Joby's Flight to Manhattan from JFK, Anthropic at $1 Trillion, & MrBeast

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0:40Robert Croak:Get the Unreal College Deal. Everything you need to study and play with select Windows 11 PCs. Eligible students get a year of Microsoft 365 Premium and a year of Xbox Game Pass Ultimate with a custom color Xbox wireless controller. Learn more at windows.com slash student offer. While supplies last, ends June 30th. Terms at aka.ms slash college PC. Hey everyone, and welcome back to the Rich Habits Radar, our Friday episode of the Rich Habits Podcast, where every Friday morning we're coming at you with the biggest headlines impacting you and your money. This episode is brought to you by VCX, the public ticker for private tech.

1:16Robert Croak:My name's Austin Hankwitz. I'm joined by my co-host Robert Croak, and the three things sitting at the top of our Rich Habits Radar this week include Joby Aviation's flight from JFK to Manhattan, OpenAI missing their internal revenue targets, and Jerome Powell's last FOMC meeting, the end of an era. And be sure to stick around to the end where we talk about Starbucks's turnaround story. Shout out Mr. Beast. All right, Robert, let's dig into our first story.

1:43Austin Hankwitz:That's right. Joby Aviation completed the first ever point-to-point electric air taxi demonstration flights in New York City's history, taking off from JFK International Airport and flying over to Brooklyn and landing at heliports in Midtown and Lower Manhattan. The whole trip, under 10 minutes, which is just crazy considering what you and I went through recently, Austin, in our Ubers, sitting for that same trip for like 90 minutes. Under 10 minutes. The same route by car averages 60 to 120 minutes depending on traffic. So this is a big step forward for Joby.

2:20Robert Croak:This isn't some concept video or a press release with some renders and some ideas. This is real. This was a real aircraft, an egg-shaped cabin with six tilt rotor propellers, fully electric, zero operating emissions that took off vertically like a helicopter does from JFK. It transitioned a forward flight and it touched down at the West 30th Street heliport in Midtown only 14 minutes later.

2:46Austin Hankwitz:Yes, these flights are part of the FAA's Evital Integration Pilot Program known as EIPP, which was established by an executive order from Donald Trump last June and formally launched in March of 2026. The Department of Transportation selected eight pilot programs across 12 states, and Joby was named as a partner in five of those 12 programs.

3:10Robert Croak:The Port Authority of New York and New Jersey worked directly with Joby and the FAA to make these flights happen. Port Authority Chairman Kevin O'Toole said, and I quote, this is exactly the kind of innovation we have a responsibility to test, understand, and help shape for the good of the region.

3:28Austin Hankwitz:Yeah, Joby is in the final stages of FAA-type certification, the five-stage process that grants approval for a new class of aircraft to carry passengers commercially. Importantly, Joby's first actual passenger service won't be in the U.S. It'll be in Dubai where the company plans to launch later this year in partnership with the city's road and transit authority. The UAE's regulators moved faster. Several other countries, India, China, and the UAE could have paying passengers in eVTOLs before the end of 2026.

4:01Robert Croak:That'd be really cool. Now, the commercial vision for New York is built on partnerships, not just what Joby's doing by themselves. Delta Airlines invested$60 million in Joby back in 2022, and they have a small equity stake in the company. The plan is to eventually offer seamless air taxi transportation to and from JFK and LaGuardia as part of your Delta booking. Uber also partnered with Joby to integrate air taxi rides into the Uber app. And with Joby's ownership of Blade, the helicopter company, they already control the passenger infrastructure, lounges, heliports, booking systems, all of that.

4:41Robert Croak:They control all of it across Manhattan and other key airports.

4:45Austin Hankwitz:And the stock tells you this is still a show me story. Joby went public in 2021 and has never traded above$20 a share. The company reported a net loss of nearly$1 billion in 2025, and this is an R &D-heavy pre-revenue business burning cash while it waits for regulatory approval. So think long term.

5:05Robert Croak:Well, let's talk about that, Robert. What does this new story of Joby actually proving, hey, I'm able to go from JFK to Manhattan, I've got the infrastructure trending in the right direction. What does that mean for you and your portfolio, people listening right now that are saying, hey, air taxes are real. How can I profit from that in the future?

5:22Austin Hankwitz:Yeah, this is one of those hurry up and wait. You want to be early, but you have to be prepared for that volatility that comes with these new technologies and secular growth trends. And so this technology is real, but the investment thesis depends on timing. Joby's aircraft works. It's flown over 50 ,000 miles across dozens of flights over nine years. The infrastructure is being built. The regulatory pathway exists. So for your portfolio, the way to play urban air mobility right now isn't just through EVTOL manufacturers themselves as their pre-revenue and burning cash. It's also through the companies that benefit regardless of which air taxi company wins.

6:05Austin Hankwitz:Delta's$60 million Joby investment is optionality on top of an already recovering airline business. And Uber at$74 is interesting because they're the distribution layer. If air taxis become real, you'll book them through Uber. So there's lots of opportunities. We're always talking about picks and shovels. This is just something to be aware of in this sector. And we're really excited about air taxis, but Joby as well.

6:32Robert Croak:Yeah, super excited about the sector. We're watching the early innings of a transportation revolution that could reshape how cities actually move people. That's not going to happen overnight. The FAA certification is a grind and Joby won't speculate on timing. But when a real aircraft flies a real route and the most complex airspace on the planet and lands safely at a commercial heliport, that's not just fantasy anymore. That's infrastructure. And it's a pretty cool achievement. So shout out Joby. And again, shout out to them for coming on the show. Maybe they're going to come back soon and tell us more about their progress.

7:06Robert Croak:Robert, let's jump to our next story, which is OpenAI missing their revenue in internal user growth targets. On Monday evening, the Wall Street Journal dropped a bombshell report, which claimed that OpenAI's missed multiple internal monthly revenue targets in early 2026, falling short of its user growth goals. And here's the kicker. Their CFO, Sarah Fryer, told other company leaders that she's worried the company might not be able to pay for future computing contracts if revenue does not grow fast enough.

7:39Austin Hankwitz:Yeah, it's a little bit of a crazy thing, but let's put some numbers around this. OpenAI closed a historic$122 billion funding round on March 31st. So remember, March 31st, just a little bit ago. The largest in Silicon Valley history at an$852 billion valuation. Crazy numbers, but hear me out. Amazon committed$50 billion. NVIDIA and SoftBank each put in$30 billion. And the company is committed to spending approximately$600 billion on compute infrastructure through the end of the decade. That's roughly$100 billion a year in data center spending. Oracle alone has a$300 billion five-year computing deal with OpenAI alone.

8:23Austin Hankwitz:And CoreWeave also signed an$11.9 billion contract just last month.

8:29Robert Croak:So to recap there, raised a ton of money. All of this$600 billion in compute infrastructure is what they've committed to spending, but revenue is roughly$25 billion a year right now as of February, March of 2026. It's a lot of money. $25 billion is a lot of money, but it's not$600 billion, right? It's a fraction of what they've committed to spend. The math only works if this revenue continues to grow at a blistering pace, and according to the Wall Street Journal, it's not. So here's where it gets worse. OpenAI set an internal target to hit 1 billion weekly active users on ChatGPT by the end of 2025, and according to the Wall Street Journal, they missed it.

9:08Robert Croak:ChatGPT's growth slowed in late 2025, and the company's been dealing with subscription churn, people canceling their$20 a month ChatGPT Plus subscriptions and switching to competitors like Anthropic and Google.

9:20Austin Hankwitz:And the journal also reported that OpenAI lost ground to Anthropics specifically in coding and enterprise markets, the highest value segments, and to Google's Gemini in consumer markets. The market reaction was immediate. On Tuesday, Oracle dropped 6.5%, CoreWeave fell 7.1%, SoftBank cratered 11.9%, Broadcom lost 4%, NVIDIA dropped 3%, and Microsoft fell 1%. Every single company that's built part of its thesis on OpenAI's growth trajectory took a hit. And collectively, we're talking about hundreds of billions of dollars in market cap erased in one single session.

10:02Robert Croak:So if you think about Sam Maltman and Sarah Fryer here, they, of course, issued their own joint statements calling the report ridiculous. Hey, Wall Street Journal, that's ridiculous. Come on, get out of here. They quoted saying we're totally aligned on buying as much compute as we can and working hard on it together every single day. But as an outsider looking in, because the Wall Street Journal also reported that Fryer has some reservations about a 2026 IPO, that the board is now more closely scrutinizing their computing deals. As an outsider looking in, you're like, wait a second, that doesn't look aligned to me.

10:36Robert Croak:CFO is publicly telling the board that she's worried about paying the bills. And then the CEO is signing$100 billion deals. Totally aligned. I don't know about that. It's a tough sell.

10:47Austin Hankwitz:Yeah, that whole statement sounds like a trust me bro process. But Austin, what does this mean for you and your money?

10:53Robert Croak:Yeah, we've been talking about the AI bull market for years now. And the difference between the AI bull market and the dot-com bubble at its core were the profits. Whenever you reflect upon the hope and idea of the internet boom back in 1999, 2000, whatever, there was a lot of companies getting hyped up on the potential of making a lot more money. Yes, we had a little bit of that hype in 2023 and maybe 2024, but a lot of these companies as the years went on were able to materially generate billions if not tens of billions of net new revenue, profits, cash flow, things like that. But now as we kind of look around we're seeing the AI infrastructure spending narrative start to have some cracks and it matters whether you own a single share of an AI stock or not.

11:45Robert Croak:The entire AI trade has been built on the premise that these companies are going to spend hundreds of billions of dollars on compute and the revenue from that spending is going to follow. And we've seen that from Amazon and Google and, you know, Microsoft, a ton of their cool companies. But OpenAI's myths forces investors to ask themselves, what if all of the revenue that's being baked into these valuation expectations doesn't come soon enough? What if the$600 billion of committed spend that's supposed to go to Oracle or supposed to go to CoreWeave? What if that money actually doesn't end up on their income statements?

12:21Robert Croak:Is that being properly priced into their stock prices at the moment? So for your portfolio, not all AI infrastructure plays are created equal. Companies with diversified customer bases, like NVIDIA, they sell to everyone, not just OpenAI, are more insulated than the companies that are concentrated just to OpenAI. CoreWeave, which derives a massive portion of their total revenue from that single$11.9 billion open ai contract is the most vulnerable oracle and their 300 billion dollar deal with open ai is a liability to the company if open ai's growth can't support that committed spend on the other hand you got companies building ai tools that enterprises actually pay for and benefit regardless from which foundation model wins so think about it you guys have the perplexities of the world which take all the different models and just build cool tools for enterprises.

13:14Robert Croak:They're going to win long term, which doesn't matter whose model wins, they're selling to the enterprises. But then you have people like OpenAI who have got one model and one product, and they're trying to sell it to as many people as possible. So you have to have sort of this perspective with your portfolio is no matter what model wins, how can I ensure that I'm participating in this AI infrastructure, which again goes back to Robert, we've talked about, You know, DTCR is an ETF that is sort of the electrification of these data center infrastructure plays. We talk about Bloom Energy a lot. That stock is soaring right now.

13:49Robert Croak:I mean, you have to be diversified beyond just a one single name into the secular growth trend, which is why ETFs are a great way to pick up some of that exposure.

13:59Austin Hankwitz:Yeah, that was a mind-blowing take, and it just really speaks to everything we talk about of having that diversification, having the picks and shovels, and understanding it's more than just chips. It's data centers. It's energy. It's photonics. It's copper. It's all of this, and you have to stay ahead of it and really understand. And we even saw that just in the last 48 hours of Marvell pulling out their POs with Poet Technologies, and Poet's stock went down 50 % overnight because of one company pulling a contract. So that's why we try to stay ahead of all of this in the Rich Habits podcast and definitely in the Rich Habits Network.

14:38Austin Hankwitz:So for me, the biggest takeaway is we may be entering the phase of AI where the winners and losers get sorted. The era where everything in AI goes up might be over. And from here, it's all about who has real revenue, real margins, and real customer retention, not just the biggest infrastructure commitments, because those can go away in the blink of an eye.

15:01Robert Croak:They certainly can. So, Robert, let's head on over to our third headline here of the Rich Habits Radar.

15:07Austin Hankwitz:That's right, our final story today, Jerome Powell's final Fed meeting. Wednesday was one of the most significant Fed meetings in recent memory, and not just because of the rate decision, but because the FOMC held rates steady at 3.5 % to 3.75 % for the third consecutive meeting, exactly as markets expected. The CME FedWatch tool showed a 100 % probability of a hold going in. But there are three layers to this story that matters much more than the rate decision itself.

15:40Robert Croak:Yeah, so the first layer, inflation. The inflation picture has deteriorated significantly. Arch CPI came in at 3.3 % year over year, up from 2.4 % in February, the biggest monthly jump since 2022, driven almost entirely by the Iran war's impact on energy prices. Oil. Oil is at$111 something dollars a barrel, right? it's above 110. That trickles into everything. CPI rose 0.9 % month over month, the hottest monthly reading in years. Goldman Sachs estimates that headline PCE rose by 0.64 % for March, lifting the year over year jump to 3.45%, which means that in just 12 months, the purchaser consumer index, which means like the manufacturers, the businesses that have to go purchase all these raw materials and stuff, their costs rose by about 3.5%.

16:36Robert Croak:This is moving in the wrong direction, and the Fed knows it.

16:39Austin Hankwitz:Yeah, and the second point here is this was almost certainly Jerome Powell's final meeting as Fed chair, so an end of an era. His term expires May 15th, and Kevin Warsh's path to confirmation cleared dramatically this week after the U.S. Attorney's Office dropped its investigation into Powell over the Fed's Washington, D.C. headquarters renovation. We've all followed that debacle. EY Parthenon chief economist Gregory Daco said he expects Kevin Warsh to be confirmed in time for the June Federal Open Market Committee meeting.

17:13Robert Croak:Looks like he's going to stay on as the governor, as a Fed governor, which he should. And that was expected.

17:18Austin Hankwitz:We expected that, though. Yep.

17:20Robert Croak:And the third layer on top of all of this is the labor market. It's softening in ways that the Fed just can't keep up with. The ADP National Employment Report showed that private employers added an average of just 39 ,250 jobs per week in the first half of April, which is a downward revision from earlier estimates. Federal government employees have fallen off a cliff, down 352 ,000 roles, about 11.5 % since Trump took office. A lot of this was DOGE-related workforce reductions, but the national unemployment rate is now hovering around 4.5%, which is up pretty substantially in the last 24 months.

18:04Austin Hankwitz:So, Austin, that was a whole lot of numbers and things that did not sound good for us. What does this mean for you and your money moving forward?