest AI model and what they're doing to keep their engineers from jumping ship. Then stick around to the end of the show to find out why 401Ks could get. a bit more risky. We got a great show for you today. Let's go. The market volatility continued

on Thursday with the S&P 500 blowing an early lead again to close down 0.1%. The NASDAQ, on the other hand, squeezed out a win, adding 0.3% on Thursday and closing at record highs thanks to a rally in tech stocks. You know, it really seems like tech stocks and the hype around AI is the main driver of the market rally these days. It's like the only thing propping up the stock market right now. And that's starting to raise some concerns around the S&P 500 being a little too top heavy. If you look at the S&P 500 tech sector right now, it accounts for 34% of the entire S&P 500 market value, which is the highest share since March of 2000, which was the peak of the dot com bubble. And then if you look at the largest 10 companies in the U.S. stock market, they now account

for 76% of the total market cap of the entire stock market. which is the highest concentration in history. So essentially a handful of mega large companies, mostly big tech companies, are responsible for the market rally while the rest of the market just gets left behind. And to add more uncertainty to all of this, Trump's tariffs look like they're here to stay.

And we might have more tariffs on the way, which could add even more pain to the non-tech companies who are more likely to be impacted by these tariffs. So it's very interesting what's going on in the markets. You know, on paper, stocks are hitting all-time highs, but if you look under the hood, it's basically all being driven by the high hype around AI. But people are asking the question how long the AI hype can keep carrying the

market. And what happens in a few months or a year when AI doesn't live up to the hype? And that's why Nvidia is the most important company in the world right now. If investors start seeing signs of weakness in Nvidia's earnings, which hasn't happened so far, that could have a pretty big impact on the overall markets. Now, we're going to have to wait a few more weeks until we see Nvidia's latest earnings. They report on August 27th. So if you guys want to stay on top of all that stuff along with everything else happening in the markets, make sure you guys are subscribed to the podcast to stay in the loop. Let's run through some headlines. Starting with Tesla.

Tesla announced that they're pulling the plug on its Dojo's supercomputer program, which is a project that Elon Musk once hyped as the crown jewel of Tesla's AI ambitions. The Dojo supercomputer was Tesla's own custom-built computer for training AI. It was designed from the ground up, made specifically to process the massive amounts of video data from Tesla. cars. That data helped improve autopilot, full self-driving, and even the optimist humanoid robot. Morgan Stanley saw this as a key competitive advantage for Tesla, predicting that it would add $500 billion to Tesla's market cap. But now, that's all over. The Doja team is being disbanded, and the guy who was leading the team, Peter Bannon, is leaving Tesla. The rest of the crew

is getting reassigned. And you know, before all this was even happening, the Dojo team was losing engineers. About 20 Dojo engineers recently left Tesla to start their own AI company. called DENCity AI. Elon must confirm the news about Doja being shut down on X last night. He said that it no longer made sense for Tesla to split resources between Dojo's custom chips and the next-gen AI chips that Tesla is working on, like the AI5 and the AI6. Tesla plans to rely more on partners like Nvidia, AMD, and Samsung to make those chips. In fact, Tesla signed a $16.5 billion deal with Samsung last month to manufacture the AI-6

chips. And from a business perspective, this pivot makes sense. Building a custom supercomputer from scratch is expensive, and that's why the stock barely moved on this news. In fact, I think that investors might prefer that Tesla outsource their chips rather than burning more cash on making them in-house. Now, let's stick with the AI theme and talk about OpenAI, because they launched their latest AI model yesterday called GPT5. This model has been hyped for months now, and it's finally here. Open AI says this model is smarter, faster, and a lot more useful, particularly with writing, coding, and math. And the model also supposedly hallucinates less.

So yeah, this is coming at a perfect time for all the college kids going back to class in a couple of weeks. Open AI is rolling out GPT5 to everyone, including people on the free plan. The people on the plus plan and the pro plan will have higher limit. Open AI is trying to also improve their user experience by getting rid of all the old models in the drop-down menu, which I'm kind of bummed out about because I like seeing how the different models would answer questions. But now it's all just going to be GPT5. There's a lot of pressure on Open AI these days to continue to innovate. and have the leading edge model.

Competition is heating up. Google Gemini continues to put up impressive benchmarks. Anthropics Claude has a loyal fan base, especially amongst coders. Elon's Grok is showing impressive capabilities. And then you have meta, which is on a hiring spree poaching OpenAI engineers with paychecks that look like powerball jackpots.

So I'm sure they're cooking up something too. But as of right now, I think the crown still belongs to OpenAI. They have the most users and the most hype. ChatGPT is on track to hit 700 million weekly active users and process 3 billion messages a day. And that kind of dominance is pushing up their valuation pretty quickly. Bloomberg reports that the company is in early talks for a stock sale

that would let current and former employees cash out an evaluation of about $500 billion. What's crazy is the company was just valued at $300 billion four months ago. And it was at $157 billion last October. I mean, at this pace, they might hit a trillion dollar valuation by the end of the year. Let's talk about some stocks. making moves today. Instacart shares are jumping this morning after the grocery delivery company reported that its profit growth nearly doubled in Q2 to $116 million. Revenue also jumped 11% to $914 million beating analysts' expectations. Instacart makes money in two big ways. First is the fee it charges

on grocery deliveries, and the second way is advertising revenue from brands promoting products on their app. Last quarter delivery fee revenues jumped a lot. 11%, which is a slowdown from a 17% growth a year ago, but their ad revenue was up 12% and advertising is a highly profitable business model. So investors are pretty excited about the company and shares are up more than 9% this morning at the time of this recording. Now, Sweet Green, on the other hand, is having a rough day. Shares are tanking after the salad chain company admitted that fewer people want to pay $16 for a bowl of kale. The company slashed its 2025 sales Outlook, they're now expected revenues to drop between 4% to 6% this year versus the earlier

forecast where they expected sales to be flat. Now, just focusing on Q2, same store sales dropped by 7.6%, which is much worse than what Wall Street was expecting. Sweet Green blames the weak results on macroeconomic uncertainty that is causing diners to pull back on expensive salads. And they also said that they had difficult comps compared to last year when they launched a new steak offering that attracted people to its stores. And to be fair, Sweet Green isn't the only food chain to blame the economy.

me of slumping sales. Chipotle cut its forecast for same store sales after traffic declined for the second straight quarter. And then there's Kava, which their shares are down 20% in 2025 and down nearly 50% from its 52-week highs. I think these companies need to take a page from McDonald's, which finally got its sales growing again by doubling down on value meals. Sweet green stock was already having a pretty rough year. It was down 60% year-to-date heading into earnings, and it's down another 25% this morning at the time of this recording. That is brutal. Now, I've I never been to Sweet Green because there isn't one near my house. But Mike, who works on this show, he has very strong opinions on Sweet Green.

I mean, he was dropping some wild takes in the Slack channel this morning. I'll post a screenshot of what he said. So you got to watch the video version of his podcast, either on Spotify or YouTube, to see what he has to say. Let's wrap the show with a fun fact. You're about to have more investment options in your 401k soon. President Trump signed an executive order yesterday that directs regulators to make it easier for retirement. plans like 401ks to offer alternative assets, you know, things like private equity, real estate, private credit, and even cryptocurrency. The White House says that this move could give everyday investors

access to better returns and more diversification. Now, I don't really know how I feel about this. On one hand, it's great that the average investor would have access to more investment options. But the thing is, these alternative assets are a lot riskier and less transparent than traditional investments like stocks and bonds. But you know who loves this, though, is, Wall Street. Firms like Black Rock, Apollo, and KKR have lobbied hard for this executive order because it now unlocks $12 trillion in retirement accounts to invest in alternative asset products offered by these firms. So we'll see what ends up happening because remember, this is an executive order, which is not law. This order just directs the SEC and other regulators to figure

out the rules and your employer would still have to decide to offer these kinds of investments in their plans. Let me know in the comments if this is something that you're looking forward to. Well, all right, guys, that's the rundown for today. That's the rundown for this week. It's been a pretty wild week in the market's a lot of ups and downs. And I feel like August is just gearing up to be one of those volatile months. So make sure you guys are following the podcast to stay in the loop. If you guys are new here and enjoy listening to the show, 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 to

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 and watching. Shout out to Mike and Connor for all the help behind the scenes. I'll see you guys back here this weekend for the deep dive.