Jon Quast

It's buying these opulent properties.

These are financial moves that are anything but conservative.

So if RH does succeed, it's making great moves right now.

But the outcome is becoming increasingly binary.

If it fails to hit its goals, it's really put itself in a tough financial position.

Billionaire investor Bill Ackman says stocks are stupidly cheap.

You're listening to Motley Fool Money.

Welcome to Motley Fool Money with the Hidden Gems team.

I'm Jon Quast, and I'm joined today by Matt Frankel and Rachel Warren.

We're going to get to Ackman's comments in a moment, as well as some news regarding the final frontier.

But first, I wanted to hit this AI news.

Is it friend or foe?

Basically, here's the headline.

Expedia and Instacart stocks, otherwise known as Maple Bear, were gaining a little bit in trading today after Jefferies analyst John Calantoni said these were actually AI beneficiaries.

Ordinarily, I wouldn't highlight the opinion of a single Wall Street analyst, but I was intrigued by these comments because it's very counter-narrative.

Basically, there are these platforms out there called third-party aggregators, and the prevailing narrative is that AI is bad for these platforms.

But this analyst coming out and saying, hey, this is actually a good thing for these two companies in particular, they're going to be beneficiaries.

Rachel, I want to start with you here.

Maybe explain what the demand aggregator business model is, and then elaborate on how AI could actually be a tailwind for these platforms.

That is really interesting and a very important thing to think about.