New “TrumpRx” to Lower Drug Prices & Spotify Drops One CEO for Two

0:00What should you invest in? And how often? Making investing decisions is easier with Fidelity. With their step-by-step experience, you can find investments based on your goals and comfort level. And if you'd like, you can decide how much and how often to invest with recurring investments that happen automatically. Ready to make your next investing decision? Head to fidelity.com slash trading. Investing involves risk, including risk of loss. Fidelity Brokerage Services, LLC, member NYSE SIPC.

0:33Good morning, Brew Daily Show. I'm Neil Freiman. And I'm Toby Howell. Today, the White House has a new plan to bring down drug prices. TrumpRx.gov. Then Spotify CEO Daniel Ek is stepping down with two co-CEOs taking over the reins. It's Wednesday, October 1st. Let's ride.

0:55The government just hung a closed sign on the door right after midnight. The federal government shut down after lawmakers failed to agree on a spending bill that would keep the lights on past Tuesday. It's the first shutdown since 2019, which was the longest in history at 35 days and could have a significant impact on your daily life and the economy, depending on how long it lasts. Toby, how's this going to affect federal services? Can I do Angel's Landing at Zion National Park like I planned? Well, I don't know if you're in shape to do that, but what stays open and what actually closes when the government, quote unquote, shuts down?

1:30A lot of fundamental services actually aren't going to change. Travel will continue mostly uninterrupted with TSA employees and air traffic control workers working without pay. National parks will remain partially open, though anything with a gate or a door will close, so you might have to park down the road or use the bathroom before you go. You'll still get your mail to and social security checks will be sent out. Unfortunately, though, tax processing will also be unaffected because the IRS has a separate source of funding. So a shutdown isn't a total shutdown, but it does get more damaging the longer it goes on, kind of like your last toxic relationship.

2:07And now a word from our sponsor, LinkedIn Ads. Toby, have you ever been the best at something? Best host of this podcast, Up Top. I'm not high-fiving you for that. My point is LinkedIn Ads is the best when it comes to generating the highest B2B ROAS of all online ad networks. They also have a network of over 1 billion professionals and 130 million decision makers. You can target your buyers by job title, industry, company role, seniority skills, company revenue, so you can stop wasting budget on the wrong audience. Spend$250 on your first campaign on LinkedIn ads and get a free$250 credit for the next one.

2:43Just go to LinkedIn.com slash MBD. That's LinkedIn.com slash MBD. Terms and conditions may apply. So when I saw this first piece of news yesterday and read it to Toby, he thought I was joking. The White House is launching something it's calling Trump Rx. It's a real thing. Trump Rx is a direct-to-consumer website that will allow Americans to pay cash for some drugs at a discount negotiated by the government. Part of the Trump administration's push to lower prices for prescription medications. Standing next to Trump at the announcement was Pfizer CEO Albert Bourla, whose company has been targeted by the White House for its drug prices.

3:19As many executives have done before him, Borla leaned into the art of the deal to get in Trump's graces by offering a few olive branches. According to Trump, Pfizer agreed to offer all of its drugs to Medicaid at reduced prices. It will sell some drugs on Trump Rx at a 50 percent average discount. And it pledged an additional 70 billion dollar investment in domestic manufacturing. Pfizer thinks that's a small price to pay to skirt two looming risks. 100 % tariffs on branded pharmaceutical products Trump recently threatened, and a broader crackdown on the pharma industry by the administration. Seems to have worked out for them because Pfizer said it won a three-year reprieve from any tariffs, and investors sent the stock up nearly 7%, confident that Pfizer was now in the clear.

4:03Toby, now that you know it's not a prank, what is the expected impact of TrumpRx, and what do you make of Pfizer's play to cozy up to Trump? Well, first of all, there was a big pressure campaign that led to this point because Trump has been very aggressively going after big pharma in both administrations, saying that the U.S. needs to get drug prices in line with other countries, specifically Europe. He has been pushing them to match most favored nation drug pricing, where he's saying like, hey, if Europeans are getting this drug for X amount over there, we needed to sell it for the same amount here.

4:35So he sent all these letters to the world's biggest drug makers saying, hey, we are going to threaten penalties. We're going to threaten these massive, massive terrorists if you don't fall in line. what the actual impact of this launch may be is a little hard to tell because a lot of these companies already have been selling direct-to-consumer drugs on other platforms. Also, a lot of different things go into pricing a drug. You can't just set the price. Insurers have a say in it. Pharmacy benefit managers have a say in it. So it's not just a simple, this is what it costs, this is what will sell it to you.

5:08So it might be a little tough. We'll see what the actual assortment of drugs that you will be able to buy on the site. Also, this is not a site that will fulfill the drugs for you. It just kind of allows you to browse drugs and then you will be redirected to the actual Pfizer's website to receive the drugs themselves. So it's kind of acting more as a middleman, a branded middleman, something that Trump can put his name on to show that we are working to get prices lower. So the actual impact we're going to have to see. Yeah. Canter Fitzgerald analyst Carter Gold came out and said that knows notice that Pfizer didn't really change any of its financial guidance after the deal.

5:46So he wrote that the changes appear, quote, largely benign. And health experts came out one by one yesterday and saying it's there's it's hard to imagine that there's going to be any major impact on the market. This is sort of jockeying, as we've seen from the likes of Apple and NVIDIA and a bunch of other big tech companies that have gone to the White House and said, hey, we're going to pledge$500 billion to build factories here in the United States. You know, under the surface, they'd already allocated$475 billion of that to factories in the United States. But it is sort of an art of the deal.

6:18Pfizer, many other drug makers have come under pressure. They were threatened with huge tariffs. So you saw Pfizer stock get a lift yesterday and you saw across the pharma industry, all of those other drug makers got a lift yesterday because analysts saw this as a particular blueprint that other companies could follow in terms of, you know, securing favored deals from Trump and avoiding the worst of tariffs and a crackdown on drug pricing. This certainly disrupts the pharmacy benefit manager kind of model because that middle layer is what a lot of people blame for the high drug prices in America.

6:51So if you start to push for more direct-to-consumer drug sales, it cuts out pharmacy benefit managers. And so we are seeing that becoming a more normalized thing now in the drug industry. TrumpRx is just another instance of that. So some of these PBMs could start to lose some of their influence when it comes to drug pricing. And then it also is interesting, like this is the branding exercise here is very intentional. It's almost trying to simplify this very complex market. No one knows how drugs are priced. But when you slap Trump Rx, you go on this nationalized website. It's almost like the McDonaldization.

7:25It's just you have a menu. It seems a lot more simple. So part of this is just a political win as well, trying to say like, hey, we are trying to simplify this very complex process that you don't know how it works. Just come to Trump Rx and things will be clearer. Moving on, today is the start of October, which means the beginning of soup season, but the end of something else, the electric vehicle tax credit. Federal incentives to buy electric vehicles have been around in some form since 2008. But as of today, they're done and dusted as a result of the GOP's tax and spending bill. The federal government had provided a$7 ,500 tax credit for people buying a new electric vehicle and$4 ,000 for a used EV in order to spur electrification and curb emissions from gas-powered cars.

8:09With that incentive eliminated, automakers and consumers are waking up to a whole new world today. So what's going to happen? To look forward, you have to look backward. In the past three months, EV demand has skyrocketed as shoppers scrambled to claim the credit ahead of the expiration date. Cox Automotive projects that EV sales hit 410 ,000 units in the third quarter, up more than 20 % from the year before, and accounting for 1 in 10 of all new vehicle sales, a record share. But the surge of people buying EVs over the summer means there aren't many left to buy them over the winter, especially as the tax incentive goes away.

8:46Analysts expect EV sales to plummet this quarter, as everyone who wanted a battery-powered car now has one. Looking further ahead, the outlook looks murky at best for electric vehicles, which automakers had once went all in on. Toby, you're about to see what so-called natural demand for EVs looks like, meaning demand without any sugar from the government. We're not going to quite see it yet because Ford and GM and all these electric vehicle makers saw this coming. Obviously, this state has been circled on their calendars for a long time. So what they started to do is actually starting to buy up dealer inventory when they still had the benefit of getting this$7 ,500 EV tax credit.

9:25And therefore, they can pass those savings on to the customer mostly through leasing. So we're going to see maybe a longer tail here. It's not going to be a sharp cliff that maybe some analysts initially predicted because these companies have been getting their ducks in a row. So by taking advantage of the subsidy when it was still active, they are going to be able to offer discounted leases to customers. So I don't think that we're going to see an absolute 50 % drop overnight. That being said, it is absolutely going to impact it because there's still not price parity between internal combustion cars and EVs.

10:01They have around a$9 ,000 premium to ICE cars. So that tax credit went a long way to making it more competitive. So natural demand, you are right. Maybe it's going to be a longer road off ramp from these tax credits than we expected. But it's certainly going to be an uphill battle once they do fully kind of come to their natural resting place within the market. Yeah, there's no question that EVs are about to face a retrenchment because pretty much every automaker that had once got all in on EVs, they set up these huge plans. They pledged tens of billions of dollars, are now walking that back. They had done it before this tax credit ended, and now they're doing it very significantly.

10:41Honda just scrapped an electric Acura. Stellantis canceled a battery-powered RAM pickup. GM is idling factories all over the Rust Belt. You had Ford CEO Jim Farley come out yesterday and say that EV demand is going to fall by 50 % after this tax credit goes away. So they're expecting just a much smaller buyer base for cars that are electric powered. When they once thought this was going to be the future of the industry, perhaps it is 10, 20, 30 years down the road. But it's certainly not going to be five years down the road as many predicted. The brutal part is that the roads were just kind of coming on to par with what the electric vehicle industry needed, though, because charging anxiety, range anxiety, was this really big issue for a lot of EV adoption.

11:24But that has fallen because infrastructure is coming in place. A lot of corridors now have enough of those charging stations. So it feels like right as, you know, everything else needed to fall in line when it comes to charging infrastructure is coming online right when the EV credit is going offline. So that is kind of a tough timing right now because this buildout has gone well. Right now, we have moved from 1 ,000 to 12 ,000 fast charging stations in a decade. Now, there's very few 100 to 200-mile gaps. There was much more in the past. And it does seem like a lot of roads you could just go on a road trip with an EV now.

12:05So kind of a brutal timing that right when everyone is building things up, allowing you to go on those cross-country road trips in your electric vehicle, the big tax credit is going away. Moving on, Spotify is shuffling its chief executive position with long-term founder Daniel X stepping down after nearly two decades leading the streaming service. The stock dipped around 3 % on the news despite X saying he's not leaving fully, assuring investors he will stay involved in big strategic decisions. Eck founded Spotify way back in 2006 amidst the heyday of music piracy and remade the industry in the image of playlists, algorithmic discovery, and subscription-based access.

12:46Since going public in 2016, the stock has almost quadrupled in value, with Eck remaining the face of the company the whole time. Now that face is gone, leaving behind some very big shoes to fill. And who's the person for the job? Well, it's actually two persons, Gustav Sodersom from the product side of things and Alex Nordstrom. its chief business officer, are set to serve as co-CEOs starting January 1st. Yes, Spotify is opting for the sharing is caring approach to the chief executive role to replace ECK, following in the footsteps of other large companies, including Oracle, Netflix, and Comcast, who have adopted the co-CEO model.

13:22First of all, what a run for ECK. And second of all, co-CEOs, what's next? Are they going to start a daily business news show together? Let's talk about Spotify under Eck. I mean, he completely revolutionized this industry, disrupted Apple's iTunes model where you had to pay 99 cents for a single song. And he said, well, how about you pay for a month and you get the entire world of music at your fingertips? And Spotify for many years had not been profitable. But in 2024, it turned its first annual profit. So he proved that this new business model for music could make money. And he's leaving now.

14:00I mean, he still has plenty of shares in Spotify, but he came from this rough patch of Stockholm and now is worth$10.3 billion. Spotify's market cap is now above$150 billion. It's moved beyond music into audiobooks and podcasts and even video now with video podcasts. So he really built quite a massive company. And then what is the deal with co-CEOs becoming a thing in corporate America? They're not quite as rare as you might expect. Actually, it is relatively rare. Fewer than 100 companies out of 2 ,200 in the S &P 500 and Russell 1 ,000 had co-CEOs over the last 24 years. There's been some major failures, but there's also been some successes.

14:41One of those successes is Oracle, which just recently put two co-CEOs to lead that company. They also had co-CEOs before from 2014 to 2019. The stock ended up rising 33 % during that period. It did lag the broader S &P 500, which gained 49 % over that time. So doing some research into does this co-CEO idea actually work, Harvard Business Review found that it kind of does. They looked at 87 co-CEO companies and found an average annual shareholder return of 9.5 % compared to 6.9 % for peers with only one CEO. So maybe there's something in the water here. Maybe the modern corporate landscape demands people to divide their attention, one with a product focus, one with a tech focus, or one with a business focus.

15:30So maybe they are onto something here. Perhaps. I mean, big companies now are just so complex. They have so many moving parts and perhaps it's not possible for one person to be in charge of it all, at least in certain circumstances. You know, I look back to Netflix from 2020 to 2023. That was a period where they grew like crazy. It was probably some of their best execution over the past few decades. And at that time, they had two CEOs. They had Reed Hastings and they had Ted Sarandos. And one way that these companies are playing this co-CEO thing is to have a smoother succession model. So when one steps up to be a co-CEO, the other can step down, move to the executive chairman role, and they kind of learn on the job.

16:12So it can be this really productive left brain, right brain thing. And there's gonna be so many Harvard Business Review articles written about the co-CEO phenomenon and whether it is successful or not. And I guess the conclusion is that it can be, it can't be, you just have to do it right. Up next, we're gonna take a quick break and come back and talk about Amazon. Toby and I don't work in accounting, so we're shielded from handling company ledgers, bank transactions, and financial reports. But for the pros who do deal with all that, Fispan can help make your job easier. It embeds your bank right into your accounting software so siloed data is centralized, and you can get more done and gain better visibility into daily cash positions.

16:51Imagine payments and remittances being sent directly from your accounting software, reconciliations that are completed in minutes, not hours, and financial reports that are consistently accurate and on time. You can do more than imagine all that. Head to FISPAN.com to transform how your firm manages money. That's FISPAN.com. Toby, the modern workplace is a digital mess. Is my laptop dusty again? Yes, but that's not what I'm talking about. Teams are scattered across locations using a chaotic mix of apps and devices. It's a logistical nightmare that creates security risks and eats up valuable time.

17:30Well, it's a good thing there's JumpCloud and Aaron Akan for that matter. JumpCloud is a unified IT management platform that securely manages all employee identities and devices from a single place, cutting through the chaos. By consolidating IT tools, JumpCloud helps businesses save money and avoid the complexity of managing multiple systems. Its AI-powered platform helps you protect, manage, and monitor your entire workforce so you can stay one step ahead. This isn't just about making IT easier. It's about giving your business a strategic advantage. JumpCloud frees you up to be more productive, flexible, and innovative, allowing you to work smarter and grow faster.

18:07Toby, you should really keep some screen wipes around. As for the rest of us, clean up the digital mess. Learn more at jumpcloud.com slash brew. That's jumpcloud.com slash brew. Amazon is not a company you think of when it comes to beautiful hardware, often overshadowed in popularity and quality by peers like Apple. But yesterday at its fall hardware event, it announced some new gadgets and gizmos aplenty, including upgraded Kindles, Echoes, and speakers. Among the headliners were two brand new redesigned Echo speakers complete with a dynamic lighting system that Bloomberg's Mark Gurman said shows ears when listening, eyebrows when processing, and a mouth when speaking.

18:46Think of them as a direct competitor to Apple's HomePod speakers. It also unveiled two upgraded Echo shows, the version that comes with a screen attached with reviews praising the new leaner look with thinner bezels and less harsh LEDs. Powering all the devices is the juiced-up, AI-infused version of Alexa called Alexa Plus. Alexa Plus rolled out last March. Alexa Plus rolled out in March and sits at the center of Amazon's new devices strategy. For instance, the ambient AI system kicks in as soon as you approach an Echo, combining AI with built-in sensors to recognize who just walked up to surface that person's preferences like a favorite podcast or a photo slideshow.

19:24It's all part of the plan to turn devices from a loss leader for its e-com operations into a profitable business unit on its own. Neil, the general consensus was Amazon hardware is moving upscale, away from the cheaper plastic shells and patchwork design that used to characterize their devices. And it's all because of one dude, a guy named Panos Panay. Back in 2023, Amazon poached Panay, who was running Microsoft's product team, and they said, you are really good at your job. We suck at our devices division. Well, we're okay. We have a huge penetration because every Amazon Prime Day, we basically give away Echoes.

20:04So everyone has them in their home and they have an Alexa, but no one's exactly excited to have them. No one is super pumped to show them off to everyone who comes in their house. But Panay has a reputation for developing much higher quality products. So they went over to Microsoft. They said, we'll pay you a lot more than Microsoft's paying you. And then he came over to Amazon, took a bunch of people with him, assembled the team. and this is his first product launch and reviewers were so impressed by what they saw. Yeah, it's kind of a reframing of Amazon's entire product division because it used to be something disposable because they were selling Echo devices for 20, 30 bucks.

20:41Like these were not upscale products at all because they were a loss leader. The vision originally for this division was that you could do shopping on them. Like you would say, hey, Alexa, or I just probably triggered a bunch of Alexas in homes around the country, But order me like paper towels, order me this, order me that. And they thought that it would feed into their e-commerce ambitions, which it hasn't necessarily been as successful doing. So Panos Panay came in and said, what if we just made the stuff good and stand on its own? Now it's more of an aspirational product. It's more of a division that you would feel proud of having it sit on your counter.

21:13It looks better. It performs better. It's top of the line now. It goes toe-to-toe with what Apple is offering. and it has this juiced up version of Alexa that maybe is a little bit more efficient or better than a Siri competitor like that. So kind of has remade the entire division in his likeness and trying to make it just a full design culture reset. Let's make these things a little better looking than they were in the past. And if they're successful, then Alexa Plus will be the AI of the smartphone, which is really the bigger fish that everyone wants to fry here because there's a huge device war heating up right now.

21:45We have Meta with the smart glasses, Apple has the smartphones and it also is trying to build out this smart home environment. And then you have OpenAI, which hired Joni Ive to come in and try to make its own AI-powered device. So how are you handicapping it? Well, Amazon doesn't have any mobile device. That's sort of its one big black mark. It owns the home. It's doing really well in the home. But once you're on the move, there's nothing really that Alexa has. The one thing that they did just buy, it's a startup called Bee, which is a wearable bracelet that is kind of another ambient AI thing that listens to your conversations.

22:23It sounds very Black Mirror, very dystopian, but they just snapped that up to maybe add something to the person that goes along to complement the home environment because you are right right now. It does have all the speakers that exist. It has the Fire TV stick that plugs into your TV, but you don't have anything you can actually bring with you. maybe B is its answer to that, even though it sounds like a very creepy thing that's always listening to you. All right, let's sprint to the finish with some final headlines. You know when someone makes fun of your sweater so much that you go out and buy a new one?

22:52That's apparently what Boeing is doing with its scandal-ridden plane. The aerospace company is reportedly planning a new single-aisle airplane to replace the 737 MAX, which suffered two fatal crashes and has never reached the goals Boeing set out for it. Building a new plane from scratch on an entirely new platform may sound like a lot of work, and it is. It's a bold bet by new CEO Kelly Ortberg to go on offense when most of his time at the company has been in cleanup mode trying to fix a broken safety culture. But if he pulls it off, a state-of-the-art new plane could help Boeing catch back up to Airbus, which leapfrogged it as the world's biggest plane maker by sales.

23:30So Boeing's staying mum about this new plane, but if they announce it, it would be the equivalent of Steve Jobs talking about Apple's next big thing. It is the next big thing, but they got to think about all the things in the rearview mirror as well, because they still have a backlog of 6 ,000, over 6 ,000 planes to deliver right now. So a lot of analysts are looking at this and going, are you sure Boeing? Like you can't even get your ducks in a row now. And now you're already looking ahead to the future. But they are saying that, hey, narrow body jets, they're the backbone of the aviation industry.

24:01These are the workhorses of the aviation industry. If we can roll out a new one, get ahead of this cycle while not just looking in the rearview mirror, maybe it will help us retake our throne from Airbus who has caught up recently. So I don't know. It seems like from the customers Boeing has had, they've been saying that we've seen an improvement in time and quality and it looks like things are turning around. I don't know if it's wise to throw a bigger wrench into things just as you're kind of getting this turnaround on the right direction. So quite the rumor that's going around. I know as a plain nerd, you're excited to see what new narrow body comes to fruition, but kind of wild to see them have this big clean sheet gamble that they're going for.