How PayPal Went from Wall Street Darling to Unwilling Takeover Target

0:28This episode is brought to you by Accenture. Welcome to Stock Club, the podcast where we find and discuss stocks that anyone can buy, many of which we believe will go on to grow your wealth. This week, Mike and I are each going to discuss a new Chinese AI model outperforming the giants of America, SpaceX's lock-up period, and one of the most shocking stories that I've seen in a long time, which is Stripe's potential acquisition of PayPal, no less.

1:07But before we dive in, I want to remind you, 27th of August is just a few weeks away, and we are holding the greatest concentration of the world's most legendary investors anywhere in the world, here in Dublin, in the Market Bar. It's an all-day event on the Thursday, food and drink included in the ticket price. But best of all, you will sit beside, close or in front of legendary investors such as Motley Fool co-founder and the original rule breaker, David Gardner. And just last weekend, last Saturday, I was on a radio show in Ireland here, Bobby Kerr's business show, a news talk. And literally, as I was walking into a studio, I saw a newspaper open on a table on the Irish Times where there was a double page interview with Motley Fool, co-founder David Gardner, who, as I said, is our VIP guest.

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2:48That's M Y W A L L S T dot com. Brian is the CEO of Investicon and he probably has a few discount codes remaining. Right, on with the show. So, Mike, how are you this week? Mighty now, yeah, yeah. All good, no complaints. Sun is shining. Down in Beirits. Down in Beirits, yeah. All good. Mike, we bought you microphones, which we're going to unleash next week. Next week if we're lucky. If we're lucky, if we're lucky. So, folks, if you already enjoy our dulcet tones, they're going to get a lot better from next week. Now, one of the stories you pinged me about yesterday, Mike, was of interest, I think, to everyone in an AI-obsessed year, that is 2026.

3:37You brought to my attention the fact that a Chinese AI model is now outperforming the big ones that we all have decided are the best. And you said you take a lead on a conversation around that. Talk to us. Yeah, it's really similar. do you remember the deep seek sell-off from last year yeah yeah there was a lot of hullabaloo about deep seek and i tried and i thought it was a loan of baloney but then again i didn't exactly pit it against everything in a in a scientific way yeah well this is very similar it would say the initial the initial sound of it is very similar um well this chinese model is delivering similar performance at a fraction of the cost and everything that the u.s is doing was kind of you know unnecessary very overly expensive and you can do it for a lot cheaper and a lot more efficiently.

4:24This is kind of similar. It's definitely interesting. It makes the story a bit more international. So basically what it is, is Moonshot, a Chinese AI startup. It brought out its most recent model last week called Kimi K3. So K-I-M-I-K-3. And according to the benchmarks, most importantly, according to the benchmarks provided by Moonshot themselves, That was Kimi outperforms all available AI models except for two. Anthropics, Claude Fable 5, and OpenAI's GPT 5.6 Sol, both of which only came out in the last two months. So essentially what it's done is it's completely leapfrogged to the top of the list of all AI models out there.

5:04It can store more information than all the leading US models. So it boasts 2.8 trillion parameters, parameters, which is being described to me, at least, from what I've read as an AI model's brain cells compared to that's a pretty much double Claude Opus 4.8, which was released back in May. And the most important thing, I think, coming out of all this is a price comparison. So Moonshot is going to charge businesses$15 per million output tokens, which is just essentially how how you can measure AI usage. And then that is half of what GPT 5.6 saw, the most recent OpenAI version is charging, and less than a third of what Cloud Fable 5 is charging as well.

5:49And that's it, because these Chinese AI models, they've been restricted to what they can do in terms of what they can buy. You know, there's been those chip import restrictions, and then NVIDIA started doing an awful lot of business in Singapore all of a sudden for some reason. but the important thing here is that they've had to learn to be efficient because they haven't had the similar funding structures that have been in the u.s the trillions being spent on capex across you know five six companies that isn't there the infrastructure isn't there and the ecosystem isn't there in china so they've got to learn how to box clever and this is the second iteration so deep seek was the first kimmy is the second of companies learning to do it on a more restricted resource base, essentially.

6:33And I think it's very interesting because what China are doing as well, and I imagine this is coming from, you know, directions from the very top, is that all of this is open source. So companies, AI startups, even, you know, a very rich and self-motivated developer, they're able to self-host and then adapt the models as they see fit. And what that means like geopolitically downstream from this because obviously all the major ai models are closed source in uh claude in chat gpt and google gemini you can only really do on their playing terms essentially and what this means first of all you give a lot of developers a lot of companies the freedom to adapt things and obviously it opens up that to bad actors as well but what could come down the line from this is very important geopolitically.

7:24Because if global startups, enterprises, developers in emerging markets, if they build up their entire software base around the open source models that are coming out of China, like Moonshots, like DeepSeek, then that essentially means that China is the center of AI infrastructure for so much of the rest of the world. And so it makes it really interesting. I think there obviously is more to come to this story. I'm not going to dwell on it hugely now, but you can see the hype around it. You can see why it is making waves, just that efficiency, the cost, and then also the open source nature of it too.

8:00So I think it's a really interesting story. I think we're going to hear a lot more about it. It shows that there are more than just one game in town when it comes to AI because the US has completely dominated that space, especially within the companies we would be dealing with and the technology we deal with here. But it doesn't have to be the case for the rest of the world, and China is definitely catching up. When you need to build up your team to handle the growing chaos at work, use Indeed Sponsored Jobs. It gives your job post the boost it needs to be seen and helps reach people with the right skills, certifications, and more.

8:31Spend less time searching and more time actually interviewing candidates who check all your boxes. Listeners of this show will get a$75 sponsored job credit at Indeed.com slash podcast. That's Indeed.com slash podcast. Terms and conditions apply. Need a hiring hero? This is a job for Indeed Sponsored Jobs. I have a thought on it, which is just as telecom equipment from China was basically effectively barred for use in and out of America for reasons of national security, you have to expect that Chinese AI models will be in some way restricted. like if every american enterprise was pouring their intellectual capability into a chinese model you gotta expect the administration and the overseers of these things will say sorry that's not happening apart from the fact that you strengthen your own country's resources by using the very resources that it's building in the name of the two big ai models which is uh open ai and anthropic you you're kind of keeping it in the family so i wouldn't be surprised if we see all types of um chinese walls no pun intended being packed around this kimmy model i mean can we use kimmy at the moment can you go to kimmy.com and just start to use it or i think you can but again i would be wary i'm in the same boat as you first of all national security issues but then And again, I hope it is inspiring in the sense of this whole AI infrastructure build that I keep going on about the same things every week.

10:03But it's the biggest story on the market. And like this rush for semiconductors and all the rest. It's just based on being the fastest past the line. None of it's based on being the most efficient. And that's probably an evolution that these Chinese companies are showing is possible. you can get similar or even better results on limited resources because they're able to do this on 60 or 80 % of the fewer costs involved. So it is interesting. I think you're right in terms of at least on the US side, I think it would be a huge impact. But I think there's lessons in it too. I think the outsized expenses from companies like the hyperscalers, Facebook, Amazon, Google, they might get examined.

10:48Like, you know, if investors are looking at what can be done in China, why can't these companies with unlimited resources? Well, I suppose the unlimited resources is the reason why they're just building it out as fast as they can. Why can't they do it more efficiently? So, yeah. The plot thickens and the plot is changing so quickly. It's so like the internet in the year 2000 where businesses were rapidly changing how they were moving and selling. And their entire processes were being rewired around this new breakthrough called the internet. and it feels now every time you just stop and click pause on the AI story by the time you've told the story and unclick pause it's moved on a bit and I think we are going to have a lot more conversations about this in the airhead 100 100 but moving on then so this is a really interesting one and we were talking about this at the end of last week and I can't I can't get over it either so go on you you set it up there absolutely I mean Stripe just made the biggest move of its life and it's aimed straight at PayPal.

11:49So before I dive into the story, I'd like just to back up the bus a bit and set the scene about what happened. Stripe, alongside private equity firm Advent International, has put in a joint bid of$53 billion to take PayPal private. And it's a cash offer that values PayPal at about$60.50 per share, which is by 28 % premium to where the stock was trading just before the news broke. So Stripe, Advent and Block are contributing$17 billion in equity for the offer. And the rest is coming from roughly$50 billion in committed bank financing. And that's a serious amount of borrowed money behind this, which tells how confident those three backers are that this deal can work.

12:40Okay, so setting the scene, Mike, if you don't mind, because really PayPal is a brand we're all aware of. Some will regard it as bland. Some will regard it as non-innovative. But if you were around during the dot-com boom, you will know what PayPal actually means. It built the railroad of the internet. And what I mean by that is there's no Stripe without PayPal. There's no Stripe. That's a very good point. Makes the story so interesting. Yeah, exactly. Because just like in the real world, before there were railroads, commerce was local. Goods were moving by horse and cart or canal, or at least slowly and with great expense.

13:22And entire regions were economically isolated because moving products over long distances just wasn't practical. And then railroads came along and suddenly cities were connected and towns were connected and markets expanded and businesses grew into empires and costs fell, etc., etc., etc. So for everyone today, paying online is pretty much trivial. Like we don't think about it. You go to Amazon, you pay for a thing, you go to eBay if you use such a username, you pay for a thing. But we're paying for things all day, every day online. But it's quite easy to forget that in the late 1990s, that's just not how the Internet worked.

14:02I mean, buying something from a stranger or a strange company unheard of online meant typing your credit card details into a technology that you just weren't familiar with, into a website that you really didn't quite understand. We're all looking at web domains, HTTPS, to see if the S was there for a secure socket layer. People are feeling quite, I suppose, nerves about it. And they were hoping it wasn't fraudulent and praying their details wouldn't be stolen. And banks, traditional, were absolutely built for the physical world as opposed to marketplace where millions of strangers wanted to transact instantly across the borders.

14:42And then PayPal rose out of nowhere, if you like, and it emerged so that every merchant could expect to take credit card details. And it built a brand of trust and it became the intermediary that we all kind of now feel comfortable with. And but like suddenly a teenager when PayPal was born could sell things on eBay because PayPal was part of eBay. I'll come on to that in a minute. like a small craftsman in Ireland could accept payment from a customer in California in fact an aspiring guitarist could buy a custom Les Paul enter Les Paul all these years later for podcast listeners Emmett is pretending to play the guitar here in front no I'm not pretending I've always been pretending uh that there went through the internet 30 years ago um but uh an An aspiring guitarist in Ireland could buy a custom Les Paul with his entire savings from a summer's job from a nice collector in America.

15:45Thank you, PayPal. And anyone with an internet connection could participate in this global economy. So, okay. So like the railroads, PayPal's greatest achievement was making something really complicated just feel easy. and eBay's explosive growth, and it did have explosive growth in the 90s and early 2000s, would have looked very different without PayPal. So as I mentioned, PayPal spun off. PayPal was born from eBay and then spun out of eBay as an independent company in July 2015, and it became its own business. But what I would like to say before we talk about the business, The one thing that PayPal most represents is the people who graduated from PayPal University.

16:36They have the moniker PayPal Mafia, which isn't, I suppose, the kindest of terms. But the people who came out of that company are the most influential, are amongst the most influential business people today. Elon Musk came from PayPal, Peter Thiel, Reid Hoffman, Max LeVican, David Sachs, and a whole pile of people who went on to either build or fund Tesla, SpaceX, LinkedIn, Palantir, YouTube, Yelp, Affirm, like so many iconic American icons had a dotted line back to PayPal. We're not just talking about another payments company. We're talking about a payments processor that had a pedigree that was par excellence, nothing like it.

17:25And few organizations have produced such an extraordinary concentration of entrepreneurial talent. Maybe HP back in the day. I can't even think of one that did anything like it. So coming back to the railway analogy, great infrastructure companies, they never really received the credit they deserve because their success is measured by being invisible. And like few people ever admire, the railway tracks on a train, it's just, they're there. You get on the train and it moves in the right direction and they expect to arrive. Well, PayPal was just that. Its infrastructure disappeared into the background as the internet economy raced across it.

18:08So this acquisition really is quite something. And the structure of this acquisition should have come to pass. is actually quite, it's equally interesting. So it's not just Stripe swallowing up PayPal and breaking it into different parts. So under the proposal that's on the table at the moment, Stripe and Advent would jointly own PayPal with each holding an equal stake. So rather than breaking up the company, it's going into a 50-50 partnership split with a private equity shop to run it. And PayPal's board is not rolling over though. They are discussing the bid, but as you might expect, they're saying 60 bucks, 50 a share is not enough.

18:53I actually texted a pal of mine working in PayPal this morning and his immediate reaction was, yeah, 60 bucks, 50 isn't enough. So that is what the halls are saying in PayPal. And that is the tension at the moment. So Stripe and Advan think they're offering a fair premium, which I guess when it's up 28 % the day after, you can say, yes, they unlocked some value. But PayPal's bored things to companies worth way more than that, even though they haven't quite proven it through execution. And from what it's been through is genuinely brutal. Like it's been a really, really rough ride. Like five years ago, PayPal was a Wall Street darling.

19:34And indeed, 20 years ago, it was a Wall Street darling as an embedded engine for eBay. And the company's market value pushed as high as 360 billion in 2021. But since then, the growth has slowed. Competition has intensified from its very acquirer stripe and friends. And multiple attempts in recent years to jumpstart the business have pretty much, well, I wouldn't say failed, but they've borne very little fruit. Like this year, the stock fell as low as 36 billion in market cap. So that's 90 % drawdown from, it's nuts. It's 90 % down from where it was just a couple of years ago. But do you know yourself, even anecdotally, like the need for a product like PayPal seems so much less important in day-to-day life.

20:22I think the financial security stuff like Google Pay and Apple Pay, everything already being kind of pretty much auto-filled in your phone. It all feels like the infrastructure around us has almost surpassed the company. And they haven't capitalized on the momentum they had post-covid when you stay in there. And obviously, that$360 billion figure comes down to a stretched valuation as much as anything else. But there really was momentum behind the business. And obviously everyone went online to do basically all their interactions all of a sudden in the space of a year. It's that inflection point.

20:56But some companies felt that rise and built on it. And it seems like PayPal fell off the cliff. You compare PayPal and Shopify. And obviously Shopify was a much smaller company at the time. But they have built on that momentum that came from COVID, where PayPal have done the opposite. And it's just a really interesting, it's a fork in the road there between the two businesses of what could be done, I guess. And maybe not letting technology surpass them instead of being the one that's pioneering stuff. Do you know, though, I mean, this is an anecdote. And as I often say on the podcast, anecdotes don't make data.

21:34But have you found online when you go to buy something and there is a native build, there's somewhere where you can enter your credit card or there's a PayPal button. and PayPal is reassuring it always works. It never lets you down. It's kind of occasionally you put your details in and it sends something to your phone and your bank has to authorize it and there's a little bit of palaver. But what PayPal always just works, like it is really reliable, albeit the same, always the same like a train track, I guess. Have you found that? Have you found it's the one you can always rely on? I would automatically, like, you know, I feel like Google Pay, for me, Google Pay, Apple Pay, for the vast majority of people listening, is always the easiest option these days.

22:19Or even just Blackbash. Maybe since I bought that Les Paul, I'm like, geez, I like that now. That's great. Got me a Les Paul. But anyway, 10 years ago, I think you would have laughed if someone told you that PayPal would end up as an unwilling takeover target for a company that didn't exist as a household name back then, 10 years ago. but the why behind paypal's collapses the interesting part for me anyway it's not that paypal got unlucky it's that it's that still while the world was moving like crazy and analysts say paypal was slow to explore opportunities in digital banking commerce or to offer some kind of fresh options for more people were using their phones to pay as you rightfully said like google pay yeah but like even beyond that the paypal should have but the paper should have been revolution people millions of people had paypal wallets and they did nothing but just pay online it would you build that infrastructure around it and you're so right they got stuck uh stuck standing still while everything else around them it's just just passed in the rear view yeah if you're an apple user everyone uses apple pay my local lovely italian when i go to order online i'm using apple page you know for apple for italian food Google have their equivalent Samsung has its equivalent and then all of these upstarts including Stripe and Affirm they relentlessly rolled out new ways for consumers and businesses to pay because they understood the power of owning a wallet and one analyst I was reading putting it very put it very well he said PayPal chose to keep being the world's biggest checkout button instead of trying to become anything more ambitious and it was a very comfortable choice right up until they realized well comfort is not always the best option that's so true as well they're making billions just being a little button and they were like why would we bother having to go get a banking charter or any of this like that's so much extra work it's a higher new department but it is it's the cost of it's the cost of standing stuff because they went off and became a bank and exactly you saw these kind of bloodthirsty uh challengers saying yeah we'll do it we're going to go get that stuff so paypal got a new ceo called enrique lords uh an ex hp guy who i mentioned earlier and he took over the top job in march um and he's the one kind of left driving the bus in the face of this option he's he's been talking about use using ai to strip out cost and and duplication of effort and processes and all that kind of stuff uh and he said that the company could save around one and a half billion over the next few years but cost savings are not it's not innovation exactly that's kind of company needs to innovate entirely it's so not innovation it might be cost controlled innovation but it's not product innovation um and turnaround stories that legacy tech companies are really hard to pull off because just as we're all familiar with the concept of debt financial debt as a company grows it starts to build process debt technology debt the way things are done each has there's a there's many categories of debt debt mountains and for anyone working in a corporate life right now they know they are in a mire of a certain type of debt very often a process debt it's like that's just the way we do it and the change it would be hell on earth so turnarounds are hard to pull off and and you know we've kind of heard it all before from from paypal and even city flagged uh just that skepticism recently noting the previous turnaround attempts at paypal had just failed to reverse that slowdown that we've seen in that 90 drop in shares but meanwhile stripe couldn't be in a more different position it's still privately held it's growing it is valued at an absolute eye-watering 159 billion dollars uh back in february where there was a tender offer um which is 70 up from the year before so this is a company at the top of its game it's lean it's trying to buy a company that's fallen from grace we all we cannot say they've gone bargain hunting i don't think they have been looking opportunistic acquisition all over it yet for sure they might just i don't really we we won't really know the business case because a private company but they might go just take it out and kill it i i don't think so it's not what they're saying and it'd be an expensive price to pay to do that but if it you just don't know the strategy and that kind of contrast between stripe and paypal tells you something about how quirky fortunes like um how rather how quickly fortunes can flip in technology now and before i shut up altogether mike there's also a crypto angle did Did you read about this?

27:06No, go on. There's an interesting crypto angle that's worth just mentioning. I wouldn't put it stenture to the story because it could matter. And it could matter the most in the long term. So Stripe bought Stablecoin Platform Bridge for 1.1 billion. And PayPal already runs its own Stablecoin PYUSD alongside a large existing base of crypto curious consumers. And if the deal goes through, you'd be combining some serious stablecoin infrastructure with real consumer and merchant scale on both sides of the transaction. So I was reading another paper last night for an industry exec called it potentially one of the most consequential developments in crypto adoption to come out of payments.

27:52Even though crypto isn't the headline reason for the deal, nor should it be, because the world is in various stages of crypto skepticism. and i think that's right it isn't a crypto story but it might end up being something of crypto value and none of this and by the way it's not a done deal my friend far from it in paypal far from it and i mean if the board is saying nah it'd be unlikely that they'll come out and say we've changed our mind so they've kind of outwardly say said no um but it's worth being clear-eyed about the hurdles a combination of this scale like bringing together stripe and PayPal with a huge chunk of merchant checkout infrastructure with hundreds of millions of consumer accounts is going to draw massive antitrust scrutiny.

28:42I mean, regulators don't go, keep going, keep going. They are going to stop and properly examine this, especially in payments where consumer protection and financial stability concerns are very real and they run deep. And there's still the basic question of the price. I mean, PayPal's board has already signaled the current offer just won't cut it. So either Stripe and Advent come back with more money or drags out or it falls apart entirely. And then just the last thing I'll say on it, if you zoom out, what I found most useful about this story isn't really about PayPal or Stripe individually. It's more what the payment sector is going through.

29:23It's going through some massive consolidation. Global Payments has been absorbing world pay in this kind of complex three-way deal. Nuvi has picked up Payoneer. MasterCard is exploring selling down its UK payments subsidiary Vocalink. So the industry is changing and consolidating really fast. And the reason is that the scale of owning a wallet is the game that they're playing more than ever because they're all racing. All the big ones are racing to build out these cross-border payments, B2B infrastructure. And indeed, if the stablecoin thing emerges, they also have that additional benefit. So for long-term investors, the lesson from PayPal's collapse is that market leadership is never permanent.

30:09We've seen it over and over and over. And you and I in previous podcasts have discussed the top 10 companies from 20 years ago versus the top 10 from now are entirely different. And it shows that being the biggest, the best and the strongest today by no means assures you of a strong future. And PayPal has had 13 years as an independent public company, hundreds of millions of loyal users. And it's still managed to get outpaced by companies that are moving more faster and thinking bigger and being more tactical and a bit more slithery. So here we are. Two lads from Limerick, Ireland are buying one of the railroads of the Internet.

30:47and for one I'm very proud of them. Yeah, it is. It's an interesting story and it's all right as well. Like just the cost of sitting on your hands, it really can damage your business and shows how fallible even these companies we put up on these pedestals are. Like the fact that PayPal was a$360 billion company five years ago and now it's looking to get bought for less than 20 % of that is nuts. Okay, I'm going to run through really quickly um the spacex spacex lockup give us a five minute on the spike exactly it's not a huge story but i think it explains a lot of volatility in the stock so obviously it's the largest ipo in history it is worth checking in on and keeping an eye on it um so at the time recording it's down about 25 lower than its ipo price and more than 35 from the peak which is the equivalent of a trillion dollars in market cap in the space of about a month you've had expensive months in your time and i doubt they've been that costly um but why is that like there's there's i suppose one outstanding issue that investors have zoned in on so much so that stock went down when it was officially added to the nasdaq 100 despite all the mandatory buying from the index funds which is kind of a bizarre thing to think about like because then you have so much of this mandatory buying but then i suppose because it was anticipated it's already priced in which you know everything is priced in depending on who you listen to um but the big thing and you mentioned is lock-up periods so when space sucks when spacex went public we mentioned that it was coming to the public markets with a very small free float aka the amount of shares that are available to trade so typically investors would want to have a stock with like you know at least maybe 40 percent of available shares in the free float and i think spacex only allocated five percent to the IPO oh my good lord i actually thought it was more than that i thought i had 12 percent in mind five percent yeah the rest come on elon this is under the rest is it's all basically locked up in these varying levels of lock-up period yeah so lock a lock a period just for an explainer is just to stop early investors and employees from selling their shares right the because you know if you have more sellers than buyers the stock goes down that's essentially It's not a good look where everyone inside has decided, right, we're done.

33:08Right the day it goes public, you're there ringing the bell and the shares are plummeting. So to avoid that, they have these lockout periods, which just stops mostly employees, early investors from selling early. So the details are about 60 % of shares, which include Elon Musk's, which is about 40 % of that vast majority. They're subject to a one year lockout period. And then the rest are subject to 180 dates, which would come on December 9th. But there are exceptions to this. and the first one is coming very soon. So those second bunch, the 40%, 35%, 40 % of shares on the 180-day lockups, they can sell up to 20 % of their stock about 20 % of their stock two days after Q2 results come out on August 4th.

33:55So on August 6th, that's the date circling the calendars. That means that's about 7 % of SpaceX's total share count comes online again. That's more than the IPO. That's a huge selling event. And of course, these are going to be motivated sellers as well because early employees, you know, early investors, these guys are sitting on huge gains. That trillion dollars I mentioned in the month, like they've watched that go down like they're watching, you know, grain sand fall in an hourglass. It's nuts because like they've been in so early. Their gains are astronomical. We could be looking at people with, you know, eight, nine figure gains on these stocks that they want to get out.

34:35They want to cash in. And not only that, but actually they can sell these early investors in the 180-day lockups. They can sell another 10 % of stock, which would be about 3.5 % of the total share count, which is three quarters of the size of the IPO. It's 5%, 3.5%, 5%, whatever the maths. They can sell that at the same time if the stock is at least 30 % greater than the offering price for five of the 10 consecutive trading days ending on the earnings release date. So basically for the two weeks before August 4th of open trading days, if the stock is at 175 bucks a share or above, then another 10 % will be opened up.

35:19So it could potentially be an absolutely huge selling event. Now, as it stands, that doesn't look very likely. I think the closing price yesterday was about 119 so it has to do an awful lot of work to get up to 175 for 5 in the next 10 trading days but again it's an incredibly volatile stock who knows what could happen I think just what's important is that there's just going to be a huge amount of SpaceX shares up for grad soon potentially more than double the IPO and potentially more than triple the IPO Although that's probably a long shot at this stage, especially considering investors know that a massive selling event is coming up.

36:00So it just all adds to this minefield. I suppose I feel like I gave plenty of warning in the pre-IPO talks about SpaceX and just how Voltaire could be. You told them, Mike, don't write in. We told you. But so the name of the game is sitting on your hands for a while. Is that right, Mike? Pretty much like as in, you know, So these are issues that have nothing to do with the business at all, really. You know, it's financial machinations around it. But it's sure to lead to some incredible volatility. And the thing is, as well, the market knows this. So anything the market knows in advance is kind of, you have to really consider it priced in to some extent.