The Rundown - Trump Threatens to Remove Tesla Subsidies, Circle Applies for National Bank Charter

Episode Date: July 1, 2025

Stock market update for July 1, 2025. Check out our Leading Indicator podcast.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 Tuesday, July 1st. In today's episode, we'll recap the end of the second quarter and tell you why stocks might take a dip in Q3. We'll also tell you about the latest beef between Elon Musk and Donald Trump. Then stick around to the end of this show to learn about Netflix's deal with NASA. We've got a great show for you today. Let's go. This week got off to a nice start with both the S&P 500 and NASDAQ adding 0.5% on Monday and ending the second quarter at all-time highs.

I mean, there is so much that happened over the last three months. We had a tear of shock in April. The bond market had a meltdown for a few days. We even had a geopolitical scare and talks of war in the Middle East. But despite all the chaos and uncertainty, the S&P 500 finished Q2 up. 10%, which was its best quarter since 2023. And the NASDAQ did even better, jumping 18%. Oh, and the Dow, by the way, was up just 5%. But nobody cares about the Dow. Now that stocks are back at all-time highs and everyone is bullish, I wonder what's going to happen next. You know, there's a saying

on Wall Street that markets climb a wall of worry, which means that when everybody's worried and feeling bearish, that's when markets tend to go up. We saw that happen in Q2. But now that the wall of worry has been climbed, investors are trying to figure out what next. And I think that's where the upcoming earnings season could play a big role on how the markets end up doing in Q3. Remember, despite President Trump pausing reciprocal tariffs, there's still an effective 10% baseline tariff on all imports. And the overall effective tariff rate in the U.S. is at its highest since the 1930s. So it'll be interesting to hear how companies have been impacted by these tariffs and what it's doing to profit margins and supply chains. As for the reciprocal tariffs, that pause is set

to expire on July 9th, but there have been reports that President Trump plans to extend that deadline to give the U.S. more time to negotiate trade deals. So, you know, there's still some uncertainty this summer and we'll have to see how it all plays out. By the way, the June jobs report is coming out on Thursday, which will tell us how many jobs were added to the U.S. economy last month, and what the unemployment rate is. The labor market continues to stay strong. It could help keep the market rally going. So we'll recap that for you later in the week. So make sure you guys tune in to stay in the loop. Let's run through some headlines, starting with Elon Musk. Elon Musk and President Trump are beefing again. This beef between the two is about Trump's big, beautiful bill

that's working its way through the Senate right now. Elon's not a fan of the spending bill because it would increase the U.S. deficit. The bill would also cut government subsidies for green energy and EVs. Elon's been going off on Twitter this week. He said that he'll do everything he can to make sure that members of Congress who support this bill don't get reelected. He even floated the idea of starting a new political party. Well, President Trump fired back at Elon last night in a truth social post, threatening to cut all the subsidies that Elon Musk's companies received from the government. In the truth social post, Trump said the Department of Government Efficiency should look into subsidies

received by Tesla and SpaceX, and he claimed that Elon Musk may have received more subsidies than any other human in history. He also said that if Elon didn't have these subsidies, Elon would have to close up shop and head back to South Africa. So yeah, Trump was not pulling any punches there. Now, looking at the numbers, Elon's companies have received about $38 billion in government contracts, loans, subsidies, and tax credits over the past 20 years. This is according to the Washington Post. The SpaceX has received between $2 to $4 billion from the government every year from 2021 to 2024, and Tesla has received at least $1 billion every year since 2020. So if these subsidies were to go away, it could be a big blow to Elon's businesses.

Investors aren't taking this lightly Tesla stock is down more than 5% this morning. Elon's not backing down, though. He fired back on X in all caps to cut it all now, referring to the subsidies. And just when you thought that things couldn't get any more heated, President Trump told reporters this morning that he'd take a look at deporting Elon Musk. So yeah, we have come a long way between the Elon Musk, Donald Trump, bromance. that we had a few months back. Speaking of a breakup, let's talk about Apple,

because Apple might be finally ready to give up on Siri. According to a report from Bloomberg's Mark German, Apple is now considering ditching their own in-house AI model and replacing it with either Anthropics Claude or OpenAI's chat GPT to power the next generation of Siri. Apple was originally planning to use their own model called Apple Foundation to power Siri, but apparently it's been pretty bad compared to the others.

In fact, one Apple executive literally told Bloomberg their models are inferior to third-party ones. So now Apple has already asked both OpenAI and Anthropic to train custom versions of their models to run on Apple's private cloud infrastructure. And they're currently testing those models to see if they can power a new and improved Siri experience. And personally, I would love to see that. And I think most people would as well. Now, if Apple does go through with this move, it would be a major strategy shift for the company. See, historically, Apple likes to control everything, the hardware, the software, even the silicon chips.

So outsourcing Siri's brain to a third party like Open AI or Anthropic would be a very un-apple-like move. But Apple might not have a choice here at this point because their AI tech seems to be way behind the competition. I mean, Siri has been clown for years now, but Apple's recent Apple intelligence rollout was even more embarrassing, with many features still not being released. Meanwhile, you have Android phones being shipped with Google's state-of-the-art, Gemini AI. So we'll see what Apple decides to do. Investors seem to like the idea of a chat GPT powered theory. Apple stock was up more than 2% on Monday after Bloomberg's story broke. By the way, we talked more about Apple and their struggles with AI on the leading indicator podcast. I interviewed

my buddy Trung fan who is really in the know about this stuff. We've got a great 20-minute conversation. We'll put a link in the description to that podcast if you want to learn more. Let's talk about some stocks making moves today. Circle stock is making moves after the Stable Coin Company applied for a national banking charter. Now, if this gets approved, Circle would be able to manage its own reserve and hold crypto assets for institutional investors. This would also make Circle the second crypto company to obtain a charter following Anchorage Digital Bank, which won approval back in 2021. The Circle's USDC Stablecoin is currently backed by more than $60 billion in reserves made up of cash and short duration U.S.

treasuries. Right now, 90% of that reserve is in a fund managed by BlackRock and held in custody at BNY. Now, Circle has been considering a bank charter since 2022, believing that the regulatory oversight and compliance helps provide more certainty and trust in global markets for stable coin activities. And the stock was up following this news, but it's now in negative territory. I think Circle is starting to lose a bit of steam after their hot start since the IPO. Their stock has low-key been down over 30% since last week. AMC shares are also down this morning after the theater giant announced a debt restructuring plan. Now, the deal is kind of complex. The company plans to raise $223 million to refinance its debt, which is due in

26. Now, I'm going to spare you all the boring details, but all in all, what this restructuring does that it lowers AMC's debt load and it buys them more time to pay off their debt later down the line. It's a clever plan on paper more time and less pressure on AMC. But the main problem for AMC is that their business isn't growing. In Q1, the company posted a 10% decline in revenues compared to a year ago bringing in just over $862 million. So until the company figures out how to make theaters cool again, they're going to have problems. And that's why Wall Street isn't really buying into this restructuring and the stock is down 6% this morning on this news. Let's wrap the show with a fun fact. Netflix will start live streaming rocket launches, spacewalks, and even real-time

views of the Earth thanks to a partnership with NASA. Now, many people don't know this, but NASA actually launched a streaming service back in 2023 called NASA Plus, which has a ton of space content, everything from live spacewalks to space documentary. So now, instead of having to download a separate app to watch all this content, it'll all be available on the Netflix app. And this seems like a win-win for both sides, because this deal would put NASA's content in front of the 700 million plus Netflix subscribers. And this is also good for Netflix, since it gives them even more live programming, which they've been building over the last year or so.

And who knows, maybe this will inspire Netflix to make some good space content themselves. I feel like we haven't had a good space movie in a while. Like, we need a good follow-up to Interstellar. Maybe Netflix will make that happen now. Well, all right, guys, that's the rundown for today. Hope you guys enjoyed today's episode. If you did and you have like 12 extra seconds,

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