Becker Private Equity & Business Podcast
9 Business News Stories We Are Following Today 5-21-25
Wed, 21 May 2025
In this episode, Scott Becker discusses 9 key stories, including Target’s earnings miss, Warby Parker’s AI-driven surge, Peloton’s ongoing decline, and more.
Chapter 1: What are the top business stories today?
This is Scott Becker with the Becker Private Equity and Business Podcast. These are nine of the stories that we're following this morning, and thank you for listening to the Becker Private Equity and Business Podcast. We recently passed 7 million downloads, thrilled with the listenership, and thank you so much. So let me go through nine quick stories.
Chapter 2: How did Target perform in its latest earnings report?
First, the markets point generally down this morning. It would have been a good morning to stay in bed is my core take there. Second, Target is getting taken to the woodshed by Walmart. It badly missed on first quarter earnings and reduced its guidance for the year.
Chapter 3: What challenges is Target currently facing?
It's simply fascinating for me to watch how some of these chains that have the it thing going, that have it going on for a period of time. Target's a good example. Lululemon's a good example. Nike, maybe. They're all there for a period of time, and it's just very hard over a long period of time to maintain that vibe.
Chapter 4: What recent news has impacted Warby Parker's stock?
Sort of fascinating to watch, but Target right now taking it to the chin, I think down 27% year-to-date. Third, Warby Parker, the eyeglasses place, jumped 16% yesterday almost on a partnership with Google regarding AI-powered smart glasses. To have bet on Warby Parker, you probably would have needed to essentially had insider information to know to double down on that.
Who would have seen that coming? Fourth, Lucid Motors jumped more than 10% yesterday. Well, its cars are very cool. It's still way below 20,000 vehicles a year and below $1 billion in revenues. Now, it's got the Saudis as a financial partner, so that helps, but it's very hard to build a serious car company without much greater scale. What's it going to get there? The stock is down 2% year-to-date.
Fifth, NVIDIA's CEO, Jensen Wang, recently criticized some of the restrictions selling chips to China. Jensen himself is a force of nature. And whether I agree with him or not, in this period of time where people are so scared to say anything negative about President Trump, I give him great credit for doing so.
I'm not an anti-Trump person particularly, but I am a pro-wag person, and I give him great credit for speaking his mind. Sixth, Peloton Interactive had another horrendous quarter. Its revenues are down. Its subscriber numbers are down. The CEO put the best possible spin he could on the numbers. Here he says, although revenue continues to fall, we did better than we expected.
So that's always a bad sign. The stock is down 23% year to date, trying to put lipstick on a pig or something like that. Seven, Palantir Technologies is up 66% year to date. No one is smarter than Peter Thiel. I'll stand by that. Eight, Astero Labs, a company I was so proud to own at one point, is now down about 30% year to date. So it is what it is.
RH, a company I love to hate, is down 47% year to date and getting just hammered in the financial press. So again, those are nine of the quick stories we're following today. Thank you for listening to the Becker Private Equity and Business Podcast. Thank you very, very much.
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