Sorry Apple, Microsoft is Now Most Valuable US Co. & Hertz is Out on EVs

0:00Tonight on NBC, Jimmy Fallon and Bozma St John host the highly anticipated new competition show. I hired 10 creatives from all walks of life. They will be battling it out to see who can impress the world's biggest brands. This is a huge opportunity. This is the battle for the next big idea. This is not play play. We're spending millions of dollars. I'm so excited to embark on this adventure with all of you. Make the best idea win! On Brand with Jimmy Fallon. Series premiere tonight on NBC. Good morning, Brew Daily Show. I'm Neil Freiman. And I'm Toby Howell. Today, how Hertz's big bet on electric vehicles ran out of battery.

0:38Ben, you hear that? That's the sound of Microsoft breathing down Apple's neck for the title of biggest company in the world. It's Friday, January 12th. Let's ride.

0:54We received further confirmation that if you mess with global shipping, the U.S. is going to mess with you. Last night, the U.S. and the U.K. launched airstrikes on Houthi targets in Yemen in response to the Houthi's frequent attacks on international cargo ships traversing the Red Sea over the past few months. These strikes will certainly jack up tensions in the Middle East and is exactly the kind of wider regional conflict experts had feared since Hamas attacked Israel and Israel responded with its war in Gaza. A senior Houthi official said that America and Britain will pay a heavy price for their aggression.

1:28So we're going to see what their response will be. Oil prices are up almost 4 % this morning on the news. A pretty sizable jump that shows investors are getting a little concerned about disruptions to the global economy from the Middle East. Yeah, this is causing the shipping industry to take a page out of the 1488 Bartolomeu Diaz navigational book. The routes that these ships are taking around the Horn of Africa, around the Cape of Good Hope in South Africa, this is the stuff you just don't see in the modern era. And it's really affecting prices. The rate for a 40-foot container from North Asia to Europe has jumped more than 600%.

2:04Shipping rates from North Asia to the U.S. East Coast have also jumped 137%. The word contagion has been thrown around a lot as the entire industry kind of becomes affected by this conflict. And so the U.S. and its rallying its Western allies to kind of put an end to this because at some point they're like, this has gone too far. We need to put a stop to this. The worst thing in the world that could happen to the U.S. government right now is that we see another spike in inflation and energy and oil prices go up because of a wider regional conflict. So we're just going to have to see what happens.

2:35I think this weekend will be pretty pivotal. Before we jump into the show today, we have a quick word from our sponsor, Veeam. I like Veeam because they set the bar high, and that's what you want in a cybersecurity provider. Yeah, you don't want the company in charge of protecting your data, cutting corners in any way. Don't want any virtual door plugs popping off at 17 ,000 feet, if you will. With Veeam, you need not have those worries. They have some of the highest security standards in the industry. And if something does go wrong, Veeam helps you recover your data faster, safely, and reliably.

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4:05Searching for real relief? Ask your doctor about Epglis and visit epglis.lily.com or call 1-800-LILY-RX or 1-800-545-5979. The king is dead. Long live the king. Apple, the biggest company in the world for the better part of 13 years now, briefly lost its title yesterday to familiar foe Microsoft before regaining it by day's end. At one point yesterday, Microsoft peaked at a$2.9 trillion valuation, eclipsing Apple's measly$2.89 trillion market cap. And even though it gave the throne right back, it's a culmination of two pretty polar opposite years for the two companies. Microsoft immediately and wholeheartedly embraced generative AI, sinking$10 billion to grab a stake in OpenAI.

4:48Apple has all but refused to jump on the AI bandwagon. Microsoft has seen growth in its cloud division, even as rivals Google and Amazon falter. Apple, meanwhile, has struggled with tepid demand for its flagship products like the iPhone. Add it all up, and Apple's once unassailable hold on the top spot has crumbled a bit. These two companies certainly have some history, too, which we'll get into. I know it's really high on the show, but if you all will allow me, I'm ready to declare Microsoft our Stock of the Week already, Neil. Yeah, in football terms, these are the Bills and the Eagles. They both have the same record at 11-6.

5:23Their market cap is about the same. But heading into the playoffs, the Bills won their last five games. That's Microsoft. And the Eagles have dropped the last four. they're Apple, and now there are far more people picking the Bills to win the Super Bowl than the Eagles. And that's kind of where we're at with investor sentiment around Microsoft and Apple. Microsoft is just growing a lot faster than Apple. Just let's look at the previous quarter, Q4. They're about to report earnings. Microsoft is projected to grow its revenue 16%. Apple is projected to grow revenue less than 1%. Yeah. If you dig under the hood, Wall Street expects Apple to report$118 billion in sales, Microsoft around$61 billion in revenue.

6:00but that's the thing. It's those different growth projections that has Wall Street completely looking at these two companies differently. I mean, Apple became the first company whose market value crossed$3 trillion last year before kind of like this year of disappointing results a little bit, flagging sales. The stock kind of receded a little bit. It's not like either are slouching, though, we should say. Microsoft shares are up 63 % over the past year. Apple's are up 39%. Together, they account for 14 % of the S &P 500, which is pretty crazy to think about. These are two giants. And it's really, really interesting to go down the rabbit hole of the history between Apple and Microsoft because they were founded around the same time in the same milieu of the development of the dawn of the internet and personal computing in the late 1970s.

6:48They were both led by the most famous tech founders that we've ever seen, maybe, in Bill Gates and Steve Jobs, who were born just a few months apart in 1955. And these two have been both bitter enemies and the best of friends over the course of the last five decades. Microsoft made a lot of its money selling software to Apple's PCs in the early days. But when they sort of started competing against each other with different operating systems, things turned. There was a lot of bad blood. Steve Jobs has gone on the record saying that Microsoft makes third-rate products and they have no taste. So it's been this interesting tussle between foes and friends for the past few decades.

7:29And I don't know if they necessarily compete now. In certain areas, they have competing browsers and competing computers. But it seems like both CEOs, both Tim Cook and Satya Nadella right now, are more interested in partnering rather than fighting. Yeah, it is interesting. Microsoft actually saved Apple back in the day in 1997 when Apple was on the verge of bankruptcy. see Microsoft invested 150 million dollars to keep it afloat so it is interesting how these ripple effects kind of play themselves out years down the line now they're competing for biggest company in the world looking ahead a little bit the big thing on Apple's docket is the release of Apple's Vision Pro mixed reality headset that comes out on February 2nd in the United States if anyone is looking for a birthday gift idea for me it's really cheap it's only over three thousand five hundred dollars but you know where to find me in the money group daily studio but that's apple's biggest product launch since the iphone in 2007 or it's it truly is one of those things that they hope reinvents kind of the next age of computing so we'll see all eyes will be on that to see how that product does all right if this isn't a sign of the times i don't know what is the car rental company hertz said it plans to sell a third of its u.s electric vehicle fleet 20 000 cars and will use the money to buy cars with traditional gas engines.

8:48Turns out these EVs presented a huge weight on the business, costing Hertz$245 million in the fourth quarter. This is a stark reversal from 2021 when Hertz made waves by announcing it would buy tens of thousands of EVs, most of them Teslas. That plan was given a standing O by investors who sent Hertz shares up 10 % and vaulted Tesla above a$1 trillion market cap for the first time ever. These days, the landscape looks a lot different evs are not the height hot item they once were demand is significantly slowing and they were proving too costly for hertz to upkeep and repair so if you're looking for a cheap used ev hertz is having a fire sale after a really bad bet yeah if you are hertz and you have the option to just use the same old gas powered cars that you've always used for cheaper without undergoing the maintenance headache of an ev the choice is clear you're going to sell off those cost gobbling EVs and just go back to what you've always done because it's cheaper.

9:47And it could free up a ton of free cash flow for Hertz, which is always a company that is on the verge or struggling with free cash flow. But Hertz had these huge, huge EV plans. They promised to buy 100 ,000 Teslas. They promised to buy 175 ,000 GM EVs, 65 ,000 from Polestar. So this is a major, major strategy shift. Yeah. One of the major problems is that rental cars are a huge sellers of used vehicles and you want to make sure those vehicles keep their value keep their value so the problem is what happened with tesla is over the past year they've cut their prices significantly which has depreciated all of hertz's ev fleet by a lot and now so when they try to sell it back to the market they're getting so much less than what they paid for it and they're at the same time they're seeing demand as we can for ev rentals people just don't want they thought when they bought the Teslas, they're like, oh, we could sell these for a lot more.

10:45People will want to rent Teslas. We can charge a premium for them. They're saying that the people don't actually want to rent electric vehicles because of this charge, this range anxiety that we've talked about is probably even more pronounced with renting EVs because you can't always just take it home to charge up. You have to kind of really know where the chargers are. People who rent cars are probably taking them for longer drives. So these two factors combined together had Hertz doing a major U-turn. Yeah, it is funny to me, too, because Hertz limited the torque and speed on some of the EVs because they kept getting these cars returned with people who were unexperienced with driving them.

11:21If you've never driven a Tesla before, the puppies got some zip. And so those were leading to higher rates of accidents. And even with a strategy of renting them out to more experienced drivers, they were still getting these cars back with higher accident rates than other cars. You've got to be careful with the pedal to the metal there. It's a little intimidating renting an EV because a few months ago, when we played golf, I rented a Tesla. I didn't know I was getting a Tesla, but it takes a lot getting used to. When you take your foot off the gas pedal, it basically is like a brake. And so you saw me, I thought it was driving pretty well.

11:51You're smooth. 10 minutes in, but it takes a little while to get used to. And I guess there is just a little intimidating factor that Hertz just didn't envision. Meanwhile, I thought this was really interesting. Avis is crushing Hertz. Didn't know that. I didn't know that. Avis is projected to do$6 billion in revenue. or Avis' market value is$6 billion compared to Hertz'$2.8 billion. It's doing much better on the stock market. So Avis is absolutely dominating Hertz, even though maybe Hertz is a bigger marketing brand name than Avis in the car rental market. May I say it? Hertz is hurting? I won't say it.

12:26Pretend that never happened. For our next story, if the names Pat McAfee and Aaron Rodgers don't mean much to you, I am truly sorry to have to intrude on that mental bliss here for a second. but the two have dominated the news this past week and bob eiger and disney can't be happy about it pat mcafee is a former punter in the nfl turned sports talk show host who espn signed to a gigantic reportedly 85 million dollar deal last year to become one of the faces of the network aaron rogers is the multi-time mvp quarterback of the new york jets who sat out the past year with an achilles injury rogers frequently comes on mcafee's espn show for an interview and is paid handsomely for those appearances sports star appearing on espn not a big deal right well aaron rogers has a habit of getting off topic to say the least last week he suggested that jimmy kimmel's name would appear on the recently released documents linking him to jeffrey epstein kimmel pushed back on rogers suggestion threatening to sue him mcafee apologized to kimmel on air and promised to remove rogers from the show but then rogers was back literally the next day spouting off once again about Kimmel in the medical establishment.

13:35It's a huge mess. And one that Bob Iger and ESPN boss Jimmy Pitaro have remained conspicuously silent on thus far. Iger and Pitaro are already struggling under a mountain of other problems, namely ushering ESPN into the streaming area. And this is just one more headache to deal with. Yeah, what's striking about this saga, It is drama. I mean, this is like reality TV show for sports talk people, is that in the past, ESPN's balance of power with its talent has been extremely one-sided. You make one mistake, ESPN is cutting you. I mean, we've seen this from Dan Lebitard, Bill Simmons, Sage Steele.

14:16The list goes on that if you cross ESPN, you're disposable. We'll just get some other on-air talent. Well, guess what? With Pat McAfee, these tables have turned. It appears that Pat McAfee has a much longer leash than any other on-air talent in ESPN's history. And that maybe speaks to ESPN's struggles right now. And it's struggle to adapt to this new creator-led media environment where someone like Pat McAfee has so much influence. He has his own audience, right? Like he came from Barstool and FanDuel. He did not sort of, ESPN did not nurture him. He has his own audience. And ESPN is kind of renting from him.

14:53So you've seen this power balance completely be upended, and it's very striking for people who follow this industry. Yeah, it is a complex problem, to be fair, though, because not only is it hard to rein in these big personalities, but neither McAfee nor Rogers are technically ESPN employees. ESPN licenses Pat McAfee's show. The company doesn't produce it, and Rogers obviously has no actual business ties with ESPN. So it's two characters that they don't have as much control over, as you said, of what they're used to in the past. This also is interesting, too, because the criticism of Pat McAfee comes about because he was hired to this big, splashy contract as ESPN was firing a bunch of on-air talent and doing this big, cost-cutting mission.

15:38And then here comes Pat McAfee with a reportedly massive, massive$85 million deal. So there's just tension everywhere you look at it. I know. And one thing Bob Iger and Disney doesn't tolerate is sort of talent on talent crime. And Pat McAfee has called out a ESPN executive calling him a rat. And he allowed Aaron Rodgers to go and call out Jimmy Kimmel, who is one of the biggest personalities at Disney because of his show on ABC. And this is not even this is only one of the scandals that ESPN is going through, because yesterday The Athletic reported that it sent in for years, for decades. it had sent in fake names for Emmy consideration.

16:16So it could stroke the egos of on-air talent by giving, it literally got Emmys, scrubbed the names from what they were, and then wrote in the names of on-air talent for people on college game day in order to kind of give them the trophies that they weren't necessarily eligible for. So ESPN is just in a world of scandal right now. We'll see if they can dig themselves out. They gotta dig themselves out for sure. Before we jump into the next part of our show, we're going to take a quick break.

17:13Does it ever feel like you're a marketing professional just speaking into the void? But with LinkedIn ads, you can know you're reaching the right decision makers, a network of 130 million of them, in fact. You can even target buyers by job title, industry, company, seniority, skills, and did I say job title? See how you can avoid the void and reach the right buyers with LinkedIn ads. Spend$250 on your first campaign and get a free$250 credit for the next one. Get started at linkedin.com slash campaign. Terms and conditions apply. Last year, tech companies cut hundreds of thousands of jobs in order to bring down spiraling costs.

17:51But it looks like even those mass layoffs weren't enough to make the balance sheet look pretty. Just 11 days into 2024, tech firms have continued to lay off workers with job cut announcements seemingly every day. Just this week, Google announced it would cut about 1 ,000 employees across its hardware and engineering divisions. Amazon made cuts to its Prime Video, MGM, Twitch, and Audible businesses. The messaging platform Discord cut 17 % of its workforce. The video game engine maker Unity slash 25 % of its workforce. And that is not all. In their messaging to employees about the layoffs, these tech CEOs have all covered similar themes.

18:28They say their businesses are in a healthy financial shape, but they believe some reorganization is required to set them up for a better future. In other words, they want to pull investment in some areas to free up money to prioritize more promising growth opportunities. Also, they just hired too many people during the boom times of the pandemic. Toby, it has been a brutal start of the year for tech employees. Yeah, I remember we talked about I feel like we had this conversation last year where it was the year of big tech layoffs after many, many years of not seeing much. And now here we are only 12 days into the new year and we're already seeing similar layoff stories percolating through.

19:05I also want to zoom in on the video gaming industry specifically because a lot of those companies are not just tech companies. A lot of them are video game specific. Unity, big video game developer. Twitch, obviously big platform for hosting video game streams. And then Discord even is tangentially related to the video game industry. So it's kind of the state of the gaming industry is not great right now. And not just tech as a whole, but specifically video games. Yeah, one company I want to focus in, because when you look at layoffs, you can kind of see where companies are trying to orient or prioritize for the future.

19:41Let's talk about Google, because four years ago, it bought Fitbit for$2.1 billion. dollars. Now, based on what happened this week with their hardware layoffs, it looks like the Fitbit brand is kind of going extinct. It sent the founders of Fitbit packing. It's really changing its hardware push to focus more on the Pixel Watch. And it seems like the brand of Fitbit is kind of just becoming a dinosaur based on the layoffs that we're seeing. And then also pivoting away from, I guess, the tech industry real quick, BlackRock laying off 600 people, 3 % of its workforce that kind of caps off a rather large year or stretching back into 2023 of layoffs 62 ,000 jobs were eliminated in 2023 by the 20 biggest banks in the world.

20:30And now we're seeing BlackRock, the biggest asset manager on earth, laying off part of its global workforce as well. So it's pretty much anywhere you look, tech, banking, there are still media as well. There's still some cracks showing in kind of the jobs market. We know that we know that December and January are the most popular months for layoffs as executives kind of flip through their budget and look where they can make things look a little bit better for the quarter. The Consumer Electronics Show, aka CES, is going down this week in Vegas and bringing us a preview of some of the weirdest electronic gadgets and gizmos hoping to make their way into our lives.

21:06CES is all about showcasing the weird and wild. So if anything you're about to hear sounds kind of out there, it could be. But it's also a major sales convention and companies give presentations of their devices and visions of the future with the hopes of landing sales or investments. One of my favorite devices I saw there was the AI-powered birding binoculars from Swarfsky. They cost$4 ,799 and help you quickly ID more than 9 ,000 birds for the rich birder in your life, of course. I still saw an app that lets you pay to go pee called Flush. It allows businesses to rent out their bathrooms for a little extra dough.

21:43I love that one. That sounds a little dystopian. It's a little dystopian, but I love it. There's a company offering a BlackBerry-style keyboard attachment case for your iPhone, which I know has Steve Jobs rolling over in his grave. But one of the buzziest inventions of the year of CS is an AI device from a company called Rabbit that you wear around your neck and theoretically lets you accomplish tasks you would have had to bust your phone out for previously with just your voice. So like ordering an Uber or getting takeout pizza, You can just ask the Rabbit R1. Neil, that is what I think people's big takeaway from this event should be.

22:15AI hardware is coming, and it's coming fast. Right. There was AI everywhere at CES, but I think this product from Rabbit was probably the most talked about that we saw. They sold out 10 ,000 units in a single day. I think it cost$199 or something. So they actually have some sales to back it up. And what it is, is we've talked about AI hardware and companies trying to crack the code by kind of re-envisioning the smartphone, saying that the smartphone was for a different era where there wasn't generative AI. And now that there is, maybe we should reimagine our devices to better sync up with what that kind of software can do.

22:52And Rabbit has unveiled a product with its own operating system that kind of skirts the App Store. And they're saying what ChatGPT does to Internet search, Rabbit OS does for the App Store. And basically, it's saying that you get very frustrated and it's very time-consuming to filter through a zillion apps when we have this amazing assistant, this voice assistant, that's way better than Alexa or Siri that can do all these tasks for you, like order Instacart or grab an Uber, and you don't have to go through any of the apps to do that. And it has a screen, which a bunch of the other AI hardware apps don't have.

23:29Yeah, you nailed the price, by the way. It is$199 real-time. Off the dome. Fact check right there. This is also, CES is also a chance for these mega companies to kind of lay out their vision of what they think the next few years is gonna be like. And Walmart was one that had a big presence at CES. They are jumping on the AI trend, saying it's implementing everything from its supply chain to its app. They kind of have to say that, but the big piece from Walmart that I thought was interesting is that it is really going all in on drone delivery. They've already made 20 ,000 drone deliveries in the past two years, but in 2024, it is rolling it out to the Dallas-Fort Worth area.

24:04It's offering drone delivery for up to 75 % of Dallas's population, which is 1.8 million homes. So this is not an unsizable investment. It really does think that it's figured out kind of how to make this futuristic delivery system work. And it's going all in on Dallas. Before we leave CES, I just got to mention one product and it's an anti-snore pillow. And I'm sure a lot of people's ears just picked up because there is a pillow that will, you plug it in, it detects your snoring. And then if you are snoring, instead of your partner having to go whack you on the face, it will adjust the pillow a little bit.

24:40so your head is in a position where you stop snoring. That is beautiful. And also, of course, it's powered by AI too because who doesn't need an AI anti-snoring pillow? I don't know why it needs to be powered by AI, but that's beyond me. I think it needs to learn intelligently how your head is sitting. I really want to try that. Anyway, next Christmas for everyone who's - You get an AI pillow, I get the Vision Pro headset. All right. Finally, I'm going to need everyone listening to locate their nearest plunger before we discuss our last story of the week because this could get a little messy. On Tuesday, boys expecting to head back to Eaton College in England after winter break received a surprising note from the school.

25:18There had been extensive flooding in the region, the note said, and the sewers in the center of Eaton wouldn't be able to cope with the arrival of nearly 1 ,350 growing boys. When you read between the lines, you realize that the flooding of the River Thames had caused the toilets to back up and the risk of clogged toilets from all those lads was too high. So they've opted for remote instruction for now. Maybe this wouldn't be a story if it was any other high school, but Eaton is not like any other high school. It is perhaps the most famous public school in the world with over a third of the UK's prime ministers, Prince Harry and William, and a bunch of other celebrities having been educated there.

25:57It costs more than$60 ,000 a year to attend. So for many people, there was a heavy dose of schadenfreude seeing such a fancy school being closed down by poop concerns. Come on, it's a little funny. You have this grand institution being laid low by the most mundane of problems. You've got to laugh a little bit. I do think that is funny that they specifically called out the Cedric won't be able to cope with the arrival of 1 ,350 boys. They can do damage. They can do a lot of damage. Yeah, the team is a beast right now. It's sitting just inches below levels, not seen in at least a decade. There's just been so much rain over there, and you just never know what the effects might have.