Tom Gardner

Well, the spirit of our podcast of The Motley Fool, our Hidden Gems Investing podcast, and our Rule Breaker Investing podcast is to present our two primary approaches to long-term investing.

In the case of Rule Breakers, it's to look for innovative breakthrough businesses.

And in the case of Hidden Gems, it's to really look at the ownership, leadership, and the financial management of companies on a growth path.

Both styles are very similar.

but in that they both share a passion for holding stocks for the very long-term, being investors in the stock market throughout our entire lives.

But we have two different wrinkles on how to look at companies, and we love having those two different brands in The Motley Fool, and they're expressed here in podcast form.

Well, I think that the market is actually responding reasonably accurately, I think, at least in the short term, to what's playing out.

Remember, as John pointed out, Microsoft, Google, and Amazon, because of their cloud businesses, are racking up incredible backlog numbers.

And those backlogs are, you know, this is enterprise cloud revenue.

This is very high-quality subscription revenue.

And the demand for AI enterprise right now is off the charts

Meanwhile, Meta does not have a cloud business and does not have backlog.

Its business is advertisers, and advertisers can cancel in difficult economic times.

So the quality of the revenue across these businesses is very important to distinguish between the companies.

Then I will just add that the capex spend, so not only are we talking about the quality of the revenues, but the capex spend that is so dramatic

We're talking about these four companies collectively spending over $600 billion in capex this year.

We've never seen anything like this in human history on this scale.

But when we talk about Meta's capex, they're spending, again, against advertising markets where

There are some real questions about consumer confidence.

The consumer drives 70% of the U.S.