Travis Hoium

Travis Kelsey is taking an activist role at Six Flags, so are we gonna get Taylor World next?

Motley Fool Money starts now.

Welcome to Motley Fool Money.

I'm joined today by Lou Whiteman and Rachel Warren.

Look, the big news over the past 24 hours has been Travis Kelsey taking an activist role.

At least that's what the headlines say at Six Flags.

Jana Partners is actually the one I think fronting a lot of this money.

But Lou, this is at least interesting.

The interest here is that he has a background going to Six Flags, but we also have Dolly Wood, Dolly Parton.

Is this going to be Taylor Swift building her own theme parks?

Is that the next thing here?

That at least seems more successful.

You see Shaq in those commercials.

Yeah, Rachel, this seems interesting in the sense that celebrities or influencers seem to be more involved in investing.

I think Ryan Reynolds, if we go to more kind of the startup VC world, he's brought a lot of attention to the businesses that he's involved with.

He's on the commercials.

It's implied that he's a huge owner.

Sometimes that's not necessarily the case.

Magic Johnson, I at one point thought he actually owned the Dodgers.

He owns like 2% of the Dodgers.

Right.

You know, Jay-Z, that was the thing.

He bought the Nets.

He owned a teeny tiny portion of the Nets.

He got courtside seats.

But, you know, these celebrities do bring attention.

And in an attention business like theme parks, that seems like a valuable thing to bring to the table.

He even tried to build a casino at one point.

Lou, is this the kind of thing that we should be paying attention to?

Six Flags stock up 26% over the past week, but you look out over the past five years, shares are down.

Over the past one year, they're still down 35%.

Is our activists the kind of thing that we should follow, or is this just noise for regular investors?

At least it's something we could maybe do a research trip, go on a couple of rollercoaster rides.

Let's do it, guys.

Might add some value to the show.

When we come back, we are going to talk about ChatGPT's new browser.

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ChatGPT yesterday introduced a new browser, ChatGPT Atlas.

I had a chance to try this.

It's not available everywhere, just macOS.

But Rachel, I just want to go high level.

Is this something that we need?

The browser is pretty established.

We're going on, what, 30 years of it kind of looking the same.

We've moved things like the search bar into the actual address line, so kind of melded those.

Google really owns this market, something like 60% market share with the Chrome browser.

They've already introduced a lot of AI features into it, but AI isn't taking over.

Is this something that's going to be successful or is this just another spaghetti at the wall thing from OpenAI?

Right.

That seems like something they want to integrate into this.

Maybe it's easier if you own the browser.

Yeah, the idea in tech is generally that the new product has to be 10 times better than the old product for people to actually switch.

So, Lou, that was sort of the context in which I started trying Atlas.

And let me tell you, I didn't get very far, and I had multiple pop-ups asking me to upgrade to a paid version or an upgraded version of ChatGPT.

That's the kind of thing that's going to turn people off.

So I, I appreciate it.

Like Rachel said, they're trying to figure out their business model, but here you have Chrome that is free.

That is basically just helping Google's ad business and it's consumer.

It's a hundred percent consumer surplus.

And then you have a new product that comes out that basically does the same stuff with AI stuck in it.

And now they want you, it's sort of an upsell machine.

I just don't know if that's what people want.

So when you say they don't have the customer, cause they do have something like 5 million paying customers.

You're saying that like Google has a bigger business or, or.

Rachel, the other thing I keep going back to is something Brian Chesky said recently about

OpenAI and ChatGPT are actually not AI native.

And we'll see exactly what he means, I think, over time, because that sounds sort of explosive.

But it's an application.

It's accessing the internet.

It's not a new piece of hardware.

It is not quite as disruptive.

The change is not the same as going from a PC to an iPhone or a mainframe to a PC, those kinds of disruptive layers.

This is an area where this is not really disruptive at all.

It's just taking the old thing and making your own version of the old thing.

So that's what I kind of struggle with here is seeing what we're dancing around.

Is this just a sustaining innovation that OpenAI is trying to make into a disruptive innovation?

One of these products is going to have to stick or OpenAI is not going to meet the revenue targets that they have promised to investors.

And that's what all of this trillion dollar build out is based on, is them actually turning this into revenue.

So we will see if this is a help or a hindrance to that.

When we come back, we are going to talk about Warner Brothers Discovery potentially not splitting itself in two and getting bought out instead.

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Warner Brothers Discovery is back in the news.

There are now rumors that Skydance is going to be, or Paramount Skydance after that merger, is interested in buying the company.

Look, Lou, we've been talking about this one for a long time.

It makes all the sense in the world.

Doesn't necessarily make the companies profitable or businesses that are going to be competing with the giants in streaming.

But what did you take away from this?

When you say they have the cash, Larry Ellison is behind this?

Yes.

There's a lot of bad assets out there if somebody wants to put them all together.

Absolutely.

Rachel, what's the thought here?

I want to put some numbers behind this.

Warner Brothers Discovery has a $77 billion enterprise value as of today, $4 billion in free cash flow.

They've got debt.

If none of these companies had debt, we'd be having a different story, but somebody's got to pay for all this.

Is it just Larry?

What about price, though?

Disney has the theme park business.

They have the second biggest streaming service.

They're worth $240 billion from an enterprise value perspective.

Warner Brothers Discovery

$77 billion is a lot, and their business is going down.

Their business is moving in the wrong direction.

So I don't disagree, but if these assets are not cheap... That's the execution question, right?

Even for someone like Larry Ellison, buying a $100 billion company is... Is a waste of money.

Notable.

It's not nothing.

As always, people on the program may have interest in the stocks they talk about, and The Motley Fool may have formal recommendations for or against.

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For Lou Whiteman, Rachel Warren, our production leader, Dan Boyd, and the entire Motley Fool team, I'm Travis Hoyum.

Thanks for listening to Motley Fool Money.

We'll see you here tomorrow.

you

Heavily shorted stocks have outperformed the market four to one over the past five years.

So is this a meme bubble or a new paradigm for investing?

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From Fool Global Headquarters, this is Motley Fool Money.

Welcome to Motley Fool Money.

I'm Travis Hoi.

I'm joined today by Lou Whiteman and Dan Kaplinger.

Guys, one of the themes of investing in 2025 and really over the past few years is the rise of meme stocks, short squeezes.

This is something that's gotten a lot more attention.

It seems like retail investors, which is us, that's

what we do at The Motley Fool, that's our customers, that's the people that we want investing, have gotten ahead of the market by buying some of these companies that are maybe highly shorted, maybe they're not quite profitable yet.

These stocks, the FT put out a chart this week that showed that they have outperformed 4-1, just phenomenal returns over the last five years.

There's some stocks that have just gone crazy in 2025.

So Dan, how do you think about this?

This is very different than what I learned in business school about how we should be doing discounted cash flow analysis and all this stuff.

The story is really what's driving a lot of these stocks.

So is that a good or a bad thing for the market?

Well, GameStop really started this, right?

In 2020, early 2020, GameStop was arguably a value stock.

I know that it was held in, the Motley Fool held it in some places.

And then it became a meme stock.

And so some of these things start as something fundamentally driven, then become something else.

Right.

Yeah, Lou, I think this is interesting because

AMC is a good example of a company that became a meme and then it didn't go anywhere.

I believe the stock is down 99% from its all-time high in 2021.

But then you have a company that is actually building something.

One of the ones that I own is Joby Aviation.

That is much more of a story stock.

There is no cash flow.

You

If they can have investor confidence over the next few years as they get their FAA approvals for their aircraft, as they build out their business model, they could benefit from having a higher stock price.

The stock price leads to the business.

This is actually something that Tesla did.

I think we overlooked this.

When Tesla went public, it was a couple billion-dollar company, I believe.

They raised tens of billions of dollars.

Then that meme status...

really help drive the business.

Is that part of a new business model?

Get investors excited and then we become the VC funders?

to put this to both of you and I'll start with Lou first.

How do you think about taking profits in this?

When you have a stock that you built a thesis, you think that there's this potential in three, five, 10 years, and then suddenly the stock goes crazy,

Do you take a little bit off the table?

Do you ride the wave?

This is something I struggle with is when to sell.

So I'm curious what you guys think when you get these short-term gains.

So would you want them to raise capital and say, hey, you know what?

We got a stock price that's worth five times more than it was six months ago.

Let's sell some stock.

Let's do a convertible debt offering.

Is that what you're looking for?

Another thing to think about is, what is that cash burn?

How do you get to building the vision that you have?

You've built this meme on, if we're going to keep going with that word.

One company that didn't do this well in the last cycle was Virgin Galactic.

That was a stock that I owned.

Look, if they were to use that high stock price to fund their operations so that they could get to launch, which is going to be next year,

but they still need to raise capital and the stock's down, what, 95%, 99%, something like that.

And so it becomes harder if your stock value goes down.

So sometimes taking advantage of these high prices is the right thing to do to be that long-term business.

When we come back, we are going to get to earnings season and see what Lou and Dan think about TSMC and ASML.

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AI picks and shovels have been doing extremely well recently.

ASML said they expect long term growth.

TSMC saw revenue jump 40 percent in the most recent quarter.

Lou, is is this still kind of the easy button in investing in artificial intelligence today?

GSMC was cheap three years ago.

I think that's what's interesting.

You go back, you could have bought it for 12 times earnings.

Dan, what were you thinking this week when you saw earnings from these two?

I said the same thing because I think revenue is down on a sequential basis anyways.

He held, kind of did a short-term trade on TSMC, bought a huge position, and then kind of went, you know what, I'm rethinking this.

Investing in a company that's dependent on being in Taiwan is tough.

Let's move over to banks.

We got some big banks reporting.

We got a couple of smaller banks reporting.

The market reacted to this pretty negatively yesterday, Lou.

So what is the bank landscape and where's the risk that we should be thinking about?

Because banks are really risk businesses.

This isn't, you know, memes upside.

This is, are people going to pay back their loans?

Dan, consumer credit is something that, auto loans is something we've been hearing about.

There's potentially risk kind of hidden with the weaker consumer.

Is that something we should be worried about?

And then the other thing that keeps popping up, and especially with this AI build out, is these creative financing structures, variable interest entities.

They're calling them different names because that one got a bad rap a decade or so ago.

So what are you looking at as maybe red flags in those areas?

Very true.

When we come back, I'm going to see what Dan and Lou would rather own.

Going to give them a couple of choices, play a little game.

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We're going to play Would You Rather Now?

And I'm going to put a couple of options ahead for Lou and Dan and see would they rather own one asset or another.

We're going to start with gold and Bitcoin.

These are supposed to be stores of value.

So Dan Kaplinger, would you rather be a holder of Bitcoin or gold today?

Yeah, gold has been going crazy.

I believe it's beaten the market over a fairly long period of time.

Is it since 2000?

Something like that.

But if you go back throughout history, there are actually these boom and bust cycles, Lou, with gold.

In the late 1970s, early 1980s, gold went crazy.

as inflation was picking up, but then it didn't end up being a great inflation hedge when there was actually inflation.

Is that the risk there that it's, again, a meme?

You get ahead of the story and then when the actual thing happens, that's when it could crash and that could go for gold or Bitcoin?

The second one, I want to know, would you rather own Google, publicly traded company, well-established business, not quite the value it was when it was trading in the teens, price-to-earnings multiple, but still a pretty good value, or the up-and-coming disruptor OpenAI?

Let's put a $500 billion valuation on that.

That's, I think, where they're raising money right now.

The idea here is, do you want to be the disruptor or potentially the disrupted?

Lou, I'll have you go first.

Which one would you rather own?

Do they still need to do that by the end of the year?

I thought there was a deadline with Microsoft.

They needed to complete that transition by the end of the year.

It's getting pretty close.

I guess I fall in the same category.

I keep going back to, is artificial intelligence, are these things like chatbots going to be disruptive innovation or a sustaining innovation?

It's looking much more sustaining over a long period of time.

That said, new consumer goods companies that can gather 800 million weekly active users don't come along very often.

Let's go to the next one, a couple of relatively hot stocks.

maybe not the kind of stocks that you guys invest in, but Palantir or Coinbase.

Lou, I'll have you go first here.

You're already smiling about this one.

Which one would you rather own?

They could be like the IBM of the PC.

Those did pretty well, by the way.

Do you think that there's a possibility?

Four or five years ago, Coinbase and other companies were talking about stablecoins as a way to disrupt the established payment infrastructure, Visa, MasterCard, American Express, all those companies.

I think a lot of people pushed that off and those credit card companies moved higher.

But Dan, have you noticed the fees coming in?

This is one of the things I think has changed just even over the past 12 months.

I'm seeing a lot more of those 3% credit card fees.

Mm-hmm.

Guess what?

It is actually more expensive to move money from point A to point B with a credit card than it is with a stablecoin.

Now, that infrastructure isn't there yet.

But if we get to the point where Stripe's fees to pay with stablecoins is half of what it is to pay with a credit card,

Business owners notice that, right?

If you're a grocery store and you have a 2%, 3% gross net margin, and you can double that by saying, you know what, we're not going to take credit cards anymore.

We're going to add a credit card fee.

That seems like a compelling point of disruption that potentially Coinbase is going to benefit from.

That one will be a very interesting battle to watch because, yeah, Coinbase could be disruptive.

It could also go through another down cycle like we saw a few years ago.

Let's go to some companies that people are very familiar with.

If you're listening to an investing podcast, NVIDIA and AMD, you have the established company in artificial intelligence and the company that's gaining a lot of momentum.

Dan, which one would you rather own today?

Do you think they can maintain their margins?

That would be the risk for NVIDIA.

OpenAI might hold the keys to both of those companies' futures.

We'll see where that one goes.

Let's do, I think, a fun one quick.

We talked about Joby Aviation earlier.

Would you rather own Joby Aviation or Delta Airlines, a much more established company?

But airline stocks can be risky too.

Lou, you go first.

If you need a passenger, I'm happy to fly anywhere to ride along with you.

I'll put you on the list.

All right.

When we come back, we're going to get to stocks on our radar.

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As always, people on the program may have interest in the stocks they talk about, and The Motley Fool may have formal recommendations for or against, so don't hire or sell stocks based solely on what you hear.

All personal finance content follows The Motley Fool's editorial standards and is not approved by advertisers.

Advertisements are sponsored content and provided for informational purposes only.

To see our full advertising disclosure, please check out our show notes.

One topic I want to get to before radar stocks is an announcement from Google that they are using Gemini that basically made a model that they're going to be able to understand the language of human cells.

Lou, this seems like a maybe bigger use case than building a chatbot.

OpenAI is leaning into ChatGPT.

This is the stuff that they said that they were going to be doing was changing the world by advancing medicine.

Is this a big deal?

I'm here for it.

They can just burn money for the next 10 years like they've been doing with Waymo and just come out with, oh, man, we cured cancer.

And improving that speed and lowering costs could potentially be a game changer.

That's a good analogy.

Let's get to stocks on our radar.

Lou, you're up first.

I don't know about this one, Lou.

Dan, what's on your radar this week?

Dan, what do you think about a picks and shovels for AI picks and shovels?

All right, Dan, which stock is going on your watch list?

That may have been a better pitch.

for Lou Whiteman, Dan Kaplinger, Dan Boyd behind the glass, and the entire Motley Fool team.

I'm Travis Hoem.

Thanks for listening to Motley Fool Money.

We'll see you here tomorrow.