Nvidia's Record $150B Buyback, Meta Poaches MongoDB's CEO

Zaid Admani (0:00)

Public.com presents The Rundown, your daily market update in 10 minutes. My name is Zaid Admani, and today is Monday, September 28th. In today's episode, we'll tell you about Nvidia's plan to stop AI agents from going rogue, and why they just announced the biggest stock buyback in history. We'll also tell you about the new AI division that Meta just launched, and who they poached to run it. Then stick around to the end of the show to find out what SpaceX's massive Starship rocket just did for the first time ever. We got a great show for you today.

Let's go.

Stocks are coming off a winning week despite all the chaos. Last week, the S&P 500 gained 1.2%, while the NASDAQ added more than 2%. So stocks keep moving higher despite elevated oil prices and the bond market getting smoked. The 10-year treasury yield finished Friday at 5.18%, which is its highest close since 2007, while the 30-year finished around 5.5%. Now, what's interesting is that historically, surging yields haven't always been bad for stocks. It really depends on why yields are going up. If you look back to 1994, a surprise Fed hiking cycle sent yields flying and the S&P 500 fell as much as 8%. And then in 2022, the Fed started aggressively hiking and the S&P fell nearly 20%. But if you look at 2016, both stocks and yields went up together because the economy was finally getting healthier. Now in 2016, yields didn't go all the way up to 5%. So we'll have to see how the market responds this time. No, so far strong economic growth and corporate profits have been enough to offset the pains from higher rates. In fact, the S&P 500 and NASDAQ closed within 1% of record highs last week. The wild card here is going to be oil prices. There was some optimism last week about a potential deal with Iran that would have opened up the Strait of Hormuz, but over the weekend, President Trump rejected Iran's latest proposal. So oil prices are ripping this morning. Brent crude is up around 4% to around $108 a barrel at the time of this recording. And as I record this in the pre-market stock, futures of the NASDAQ and S&P are also in the red. Now as you guys know, higher oil prices makes everything more expensive, which keeps the pressure on inflation, which strengthens the case for more rate hikes by the Fed. In fact, traders are already pricing in a 70% chance of a rate hike at the October Fed meeting. Now looking ahead to this week, we are getting some data that could impact the Fed's decision. The PCE inflation report comes out on Wednesday. The PCE inflation report is the Fed's preferred inflation gauge, I like it more than the CPI. So this report matters, although this report covers the month of August, so it's a little bit dated at this point. But on Friday, we get the September jobs report, which will tell us how the labor market is holding up. If the labor market continues to be strong like it has, I think the Fed will keep hiking rates. So we'll continue to stay on top of that, along with everything else happening in the market. So definitely get subscribed to the podcast if you haven't already, especially with everything going on right now, and tune in every day to stay in the loop.

Let's run through some headlines. And we're talking Nvidia, because they just made two pretty big announcements this morning. Nvidia just launched something called the Open Agent Safety Platform, which is designed to stop autonomous AI agents from going rogue. You know, AI safety has become a major talking point these days, especially after Anthropic CEO Dario Amadei, and other AI CEOs like Sam Altman and Elon Musk called for a industry-wide slowdown in AI development. Not to mention there's been a few AI researchers that have even said that there's a 10% chance that humans would get wiped out by AI. A lot of these researchers and executives are going to the hugging face incident earlier this year. A few months ago, OpenAI agents escaped containment and got on the open internet and hacked the AI company hugging face. That freaked out a lot of people that AI agents could go rogue. Well, now Nvidia has come out and said that their new system would have stopped that from happening. Basically, Nvidia's new system is a software that sets rules for what AI agents are allowed to access. And if an AI agent starts acting suspiciously, it can quarantine it within milliseconds. Jensen compared the whole thing to a browser for AI agents. Now, speaking of Jensen, he's pushed back hard on this whole AI doomerism narrative. Obviously, Nvidia has a very strong financial incentive to keep AI development going. Slowing down AI is probably not great for a company selling everybody AI chips. So yeah, Nvidia is leading the path when it comes to AI safety. By the way, if you wanna hear more about the AI safety debate, go check out my interview with tech journalist, Kevin Ruse. We posted that interview yesterday. Kevin provides a perspective that is much different than mine. So definitely check that out if you wanna learn more. Now, the other big Nvidia related news this morning was their buyback announcement. Nvidia is adding a record $150 billion to their stock buyback, bringing the total to $235 billion. That is the largest buyback authorization in US history, being the $110 billion that Apple announced back in 2024 Now, just because Nvidia announced this buyback doesn't mean that Nvidia is buying back these shares today. The board is just giving the company permission to buy that much stock over time. And a quick refresher here, a buyback basically means that Nvidia will use their cash to purchase their own shares, which reduces the number of shares outstanding, making each existing share a larger ownership of the company. Essentially, a buyback is a way for the company to return money to shareholders. And Nvidia definitely has the cash to do it. They reported nearly $60 billion in net income in each of the last two quarters, and management expects revenues to keep growing at least 70% next fiscal year. Nvidia stock is up about 2% this morning at the time of this recording, and within 2% of record highs.