00:00 Speaker A
Now time for some of today’s trending tickers. We’re watching Nvidia, Tesla, and Warner Brothers. Joining me now, we’ve got my Morning Brief co-host Madison Mills. First up here, we got to talk a little Nvidia on the day. Here’s the scene setter. Nvidia CEO Jensen Wong’s compensation soared to $50 million in fiscal 2025. That includes a base salary of $1.5 million. And under his tenure, Nvidia has rejoined the $3 trillion market cap club. The stock getting a boost of late on trade optimism here. You’re seeing shares rising by about 2.8%. And, of course, this coming as they’re netting even more deals. CEO Jensen Wong traveling internationally to get some of those deals done, too.
00:53 Speaker B
Yeah, two big catalysts for the stock this week. Obviously, the broader market optimism is going to impact a name like this so heavily weighted in the indices. But the biggest news for Nvidia this week is this Saudi Arabia potential deal coming. We do have reporting coming in here that the United States is expected to buoy Saudi Arabia’s ability to get those high-level AI chips from the likes of both AMD and Nvidia. Important to note, we don’t have those details and those deals fully officially announced yet, but that is the reporting and Wall Street’s certainly running with it. I had a conversation with Dan Ives over at Wedbush about this stock, and he says that it is the biggest winner, in his view, coming out of the US China trade truce. He thinks that Nvidia is still the stock that is fueling the AI revolution, and he sees the stock only continuing to move upward. Those shares up nearly 3% today.
02:08 Speaker A
Yeah, from the newsroom of Nvidia, they’ve mentioned Humane, the new full AI value chain subsidiary of Saudi Arabia’s public investment fund, the PIF, announcing that landmark strategic partnership with Nvidia here. And it’s really a question of what that phased-out of deployment will look like. As of right now, could be potentially 18,000 Nvidia GB 300 Grace Blackwell AI supercomputers with that Nvidia Infiniband networking. Of course, casual terms that we talk about every Friday and Saturday when you’re just kicking it with friends. But anyway, that is going to be part of the powering of factories of tomorrow, as Nvidia is calling it within this investment for Saudi Arabia. Also, let’s talk about Tesla here. Tesla’s board has reportedly formed a special committee to explore ways to compensate CEO Elon Musk after his 2018 pay package was voided by a judge over possible conflicts of interest with the company’s board. That report according to the Financial Times. Tesla did appeal that decision to the Delaware Supreme Court, and that process is still underway. Shares of Tesla are up by about 1.5% right now.
03:53 Speaker B
Yeah, and this new compensation package would potentially be performance-based, according to reports here. As you noted here, this comes after a Delaware court voided Musk’s $56 billion stock award back in 2018, citing lack of board independence here. That was back again in 2018. Uh, the $304 million stock option, $304 million stock options valued at $56 billion are now worth about $98 billion from that 2018 award. Musk then meeting aggressive growth targets to earn those options by 2023. And, of course, now the question is what this pay is going to look like going forward, which is of critical note given the underperformance of Tesla stock year-to-date here. I believe the stock is down about 30% since its previous highs back in December. Um, and I should also mention that there was some reporting that Elon Musk was potentially being considered a CEO, a CEO replacement for Elon Musk was being considered, uh, and then Tesla denied that reporting.
05:12 Speaker A
Absolutely. And then finally here, we got to talk about this one because this is going to get people to drop their remotes or even drop their cell phones that they might be watching on. Warner Brothers Discovery is changing the name of its streaming service back to HBO Max from just Max. Now, the entire arc of this has been quite crazy to say the least here as we think about the past few years because it’s not the first time that it’s had this name before. It was originally HBO Go, then later HBO Now in 2015ish, and then HBO Max in 2020 as many of us are old enough to remember here. 2023, rebranded to Max, 2025, back to HBO Max. This has been wild to track over the past few years now.
06:13 Speaker B
I mean, what is there to say? I happen to be talking about this last night with Dan, my fiance, and we were like, “I can’t believe that it’s it’s Max. Like, why would you let go of HBO, which is what so many of us know and love as the go-to for your prestige TV? Why would you do that?” So, they were bugging our apartment in the upper west side and clearly listening to us. But I also think the back and forth. It’s got to make you have questions about the executive presence in the room when you’re going through this many changes.
06:51 Speaker A
Indeed. And taking a look at shares here today, they are moving lower by about 1 and 1/4%. I mean, as we’ve continued to watch some of the direct-to-consumer entertainment efforts, whether that be making sure that you’re striking the tone correctly and naming a platform versus the content that you have on that platform. It’s been, uh, it’s been Netflix that’s really been the kind of standard-bearer for many of these others to kind of model their services around. Um, and that comes back to naming, I guess, to some certain extent. It’s got to be something that has staying power.
07:57 Speaker B
Did you see CNN Plus is coming back, too?
08:01 Speaker A
I did.
08:02 Speaker B
That lasted a couple weeks, but they bring it back years later, so what’s old is new again, I guess, on streaming.
08:09 Speaker A
Exactly. Uh, the reboots, they they they run abound. Thanks so much, Maddie. Appreciate it. You can scan the QR code below to track the best and worst performing stocks of the session with Yahoo Finance’s trending tickers page.
