Stocks Rally on Potential Iran Peace Deal, Fox Buys Roku for $22 Billion

**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, June 15th. In today's episode, we'll break down how the markets are reacting to the interim peace deal between the US and Iran. We'll also explain why the US government forced Anthropic to disable their most powerful AI models just days after launch, and why the market doesn't like Fox buying Roku. Then stick around to the end of the show to find out what record the New York Knicks just shattered. We got a great show for you today.
Let's go.
Markets are coming off a volatile but winning week. After some up and down days, stocks squeezed out a gain for the week with the S&P 500 going up 0.6%, while the NASDAQ was up 0.7%.
The Iran war was a key factor driving the market volatility last week. Stocks fell early last week after the US and Iran exchanged attacks, but then rallied near the end of the week after rumors of a peace deal. And it turns out those rumors were actually true this time because over the weekend, the two sides reached a preliminary deal to extend the ceasefire by 60 days and reopen the Strait of Hormuz. This preliminary deal would also lift the US blockade on Iranian ports. This deal will be formally signed this Friday in Switzerland, and the Strait of Hormuz should be open after that. Remember, the Strait of Hormuz has been closed since early March, blocking off 20% of the world's oil supply. Oil prices are falling this morning following the reports. Brent crude is down 5% to below $83 a barrel. That's way down from the roughly $125 a barrel we saw back in April. Now, I do want to mention this is still an interim deal, and we don't have all the details yet. I'm seeing reports that Iran is only re-opening Hormuz toll-free for 60 days, and then after that, they're going to start charging fees for ships to safely pass through. There's still a lot of unknowns here, but for now, the markets are celebrating. We could be setting up for a strong week ahead, especially with the Fed meeting coming up this week. We'll do a full preview of the Fed meeting later this week, but the timing of this Iran deal and oil prices starting to fall could get the Fed back on track to potentially cut interest rates soon. So we'll talk about that later in the week. Now, a quick programming note, we do have a short week coming up for the stock market and for the show. The stock market will actually be closed on Friday for Juneteenth, so we won't have a show that day. And we're also taking Thursday off, which fun fact is the first time in the show's two plus year history that we won't be doing a show the day the stock market is open. But I gotta say the timing of this couldn't be better because I'm gonna be in California for a family vacation and producer Mike is gonna be at the Knicks Championship Parade on Thursday morning. So I gotta imagine productivity was gonna be pretty low on Thursday in the New York area anyways. But yeah, only three shows for us this week and we'll be back to regularly scheduled programming next week. Let's run through some headlines. Starting with Anthropic. Anthropic disabled access to their top AI models on Friday following a directive from the US government. On Friday night, Anthropic announced that they were breaking down Mythos 5 and the Fable 5 model because of the US government issuing an export control directive, blocking foreign governments, companies and individuals from using those models. And the thing is, because the rule also applied to foreign nationals inside the US, including some foreign born Anthropic employees, Anthropic decided the only way to comply with the directive was to shut off access for everyone. Now the government's rationale for this directive was national security. The US government says the model is so good that they are worried it could be used by bad actors to launch cyber attacks. Now, Anthropic said that Fable 5 has strong guard rails to prevent this, but apparently those guard rails weren't strong enough and there was a company out there that was able to bypass it. And that's what makes this story even crazier because apparently that company was Amazon. They snitched on Anthropic. According to the Wall Street Journal, Amazon CEO Andy Jassy personally called administrative officials, including Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent, after Amazon's own researchers got Fable 5 to provide them with information that could be used in a cyber attack. Keep in mind, Amazon is one of Anthropic's biggest investors. So the fact that they are doing this is pretty bizarre to me. And I feel like there's probably more to the story here. Now, some cybersecurity experts are saying the US government overreacted here. Anthropic is also saying the same thing, but I think Anthropic deserves some blame here because their messaging around their AI technology has been terrible. It's all been doom and gloom. They're constantly talking about how dangerous their AI models are and how it's gonna replace everyone's job. So I think they need to kind of tone that down if they don't want to be constantly regulated by the US government. Anthropic is now sending their executives and technical staff to Washington, DC to try to get the restrictions lifted. I hope they do because Table 5 was a fantastic model in the few days that I used it. So we'll see what happens, but I mean, Anthropic is constantly finding themselves getting in trouble with the US government. And the timing is also brutal because remember, just filed for an IPO last week. Let's shift gears and do a quick recap of the SpaceX IPO from Friday. Shares of SpaceX started trading on Friday at $135, closing the day at $161 for a 19% first day pop. And honestly, that's like the Goldilocks range for an IPO. You want to have a nice pop to build on the hype, but you don't want it to pop too much. Otherwise, it feels like the company left money on the table. And speaking of the money, we got some fresh news this morning. SpaceX initially raised $75 billion in their IPO offering, but the demand was so strong that the underwriters, which are the banks running the IPO, exercised something called a green shoe. A green shoe essentially lets the banks sell a batch of extra shares beyond what was originally planned, usually up to 15% more. But they only pull the trigger on selling those shares when demand is hot and the stock is climbing. And clearly, that was the case with SpaceX because the bank sold an additional 83 million shares, pushing the total amount raised from $75 billion up to $85.7 billion. So the biggest IPO ever got even bigger. And by the way, I was curious to see what was gonna happen as Tesla stock because many people thought that Tesla stock would suffer after SpaceX hit the public markets because the Elon fanboys would sell their Tesla shares to buy into SpaceX, but that wasn't the case. Tesla stock was up around 3% on Friday and it's up another 1% today.