Projects
![]()
No projects found
Investors
New
DAO Treasuries
DATs
Lend / Borrow APRs
Chains
Categories
Spaces
TONX CHAIRMAN INTERVIEW
Recorded: Sept. 2, 2025 Duration: 2:13:24Space Recording
Full Transcription
Thank you. Thank you. what is up Tesla crew how is everyone doing happy Tuesday feels like a Monday but happy Tuesday
hope everyone enjoyed the long Labor Day weekend with family friends whatever you were doing
maybe uh the last hoorah of the summer.
Hope everyone enjoyed it.
And welcome back in.
We've got another week going here of Spaces over on the Wolf Financial crew.
Obviously, this is Ryan or Maximiliano behind the account.
Gab is on a plane somewhere over some flyover states right now.
I don't know where he's at.
Honestly, don't know where all he's going. I know he's got a ton of travel going on right now, but we got to keep
talking Tesla. There's just too much stuff going on to ever skip a week here. And we got such a
great crew that always joins us up here. So big shout out to all of you. See a lot of people
coming in, the listeners as well. We'll get some of our through up here on stage and we'll talk everything,
Tesla, SpaceX, all the above that has anything to do with Tesla. Honestly, I think it's all
encompassing. A couple of notes that have been going on. I know that there's some autonomous
driving expansion stuff going on. There's some different little product teases, some app stuff getting
released here and there. I was looking through some of the different headlines. Are we going to
get a new model soon? What's going on in the Tesla world? That's what I'm excited to talk about and
see what's going on here. So I know there's been a lot of China talk as well with the different EVs
and Tesla stuff going over there, that new long what is it the
YY model over there so pretty interesting everything going on here
Landon my friend Landon always love having you on these spaces love your
energy your your love for Tesla it bleeds through on these spaces it's
it's contagious so I would love for you to kind of kick us off here a little bit
today and tell me what's on what's your mind, what's going on in your world.
Hey, thanks so much.
It's just great to be here because this is our Tesla community.
And that's what I love so much.
You know, I've been in the car business for so long.
It used to feel like I had gasoline in my veins.
I don't know what it is now.
It's electricity. And that's even more exciting to be around these people on a regular basis.
So part of what I've got for you today is, let's say, a summer recap. We've got the kids back in school, right? We've got the temperatures coming down around the country. And here we are talking Tesla.
And so what have we seen this summer?
Well, one of the most exciting things I've seen this summer is our community.
I've been so lucky to be able to travel and see the people in Michigan or Tennessee or Florida or Utah or Colorado or SF or LA,
there's people that love the Tesla products, love the Tesla company, and they're just happy to show it.
And what does that mean to me?
I mean, I've seen some groups before in the car business, right?
People love Jeeps, don't they?
You know, people love Mustangs and things like that.
Throughout time, Americans have been just absolutely enraptured by the automobile.
And I'm happy to carry that forward and tell the world what Tesla's doing.
doing because part of it is the excitement about about cars themselves you just mentioned we've had
Because part of it is the excitement about cars themselves.
two big releases of different model y variants just in the last weeks you're right we've got
model y long range on sale now in china it looks like people are going nuts for it don't you love
to see all those delivery photos of happy families taking their new Teslas and they've got stuffed animals
and balloons and Tesla's excited and the customers are excited and I'm excited. We got Model Y
performance. You know, Wolf, I've got a pretty OG Model Y performance myself. It's VIN number 11,000
and that car has been an absolute workhorse for me. I mean, not only does it go
zero to 60 in three and a half seconds, but it looks good doing it. And you could actually put
Home Depot supplies in the back. That's why the Model Y is the best selling vehicle in the world
is it's so versatile. It works so well for people's families. But, you know, back to those
festivals, we've got great people
in the community that put those on. People like John at Tesla Silicon Valley and Diana at Denver
Tesla Club and many, many more around the country and around the world. People are supporting Tesla
not because they have to or not because it's their job because it's one of the shiny spots in an
otherwise dull day sometimes we ever let the world get you down well don't let automobile accidents
get you down in your family put people in teslas because they're also the safest cars in the world
and speaking of the future we've got from from Tesla a teaser on the master plan part four.
And if you want to just a quick recap, I think the most tangible thing in the master plan series has been Elon telling us how Tesla will grow as a company.
And in the past, he's told us, hey, we're going to build this is 20 plus years ago.
He says, we're going to build a Roadster, a years ago, he says, we're going to build a Roadster,
a super exclusive supercar, and we're going to take the money that the Tesla buyers give us for that car, and we're going to use it to invest in a luxury sedan and a luxury SUV, and we're going
to take that money, and we're going to make a world car. We're going to build a car for about
$35,000 that we're going to sell all over the world.
And that's what they've done with Model 3.
And they took Model 3 and they used 84% of the same components to build a seemingly very different car, the Model Y in 2020.
And now we're moving on to where we've got versions of the Model Y long.
And now we're moving on to where we've got versions of the Model Y Long, and I'm expecting
any time, maybe next month, Wolf, while China's got their Model Y Long to deliver, and Giga
Berlin has got the Model Y performance looking good with the new front bumper, the rear bumper,
that amazing new interior with the adjustable ball.
I want that seat, man.
I'm telling you, people would love to buy that seat and put it in any Tesla.
But they've got those cars, and I think that means Austin is next.
I'd love to see a subcompact based on a Model Y, and I think it's coming.
So again, Wolf, thanks for letting me start off just with a little excitement.
But whether it's the cars or the company, and take a look up there at the master
plan part negative five from Arthur C. Clark. Watch that video and tell me if that doesn't seem
like Elon today making the future. The only way to control the future, Elon says, is to build it.
And that's why I'm excited. Thanks very much for letting me up here
with these wonderful people. You always kick us off so well on these spaces, Landon. Appreciate
you being here. You mentioned something that I want to hit on before I go over to Kristen and
Ryan up here with us hanging out as well. You mentioned the Mustang group that we used to have or the Jeep owners, which I think is a
little bit more recent. It is interesting that Tesla has kind of become that new, what is it?
Like people want to group together. People want to come together and do these different events.
And it seems like, you know, you had the kind of the hot rod phase, I guess, back in the day,
I feel like the Jeep, and you can almost even throw like Tacoma in there, kind of the off-road kind of crew. And it seems like we
have this over the last few years, and it seems like it's growing to me. I mean, from everything
I see, and maybe I get exposed to a lot of Tesla stuff, you know, through you great people here
and just on my timeline, but it does seem like there's this, I hate the term cult. I don't want
to, I don't even want to use that term, but Landon, it seems like there's this, I hate the term cult. I don't even want to use that term. But Landon, it seems like there's this community that it's now, you've gone from the hot rods,
you've gone from the off-roading, and it seems like the EV, the Tesla, the futuristic, like,
hey, we're changing the world here.
It seems like that's the new community and it's just ever growing and ever strong.
You know, you're right.
And what I've found that is unique about the Tesla fan base, the Tesla community, the serious
Tesla investors that look into this stock every day.
What's different about this group for me?
Well, when I was with the Corvette Club and I visited them and took some pictures, they're
all, you know, 75 year old white guys.
I'm sorry, but that was kind of the
stereotype. And when I went out with the Jeep guys and went camping and they wanted to go off-roading
and stuff, boy, they're just all into the mechanical nuts and bolts and how I can bolt this thing on
to make my Jeep better. But what I find about the Tesla community is we're diverse and we are here
for multitude different reasons. Some of us are
absolutely in love with the cutting edge, bleeding edge tech. I hope we get to talk to Jason soon
today and he can tell us about Tesla rolling out FSD in Australia and in his area because we've
been so excited about it. And that's those of us that are into tech we've got a
lot of families in our group so it's no surprise that the safety fsd is 10 times safer than driving
without it and tesla builds great vehicles to where you can be in an accident and gosh we sure
hope you're going to be okay in that accident and we see time and time again how the teslas
perform and speaking of
performance, there's a lot of us that like to get into that three motor plaid or the three motor
cyber beast, jam down that electric accelerator and feel the zero to 60 and you know, about two
and a half seconds. That's really amazing. So all of these different groups coming together,
some of us introverts, some of us extroverts, some of us know what we're talking about, and others just like to hear our voices on the radio, right?
Well, we're a very diverse group, and it's fun to meet these people.
And I think that's what makes our cohesion a little different than some of the other groups.
I'm really glad you asked that question.
Yeah, you mentioned a couple things there. So a couple pieces from
the Newswire that I did see that I'm sure we'll hit on at some point in the space. I did see a
lot of stuff coming out of Australia, which anytime we get to see, you know, the FSD stuff
released into a new market, just seeing the reaction. You saw this with China a few months
ago, seeing it with Australia this weekend was really, really, really neat to follow along and see those reactions to.
Also, I saw testing, this was from Sawyer this morning, but a lot of Tesla testing autonomous
freeway driving with the RoboTaxis, the customer RoboTaxis in Austin. So safety monitor in the
actual driver's seat, but testing freeways, which I saw it was a, that's a new thing.
And that's what the progression on this just continues to ramp up, which it's a lot of the
doubters hate to hear that, but that's what I'm seeing. I appreciate you getting us started there,
Landon. Kristen, I want to go over to you next. You've been hanging out with us. What's on your
mind? Anything that we've hit on so far that piques your interest or what's going on in your world?
I saw an unmute, but I didn't get any audio.
I was testing Kristen there. Landon, are you able to hear or is it just me?
I sure had some problems joining the space today with the audio. I'm not sure if this is a
continuation of that, but I cannot hear her. Now we've got Omar co-hosting, so maybe he can
break through the audio barrier. Yeah, absolutely. Omar, great to have you as always, my co-host of these spaces.
Omar, we have a couple things. Alain, I was just kind of getting us warmed up into the conversation
here, but we'd love to see what's on your mind. It seems like I mentioned a little bit earlier,
it seems like there's a lot of things still going on in the Tesla world. One of the reasons we do
this weekly space is because the progression just keeps coming new things popping up what's uh what's on your mind today omar yeah there definitely does seem to be a lot of stuff going on in the last
week so we saw the new model y performance introduced in europe which looks amazing i won't
spend too much time on that we saw a tesla fsd launch in australia and new zealand which has been super
exciting i've loved looking at all the reviews this is the first right hand drive country that
tesla fsd is launched in um it's the sixth and seventh country that we now have tesla fsd in
so really exciting to see that i know a lot of people in that market have been waiting a long
time and now they actually can finally start to use the software it's in early access now
it's going to start going out to all the cars as it's validated but it looks to be pretty good from
the reviews we're seeing i don't think it's going to be long before they're ready to send it out to
you know the broader fleet then you're going to start seeing
FSD subscription in that market. You're going to start to see free 30-day trials included
with every new car purchase. So this is really exciting having FSD, which is something that only
the United States had maybe a year or two ago, to now it really becoming a core part of their product offering worldwide
and yeah going from autopilot to fsd is a big jump i think it's totally going to look at the way
change the way people look at these products especially with some of these newer software
versions that are coming here in september tesla is finally going to be launching their robo taxi service to the public
you won't need an invite to be able to hail a tesla robo taxi in austin you'll be able to just
download the app and call a ride and that's a big launch for them that's going to be happening this
month they're also going to be launching tesla f-14. That's a 10x larger model.
Everybody's very excited about that.
It should be significantly more intelligent.
It should enable them to start scaling out the robo-taxi service in a big way.
So that's all very exciting.
We are also seeing that the robo-taxi service in Austin is now using highways, just like in the Bay Area.
If you call a ride that needs highway driving, they will have the safety monitor get in the
driver's seat, as opposed to regularly for a city streets ride that's low speed,
they'll just be in the passenger seat. So that's kind of interesting, but I think a good way to sort of
scale out the service because it's always annoying when you are taking a drive and it's
dramatically slower because you're in an autonomous car. So I love to see that they're
starting to operate on the highway and looking forward to them being able to do that without a driver. We've also got the Model YL started deliveries in China.
Tesla unveiled their Master Plan Part 4,
which I'll touch on a little bit.
And in the video, you can see in the back of the design studio
that there are some sort of clay mock-ups of a three-row SUV extension of
the Cybertruck and they were looks like they were playing with a few different
designs and I've heard from a reliable source who told me about the Model YL
maybe a year ago and has had other things.
He doesn't actually work at Tesla, but he's been a reliable source.
And he confirmed to me that the Cyber SUV is definitely happening.
With all of Tesla's vehicles, when they do a new vehicle platform,
they typically have at least two variants of that platform. So for the Model S,
they followed it up with the Model X, which is an SUV version. For the Model 3, they followed it up
with the Model Y, which was an SUV version and ended up actually being a lot more popular than
the sedan version, the Model 3. And similarly for the Cybertruck, they're not just going to do a truck version. They're also going to do a three-row SUV version.
So a lot of people have been asking for bigger capacity Teslas for large families, kind of similar to the Rivian R1S.
So I think it's going to be exciting to see what Tesla's doing there with that Cybertruck SUV and what other vehicles they have coming down the line.
And then Tesla had a little post about Master Plan Part 4.
Some people were saying it was a little odd in terms of its formatting
in comparison to the other Master Plans.
Really, the two master plans
that kind of matter right now
are master plans one and two.
Tesla's kind of in the process
of implementing master plan part two,
but it does look like it's going to be wrapping up
in the next year or two.
So I think really what master plan part four is about
is reorienting the company's mission.
Tesla has always said that the mission is about accelerating the world's transition to sustainable energy.
And they've definitely made massive progress on that.
I think that's still a core part of their mission.
But they're really expanding the focus when they
talk about sustainable abundance they're not just talking about sustainable energy but
also all the downstream economic benefits of automation and automation you know powered by
clean electricity so if you think about the economic opportunity that's enabled by
these autonomous cars that can go around the city and do things for you,
and these autonomous humanoid robots, which can do pretty much any task,
it's going to change the way we produce goods and services, the way we deliver goods and services, and that's ultimately going to add up to, I think, a future where everything we need becomes much lower cost, which really means that people can have more of what they want.
people can have more of what they want.
It's a mentality that's not about
trying to save the earth through conservation,
but actually using tons of energy,
building massive data centers,
building massive AI compute,
but doing it in a sustainable way
where you're looking at renewables and battery and taking that and really
enabling a revolution in the economy that is kind of akin to the industrial revolution.
So automation here is a massive theme. They're really folding it in to the mission as really something that's as core as
sustainable energy and transport to really sort of delivering those benefits to society.
So I think it's sort of an important reorienting of the company.
It's one that we've been talking about for a long time,
moving from just cars to robots and robo-taxis,
and they've kind of folded into their mission now.
Whereas it kind of seemed a little bit at odds before.
Okay, this company is supposed to be about sustainable energy.
Why are they building a robot?
But now they're really starting to kind of bring it all together.
So yeah, a lot of exciting things happening with Robotaxi, with FSD-14, with Optimus.
And it feels like the Tesla team has just been working really hard getting all of these
things out around the world. So I'm very excited about September. It's looking like it's going to
be a good month. Ironically, because Donald Trump got rid of the EV tax credit, sales are actually
up in a big way this quarter in the United States. And it's looking like Tesla is actually going to be analyst consensus on deliveries for
the first time this year as a result of that.
Now, in the fourth quarter, you're probably going to see weaker deliveries because of
the pull forward into the third quarter in the United States.
But you're actually seeing some strong product offerings worldwide
model yl in china model y performance in europe i think there's going to be a lower cost model y
in the united states next quarter to help offset the loss of the tax credit franz hinted that it's
going to have some interesting new design language, some future design language.
So I'm really excited to see what that looks like.
But yeah, you've got a lot of good advancements on the AI and robotics side.
Combined with here in the core business, you're not going to see it as weak as it was in the first half of the year.
you're not going to see it as weak as it was in the first half of the year.
And that's a good combination, I think, for investors right now
as we head into the last month of the quarter.
Are there any set dates that we should be watching for?
Have they set any dates over the next maybe month or further out?
I haven't noticed any.
Dates for what?
Some of these releases and things like that?
Yeah, any releases
or typically they have some type of
like if they're going to do any type
of new models or anything like that, it seems like they would
set some type of date to announce it, right?
Yeah, they
you know, Elon tweeted
that he expects to send
FSD-14 out by the end of the month, which is Elon speak for October, November.
So, you know, we'll probably see it maybe going out to early access before the end of this month, if we're lucky.
Could slip into next month.
But, you know, this is a major, major undertaking.
We've seen how long it took
OpenAI, for example, to go from GPT-4 to GPT-5. Training one of these models, validating it,
making sure it's safe, it takes time. There's, you know, no way you can really have a date and
say it's going to be ready at this date. You can say, hey, you know, we hope to get it out by the end of this month. There are definitely people driving it already. But, you know, ultimately, it's done cooking when
it's done cooking. So hopefully before the end of the month, we start to see what that looks like.
But it could also be in Q4. But yeah, very exciting.
Of all the things before I move on here, of all the things going on right now, is there one thing that you're most excited about?
Is it the highway FSD? Is it seeing the highway supervised robotaxi?
Or is it the FSD going into Australia?
Or is there a certain thing or something maybe you didn't mention there?
or something maybe you didn't mention there.
FSD in Australia and New Zealand and right-hand drive
is definitely up there in terms of excitement for me.
You know, you don't see any other self-driving system
operating with customers on both the right-hand side of the road
and the left-hand side of the road.
As a matter of fact, no other system is even working
in more than one country.
You have some self-driving cars in the United States, some in China.
Tesla FSD Supervised is now operating in the United States, Mexico, Canada, Puerto Rico, China, Australia, and New Zealand.
And once they have approval for Europe, they're going to add an additional 30 to 60 countries on top of that.
So, you know, within the next year or two, most of the developed world is going to have this
technology, which, you know, is easy to say, but to train the model to work all across the world
is extremely difficult and something that nobody has ever really done before.
So I think it's definitely significant.
But yeah, if I had to pick one thing that I'm most excited for this month,
it's got to be FSD-14.
The software is already kind of at the point where it can do most drives
do most drives from start to finish without an intervention most of the time. FSD-14 is going to
from start to finish without an intervention most of the time.
take it to almost all the time. And they're going to actually start to be able to relax some of the
cabin camera driver monitoring restrictions over time after that. So that's something that,
you know, people have been waiting for for a long time. I'm also really excited for them to open up the
Robotaxi service to the public because right now you need an invite, so most people can't try it.
I think when people can just download the Robotaxi app the same way they can download
a Waymo app in many places and just hail a driverless ride and see how smooth it is,
see that you actually don't need anyone in the driver's
seat and this is just an ordinary car you can buy.
That's definitely going to be a significant milestone that they've been working towards
for many years.
Maybe you could even call it a turning point as this robo-taxi service starts to become
available to the public.
So those are the two really huge milestones I'm
watching. Yeah, I was going to say the public release, almost an inflection point is kind of
what I would think about calling it for RoboTaxi. Right now with invite only, seeing videos from
different influencers, it's like, okay, it's a real thing. I'm watching it happen, and it's incredible.
But whenever I think about somebody flying into Austin and saying,
hey, I need to get an Uber, need to get a Waymo,
need to get some type of ride hell across town from my airport to my event
to whatever's going, and when the general public can download that,
I think that is like, hey, this is now officially, officially here. I think
that's the next big point that we're going to see. Did you mean to put your hand up there, Omar?
Yeah, there was one more point that I forgot that's kind of not as significant, but I think
is also pretty important. Tesla's also started rolling out a new update 2025.32, where they've made some major safety improvements.
The new frontal airbag system is now built on the Tesla vision system, the same vision system that
drives your car. They've actually integrated that into the airbag system. And they've started doing
this a little bit with the seatbelt pretensioners and stuff like that.
But essentially what this allows the system to do
is prepare for a crash before the crash happens.
I mean, you know, ideally the system tries to avoid a crash, right?
And brake automatically and stuff like that.
But in cases where a crash is unavoidable,
before you hit the other car, or before the other car hits you, the seatbelts will tighten,
the airbags will automatically, you know, prepare to start inflating, so that they can be ready
earlier and, you know, better protect the occupants in a crash. So most cars, you buy a car, they crash tested the car before
they sent it to you. And of course, Tesla does that as well. But only Tesla continues crash
testing the car after you buy it and tries to make it even safer, tries to even come up with
new innovations to make your car safer, and then sends that to you over the air for free.
And you're just safer. You might not even know about it until that moment where the worst thing
possible happens. And, you know, you're glad they did that. So a lot of people are saying now,
you know, I'm not putting my kids or my loved ones in anything else other than a Tesla.
And it's really great that now they're starting to offer used Tesla leases.
You can lease a used Tesla for like $150, $200 a month.
And you can get all of this.
Some people said, well, you know, I don't want my kid to be too pretentious driving a Tesla as a 16 year old. But I would say to them, you know,
would you want your car driving? Would you want your kid driving in a car without, you know,
seatbelts or airbags? Because while you don't want them to be too pretentious with, you know,
a new car, let's get them a Model T or something. Obviously not, right? So I think
this is a really crucial safety technology. I think that you're going to start to see safety
agencies around the world start to mandate it over the next five to 10 years. And yeah, I, you know,
rely on it every day. I tell all my loved ones to adopt it. When you see people literally going off a cliff and walking out unharmed in a Tesla, it's really all these little send you software updates like this that offer major new features and, you know, make you safer.
And I think the rest of the industry should be taking notes.
Some really great pieces there to hit on, Omar.
I appreciate you.
Ryan, let's go over to you.
I saw you reacting to some stuff.
Want to get your thoughts around any of the great pieces of conversation we've had so far. See what's on your mind and if you had anything to add there and then
we'll continue around the panel. Yeah. I mean, that last bit that Omar was talking about, it's
like, how freaking ridiculous is this that people are going to be caring so much about pretentiousness?
It's like if their son or daughter passes away
due to being in a car accident and not driving a Tesla,
they're gonna be like, okay,
that was the most ridiculous thinking
and lack of logic they could have had.
I mean, really people should just be caring
about their own reality rather than the perception
of what other people think
of them. It's like, I mean, the ability for Tesla to dynamically adjust the airbags and the seat
belts, like Omar was talking about, like, this is just another sign of their passive and active safety features that are both
better than the rest of the industry FSD is obviously fantastic at avoiding
accidents but then when you are in a crash the architecture of how Tesla
builds their vehicles and their airbags
are better than the rest of the industry.
So I think on the vehicle side,
like if somebody is looking for the best value car
in the world in terms of safety and technology,
of course they're gonna choose a Tesla.
So I'm glad that the Model Y indicates that they are,
or showcases that they are indeed the best value product
because they're the best,
they're the highest revenue grossing vehicle in the world and best selling by units as well.
And then when we go to the master plan update, they are like previously they were accelerating the advent of sustainable transportation.
Accelerating the advent of sustainable transportation.
Now they have transitioned to, or after the world's transition to
sustainable transportation, they moved to sustainable energy.
And then now they're accelerating the world's transition to sustainable
So the way we get there is Optimus, FSD, and the entire energy ecosystem.
abundance.
But they're also storing it in these very large batteries so that it makes it where the economics of solar or wind or other renewable sources make much more sense.
And then they're also helping with the consumption of that energy with using it in an efficient way with their vehicles for transportation.
But transportation is just such a smaller market relative to labor.
So this expansion of the mission, I think the primary reason for this transition
is about inspiring
others like i i've previously talked about how i believe elon's biggest most important skill is
inspiring people and this is what he has to do all the time with inspiring people to join the Tesla team and motivate them to work on great projects every day.
So when people have to think about what the future is and look to that future,
they have to have something that's really large scale, grand,
something that they can wake up and look forward to just like with spacex
like people want to look forward to this very grand plan of living and getting getting to mars
living on and getting to mars, being out amongst the stars.
And same thing with Tesla.
At this point, it's different to be thinking,
hey, we want to transition the world
to sustainable transportation
because they've already done that quite a bit.
So now it's about replacing labor and therefore leading to this world of
sustainable abundance. And the reason I frame it as labor is because like FSD, they're basically
just building an artificial driver to replace labor in one, I mean like one one occupation or it depends on how you slice it but let's say like
five different types of driver profiles like you could have uber drivers you could have um like
food delivery drivers you know truck drivers there's there are many different types of drivers, but really it's like one occupation.
And with Optimus, they're replacing many different types of physical labor.
So like this market is gigantic because it impacts so many people. And this AI revolution is absolutely transforming digital labor at the moment,
but it will soon take over the physical world.
So I think this expansion with Tesla's mission is not only inevitable, I'm glad they've put it on paper and now people can recognize more clearly
that they are indeed more than just a vehicle company, they're more than just an energy company,
they're working on the future of AI and robotics, which is digital and physical labor. And like Elon always says,
the economy is really just labor because labor produces actually useful goods and services.
So as labor becomes uncapped, the production of those goods and services, like the goods and services will also become uncapped over time.
This is an extremely exciting future that I'm looking forward to.
Oh, the other thing, Elon says that Tesla Optimus will make up 80 percent of Tesla's value.
So, I mean, I think that's probably right.
Like the physical labor replacement in optimists
is just so overwhelming.
It's really difficult to conceptualize
what the potential of that is
because we can think about replacing current labor,
but there's also going to be new types of physical labor that we don't
like we currently take for granted or goes unseen. Um, and then,
and then there will actually be new types of labor as well,
like new jobs or things that the robot can do that humans
wouldn't like really fathom doing so
yeah just uh it's great to see that this mission expansion is actually been put to paper and um
it's really exciting for this month with fsd and everything going on so thanks for letting me speak
for this month with FSD and everything going on.
So thanks for letting me speak.
Yeah, some great thoughts there, Ryan.
I appreciate it.
It's interesting to me that the optimist also reduces accidents and injuries to workers.
Like that's one narrative I haven't heard shared at least enough around, you know, maybe
in this space, but just in general, in the community of Tesla or investors
of Tesla. You think about the optimist, a lot of people still think, oh, it's still far out and
stuff. But when you think about the reality of what optimist does, not just are we talking about
Tesla making the world safer on the roads, optimist makes factories safer too. That's
something that you just triggered a thought in my head on that thought that was really interesting there uh penny my co-host how are you my friend i saw you
flying in a fighter jet i've seen you all over the place what is going on penny give us an update and
of course any thoughts on your mind today that we haven't that we've been hitting on or anything
maybe we haven't hit on yet how are you sir, sir? I am super well. Thanks for the introduction.
I did fly on a fighter jet a couple weeks ago.
Talk about unbelievable, something that never could have happened
if I didn't spend so much time making great connections on X
and immersing myself in this world of Elon and Tesla.
That's how I became connected with Jared Isaacman. If you are
unfamiliar with Jared, there's an entire chapter in him or about him in the book about Elon by
Isaac's son, not to be confused with Isaacman. But anyway, he is a businessman, a fighter pilot,
a businessman, a fighter pilot, amongst many other things. And I got to hang out at his hangar
in Montana and, uh, and fly in some alpha jets. I got to invert. I got to take the stick and fly
it myself. The, uh, a lifelong dream. I wanted to be a fighter pilot when I was a kid. And, uh,
you know, as I grew up, I never thought I would have a chance as I, you know, crossed,
ticked into my forties and I hadn't flown in a fighter jet yet.
I thought, all right, this is over.
But I got a chance and I couldn't be more grateful.
It was absolutely incredible.
And I hope that everyone that would enjoy it as much as me gets a similar opportunity.
It was so super cool. I also last night, just before going to bed, took advantage of the 0% financing on a model three, if you buy FSD. So I bought a new model three with FSD last
night, just before bed, I got blue with the white interior. I got the rear wheel drive long range.
I was going back and forth between getting a performance or the, or the long or the,
you know, the most expensive or the cheapest one, right?
That's what I was vacillating back and forth between.
And then I got in my current model three, which in every way is worse than, uh, than
the new rear wheel drive long range.
It has worse range, worse speed, uh, worse cameras, worse computer,
worse everything. And I was dropping off my kid at gymnastics and it was still so fast and so
smooth. And so everything I'm like, I really don't need to pay an extra 15,000 more for a
worse range and bigger rims. Right. Uh, my car's fast enough already. So I got the rear wheel drive Model 3. I'm super
excited. Paid for FSD up front because I think we're so close to robo taxi now. And I have some
inkling that when it's unsupervised, there's no way they're going to continue to be $99 a month
or 8,000 to buy. I have a feeling those prices are going to go up. I know that there's
only about 30 more days left for the $7,500 tax credit. If you do not order before the end of
this month, you're toast on that. And I just thought, you know, I'm not going to pay $7,500
more for the same car next year. I'll just get it this year. I'll make that transition a little
bit quicker than I originally imagined. And I'm so super excited about that. I can't wait to get
my new car. I'm driving an FSD on the old cameras and the old computer right now on my way back.
It changes everything. It is a completely different experience when you're driving in
these cars. And I mentioned on the last Tesla space, uh, that my girlfriend is looking at getting a Tesla,
maybe before the $7,500 rebate ends as well. Cause she got behind the wheel in my car with FSD
on a long road trip. And it's just like, I never want to drive somewhere without this ever again.
She was super skeptical before too, but I'll, I'll tell you, you get behind the wheel and you push that button and you hear the beep and it just starts driving for you. And, uh, you know,
it changes your mind. So I want to circle back to some of the things that Ryan said, uh, as well as
you, the, uh, the safety aspect of Optimus is super cool, right? Like they mentioned early on in the development that the
first jobs that Optimus is going to do are the most dangerous, the most dirty, the jobs that
would have been on that dirty job show back in the day that no human in their right mind wants
to do, right? They're dangerous, they're deadly, they're disgusting. And, uh, I don't feel like the least bit, sorry,
that Optimus is going to start doing those jobs for us. Hopefully it saves a bunch of lives,
saves families. And, and beyond that, even I love this new master plan for one reason.
Who do you want working on Optimus? Who do you want working on the future of robotics,
except for the few people. And I'm telling you, there are few that can actually envision
sustainable abundance, right? Like when I talk about sustainable abundance and I have been,
uh, actually since before I didn't use those words, I called it free food day when I first
started talking about it, but it was like 15 years ago when I coined
free food day. Uh, and, and I was talking about exactly what we're approaching now. We're
approaching the time when automation is so incredibly powerful that we don't need to do
anything anymore. We do things because we choose to most people I talk about, even Tesla bulls,
even the people working on AI and robotics, they have a
really hard time envisioning this sustainable, abundant future. People talk about, uh, you know,
humans going crazy with no purpose and all of these other things. Well, if anyone is going to
be working on solving that problem and creating these super powerful robots and AI, I hope that
there are people that share the vision with Elon, that share the vision of sustainable abundance that are going to be working to achieve that
instead of, you know, it could go the global dominance direction. It could be one person
has all the money in the world and everyone else is poor. But I think if Elon and Tesla win,
and if they're surrounded by, you know, the best employees, employees that share that vision of sustainable abundance,
then it makes the likelihood
of it happening just that much.
It just seems that much more possible.
So super excited to see
more formality around that.
Elon's been talking about
sustainable abundance
a really long time.
He mentioned,
I don't know who it was in response to,
I forget, but that they're going to
add more details to the new master plan as well. So it's a little bit less vague and we can see,
you know, maybe some milestones along the way. But I'll tell you, if I was an newcomer and I was
getting out of school right now, if I'm amongst the best and the brightest, what project do you want to work
Right?
Like there's a lot of cool AI companies.
But the reason that Tesla and SpaceX have been able to recruit the best employees for
the past decade or so is because they have a, the best team to join.
You're going to be around just absolute units, right?
Like all of the Tesla workers are so good.
Elon is so inspirational.
But besides that, why would you want to work on a chat bot when you can work on a version
of the chat bot that enters the real world and can shake your hands and do the dishes
and clean your closets and clean your garage and clean your garage and, and dust your house
and all of these different things that are like so much more useful and fun, uh, real world
robotics projects like that, I think are the cream of the crop in terms of what the best and the
best would want to work on and the problems that they would want to solve. So I love that Tesla
has that project in their back pocket, back pocket to continue to recruit the best.
I hope to continue to see updates.
It's actually been a fair minute since we got a big Optimus update.
And they have been fairly regular with those at least every few months.
I look forward to them all the time.
The reason that I have been invested in Tesla for as long as I have,
and I don't plan on ever pulling out is because they work on the world's most cutting edge
projects, whether it's creating, uh, you know, an electric car when there was no such thing.
If it's creating, uh, these battery packs or beautiful solar roofs, if it's creating FSD and now Optimus, there are so many
reasons to work at Tesla. I continue to be bullish on Tesla for those future projects and the fact
that they're such a great recruiting tool. If I could work on that project without leaving my
kids behind, I would dedicate all of my energy to figuring out,
you know, whatever it is that I needed to be good at to get hired. That's how cool that project is.
The only reason that I'm not working on it is because, you know, Elon doesn't love remote work.
And, uh, and I, it's really hard for me to move as a divorced dad without leaving my kids behind.
But I think there's so many other people like me that would just absolutely love to work on these projects.
And yeah, it's been an exciting week, exciting couple of weeks for me and Tesla. And I don't
think that's going to end anytime soon. I expect Geofence to continue to expand. I expect new
locations to pop up on the radar for RoboTaxi. I expect Optimus updates. And man,
if 2025 isn't the year of Tesla, I can't imagine 2026 not being it. I'm really looking forward to
the rest of the world waking up to what a lot of the people in this room have been excited about
for years now. And it just seems like we are at the point where it's
inevitable, where you're no longer going to be able to deny it. You know, these cars are actually
driving themselves. People are paying for robo taxi rides and Optimus is getting more and more
real. It's going to start doing more and more jobs for Tesla. They're going to start sharing more and
more information about that. And man, welcome to the future, everybody. It starts yesterday.
The future is now, as they say, Penny, uh, first off, I am just so jealous because I grew up
building the fighter jets, like the little models I would buy at Hobby Lobby. I'd paint them, put
all the stickers in the right spot and all that stuff. So the fact that you got to fly in one day, you took the joystick. Did you,
did I hear that correctly? Yeah, I got to take the stick for a few minutes. I got to do,
I got to invert myself. I was doing, what do they call them? Well, I forget the name of the role.
They taught me the name of the role and they taught me how to do it. And I got to do two roles.
I got to do some hard banks and get a feel for, yeah, what it's like to fly a jet.
Before that, I had only flown a Cessna, which is a completely different experience.
The amount of power they have when you're flying a jet, even a subsonic jet that can
only go, you know, like 750 miles an hour or something like that.
That's still, it's such incredible power and agility. And, um, yeah, again,
I can't believe that I got an opportunity. It's just so cool.
I'm so, so jealous of that, Penny. That's awesome. Thanks for sharing with us. And then,
of course, a lot of other really great thoughts shared there um josh
we saw you up here on stage haven't heard from you wanted to see if you had any thoughts to
toss into the mix here hey wolf yeah thanks for having me up excited to be with you guys once
again i definitely had a few thoughts here on a couple of topics and as most that know me my
background is in automotive so i'm going to start with the tesla model y performance super pumped to see
tesla nail another amazing design and really take an already fantastic package but take it to a
whole new level i heard one person say that they believe that franz began with the performance and
then subtracted things to get us the mainstream dual motor model but now we have the finished
product which is fantastic
i thought it was very interesting that they began uh that they announced it in the middle east i
think we're seeing a real renaissance with tesla flexing the fact that they are a global automaker
and that they are fully mainstream so there's a couple of things, a couple of reasons that I think that. One is that I see Tesla has moved not only the S and X, well, specifically, sorry, the S Plaid, and now the Model Y and the Model 3 to distinct performance styling.
That's something we've seen from traditional automotive to have unique looking vehicles, much more unique than in the past.
So that's really great to see. But also things like the luxe package on the model s model x and cyber beast so again
just designating them packing them with value for kind of the higher end customer and then we're
seeing uh sort of the rumors of these lower cost versions coming now i can't confirm this but i
have heard some rumors rumors that this lower cost model y
could be kind of an older spec maybe the same exterior but an older spec on the interior
and i worked selling stellantis for many years and they when they brought out the latest version
of the ram truck they also brought back the older styling as a lower cost model and they called it
the ram classic so i'm wondering if
we're going to see tesla kind of take that strategy in-house new models are available
elsewhere in the world for the first time we're having multiple models for sale globally that are
not available in the united states we have model yl available in china model y performance is in
germany europe in the middle east and not yet here in the United States.
Obviously, we're all hoping that they may come very quickly, but that's unique.
We've never been in that position before.
And, of course, this rumor, which I foretold quite a while ago, of the cyber SUV coming to America as the big family vehicle that we all want.
And that brings me to the cyber SUV.
I just want to mention a couple of things. The reason why I saw this as an easy, you know, kind of a, it was already in the hat type of thing is that everybody has been begging for a full size SUV from Tesla.
haven't thought of. And it was actually Ben of Unplugged Performance that had mentioned this
to me and brought it to my attention. And that is military security and police applications of that
vehicle is actually going to be massive, even significantly more, way more than Cybertruck.
So that's going to be a huge market for it. We're going to see corporate and commercial use cases.
And of course, for big families, I mean, who doesn't want the big family hauler?
That's dent proof, bulletproof kid proof. I remember back in, uh, Oh man, I'm dating myself.
I think it was like 2010 or 2011. Uh, we had bought a brand new Dodge minivan. And I remember
looking down and seeing my two-year-old son pick up a sandy piece of wood off the ground and start
rubbing it on the paint. And heart just sank he's like dad look
i'm cleaning the car and of course dad's having a conniption and trying to hold it together
but having a stainless steel scratch proof stainless stainless steel beast would solve
that problem for sure um yeah so a couple other things here tesla semi we had a big announcement
of a mega charger installation the first in the great state of texas in san
antonio i am super pumped for that i will be bringing you guys all of the texas content 100
semi has been a huge focus of mine for quite a while we've actually been seeing semi on display
significantly more most recently at the x takeover tesla was amazing and bringing that beast out for
all of us to touch feel and look at
and get a really good idea of the scale of it and i would love an opportunity to get up behind the
wheel and the cab and i'm sure that is coming down the line so stay tuned for those videos
but the semi-logistic corridor that's being built out between fast drop and austin uh and starbase
is that is that's basically what's happened here with the San Antonio
installation so they want to do runs between we have SpaceX we have Boring Company we have
you know x headquarters and so on located in Bastrop and then not too far away we have the
Gigafactory so no doubt Tesla wants an open semi-corridor and all they need to do is just
one stop for charging in San Antonio.
So they're going to make that happen. Super excited about that. And then we have RoboTaxi,
which we just saw a recent massive expansion here in Austin. And, you know, of course,
everybody noticed that we had all the memes and that sort of thing, and that was great.
But what I wanted to draw your attention to is the comparison to waymo no i'm not anti waymo at all
i love waymo i think it's great but what i really was struck with was the the rapid expansion of the
tesla geofence and how quickly we're really going to see them pull away from waymo so when tesla
first announced that they were coming to austin waymo quickly jumped and bumped up their fleet
numbers huge they expanded their geofence they did a whole bunch of movement but then it didn't take long really only a matter of weeks for tesla to eclipse
their expanded network which was very profound um of course we have regulation headwinds but i think
that it's important to remember that the war is not against Waymo. I want to make it really clear that Tesla Robitaxi
and Waymo need to work together to move automation and autonomy regulation forward with politicians,
both at the municipal state and federal level. I think that's extremely important. And then one
other thing as an Austin resident, I have been, you know, getting out to lots of events and things
like that. And I have a ton of people asking me, just in the public, they're not in our ecosystem here,
when are we going to get access to the Tesla Robotaxi?
I see these things driving around with the gold stickers.
I want to try one.
I want to try one.
So there's a ton of interest, a lot of pent-up demand for Robotaxi here in Austin.
People are very excited about it and very supportive here in the community.
People are very excited about it and very supportive here in the community.
And lastly, I just want to give a quick shout out to a world record that was set at 14,150 feet.
We had the Pikes Peak Light Show in Colorado.
That was absolutely phenomenal.
Just a really unique, spectacular.
It was truly a symphony of technology and geology.
And we did it, you know, know kilometers miles up in the heavens we were we had people thinking that we had lit the mountain on
fire we had people thinking that we were ufos but what we were was a really wonderful exhibition of
the tesla community coming together and uh really embracing all things positive for this world. So that was really
exciting to be a part of. And I also just wanted to really quickly highlight, and with this,
I'll kind of close up my comments. I really want to stress the importance of these events. You know,
we have a lot of negative garbage going on in the world. There's a lot of anti-Elon hate. There's a
lot of kind of nonsense. There's a lot of distraction and really just noise against the mission of tesla and i really want to stress how important these these community
events are the tesla community is unmatched globally and they they really are uh rolling
out globally you know we've got events in singapore there's upcoming events in japan
uh in europe austria that are coming up And then of course, right here on our own home turf,
you know, we had the, we have the Chattanooga charge, we had X takeover, we had the summer
meetup in Michigan. And of course this massive event in Colorado. So it's just really exciting
to bring everybody together. Thank you to everybody that shared all of this stuff.
I think it's really important because it just brings us all some joy, no matter what age we are.
So thank you so much, Wolf.
Beautiful.
I appreciate you joining.
Josh, great to have you on these spaces.
Big shout out to the entire Tesla crew up here.
Since yesterday was a holiday, we are going to go ahead and rotate this conversation over.
We're going to squeeze in our small cap show that is usually on Mondays.
And we're going to have that right now. So going to rotate the conversation here a little bit.
Big shout out to the Tesla crew.
If you aren't following all the great speakers that were up here on stage,
you're definitely missing out.
They will improve your timeline and your experience on this app,
keeping you up to date with all kinds of things going on Tesla.
So big shout out to Penny, my co-host, Josh Landon, always up here.
Kim, we didn't make it over to, but you guys know Kim.
She's a staple of a lot of our spaces. So big shout out to Kim as well as some of the other ones up here. Kim, we didn't make it over to, but you guys know Kim. She's a staple of a lot of our spaces. So big shout out to Kim as well as some of the other ones up here. And with that,
I'm going to do a hard transition here so we can get over to small cap investing show we normally
run on Mondays at 1 p.m. Eastern. We've got that over here on Tuesday today. It is 1 p.m. Eastern.
And this crew, I tell you what, if you're an investor, especially if you look at the broad markets in general, if you look at Tesla and then all the way down to anything else
for your investor, you definitely will not be disappointed by the great minds up here
on this space.
There was some yellow and orange alerts that went out on this very space in the last few
weeks and here we are with our first kind of big down day in the market, if you want
to call it that.
It's not terrible when I look across the board, but it is significant selling going on today.
And we'll see how it turns out the rest of the day.
But I'm excited to jump into this.
And my co-host, Ben, over at Story Trading, I've got him up here on stage.
Ben, I would love to toss it over to you to kind of take it away here.
And if you want to drop some quick macro or market thoughts, we can.
But I know we have another great conversation
in about 30 minutes
if we want to kind of dive into some of the picks.
Yeah, great.
And so glad to have the full team back.
I think this is the first show with you back
since you had your time off.
And great that we spoke in.
I don't remember.
I don't think so.
But welcome back.
Congratulations on the child.
How's that going?
Well, you know, anytime you have a newborn,
any of you fathers or mothers in the crowd will know this.
It's an exhausting event, but it's an adrenaline-filled event at the same time.
So I couldn't be more happier.
I'm blessed, but I am – tank is down on empty.
We'll put it that way. here i am you know so let's
start with a little macro on friday morning i went to yellow alert for the first time in over months
we're at a green signal for the entire month of august uh friday morning uh the warning sign was
crypto and ethereum dropping below the 20 dma on Friday morning ahead of the PCE.
I thought maybe PCE would come in hot and it didn't. It came in in line. And then the second
warning signal was that we didn't rally on an inline PCE. I thought we might have. We didn't.
So I didn't rally on that. And that leads you right into September, another month which could potentially have seasonal weakness and a pullback.
So it looks like that's playing out right now.
We're getting this pullback into September.
And a couple other warning signs here.
You see IWM broke below its breakout level of 235.42.
It is holding a secondary support of 231.46.
But then you also have QQQ dropping below the 50 DMA.
We'll see if it reclaims it by the close.
And we have SPY below the 20 DMA.
And then you have this issue with TLT dropping because of concern that maybe,
depending on what happens with this court case on the
Supreme Court, that the United States government will have to give refunds back on the tariffs
they gave.
And if they give refunds, that worsens the deficit and the debt, and they'd have to issue
more bonds, which takes the TLT down, interest rates up.
And that's why you're seeing the weakness across the board and also in IWM, which is
so important for our small cap.
So I'm at a yellow alert since Friday morning.
I almost went to red alert this morning.
I decided not to just simply based on our great ability to find alpha in almost all
markets.
You know, this morning, I'm green today. It could have been a really good day
because I carried a gold and Ulta, ULTA call options into today. Ulta had great earnings.
I have no idea why it went down Friday. You know what? It's just simply that we're in this moment
of sell the news no matter what, sometimes on day one. So that saved my account today. Man,
if I kept them throughout the day, Ulta call options my account today. Man, if I kept them throughout
the day, Ulta call options are up a thousand percent, but I sold them very early this morning
after I basically made back my losses from Friday because I was playing Ulta all day
Friday and Gold had a nice gain in Gold. So, you know, based on our ability to find Alpha,
that's why I kept it at Yellow Alert. But, you know, for someone that maybe cannot find that alpha as easily, you know, it might be time to pull back and just kind of wait to see what the IWM and the major indices do with the key moving averages and maybe wait for a better time.
I think it'll be tough for most people, but for us, I think we'll be fine.
So that's the macro look.
Em, back to you.
Beautiful way to start us off there, Ben.
I appreciate that.
Money Mark, let's get your brief macro thoughts here on what's going on in the market.
Yes, sir.
Yeah, I'm with Ben.
I mean, I've been on yellow alert for a while now.
It's more of a fundamentally valuation based metric. I will tell you that, you know, there's a couple of technical and macro analysts that I have respect for. They are all bullish. That is not a contrary indicator. That is actually a directional indicator.
indicator that is actually a directional indicator. So I would look at this, you know,
any correction as being a buy the dip opportunity in general, but with caution, knowing that
valuations are stretched in the market. And that has me on yellow alert, my proprietary yellow
alert. We continue to make money in this though. We have winners we'll talk about in a little bit,
but you have to be very, very picky.
I say it every week.
So I'm just going to say it again.
Be picky, picky, picky.
And I'll come back with some stock-related information on the second half of the show.
Yeah, absolutely picky.
You know, part of my morning of this morning, the very last line of the macro review, I said,
we recommend maintaining higher cash levels
and being significantly significantly sure sorry
being significantly more selective in stock picking at this time so 100 agree with you on that um let's
go to the godfather i haven't talked to you in a while you had some time off welcome back godfather
yeah i wouldn't exactly call it time off in so much as I moved both office and house after 25 years to a new city.
I've been scrambling to get back up to speed.
But yeah, look, I think the macro is more important than anything today.
It feels a bit like coming back up for Christmas holidays and the adults are back in the room. And, you know, this sort of silly season where you can throw money at most things on a momentum basis and
make some money is over. You know, Ben noted some concern about the tariffs is possibly pushing
rates higher. I mean, I think that's a marginal reason that the bigger issue, and you can see it across the board,
you know, global yields continue to surge higher. The term premium on the 10-year remains near
highs. And it's pretty simple. It's, you know, stubborn inflation, and it's a continuation of
deficit spending, right? We've seen, you know, $200 billion in issuance in the last five weeks.
I know Trump likes to, you know, trumpet how much the tariffs are bringing in and that money's going
to go down and pay down the debt and all the rest of it. But in the meantime, deficit spending
continues and inflation isn't going anywhere quickly. And that environment of stubborn
inflation, you know, when you combine it with a relatively weak labor market and relatively weak industrials,
and we saw it again today on ISM, this points to stagflation.
And, you know, this is the Fed's worst nightmare.
And that could impede the cadence of future rate cuts.
I've been far more sanguine about the pace of rate cuts than the market has been.
And I've been right,
frankly. It continues to get ahead of itself and then sort of pulls back and readjusts. And,
you know, it's important to note that, you know, despite the fact that, you know, rate cut of 25
beeps is all but certain on the 17th of September in 15 days, it's clear that it's priced into this market. And, you know, I've taken some additional shorts in this market in anticipation of things falling aligned with
what we see seasonally. And, you know, I think money market is right in terms of the global
equity sentiment remains high. So pullbacks will be probably relatively
shallow. But there is this big disconnect. Global equity sentiment, if you look at it on,
combine all these things, volatility, put call ratios, investor surveys, you name it,
we're in the 93rd percentile. And the market is relatively highly valued in a similar sort of percentile range.
So, you know, we typically see if you go back to the Almanac, we typically see September down over 60 percent of the time, usually, you know, more than one and a half percent.
Combine October with that, we're typically between two and two and a half percent.
October with that, we're typically between two and two and a half percent.
It doesn't seem like a lot, but for a market that's used to going up and has gone up relentlessly,
you know, I think you'll see some sentiment change here and that could impact small caps.
I think it's notable, as Ben pointed out, that the queues are flirting with this 50-day,
but yet ISM is still 4% away from its 50-day.
That strikes me as vulnerability.
I don't see that as a positive.
I see that as a negative.
Others may see it as positive, but I do not.
So I'm firmly in the camp of Money Mark and Ben on the yellow to red,
especially when it comes to small caps.
You need to be in quality. You need to be in quality.
You need to be in compelling stories.
And we can talk about a few of those when we come back around.
Appreciate those thoughts, Dougie.
Godfather Dougie.
Let's go over to you next day and get some of your quick thoughts.
And then we're going to dive in a little bit deeper here to some uh individual names yeah guys uh yeah obviously obviously we have a little pullback
right here on our spy and our rest of our market even crypto is pulling back honestly that spy
could get down to that 610 area we're at 636 right now we're approaching that 50 area that is about
630 and i don't think it's going to stop right there.
It could hover around there.
I do think we're going to see that little bit of pullback.
We had talked about the market being way up anyway, and I do think this is going to be a great opportunity for the dip.
So I think when we catch the bottoms and we know it's about to reverse up, I think you're going to see it just get cruising right at the end,
possibly at the end of the month.
Maybe it'll take a whole month to get set up here into October,
which will be perfectly fine.
Like Ben said, we always find the alpha.
We always see what's popping each day.
So that's not a problem.
You just have to be careful with the Mag 7 and the big caps here.
And I went through on my show this morning the etfs because you
can play them the bear ones um each each mag seven a lot of the big caps they all have etfs that you
can play they have a bull and a bear and if you look at the bear ones they all look pretty good
right now and are curling up and they uh they're one times leverage started bears the bulls are
two-time leverage and there's all kinds of different etfs that you can look at so you can play it either which way you don't necessarily have to short
the market you just play it the opposite way and that's how i always look at it and gear the market
as well i always look at the opposite side of things to see if they're getting set up like
your uvxy and your vix and things of that nature they They are curled up looking good. I don't think we will see
a huge correction here, but we're definitely going to see some pullback. So be ready to catch them
bottoms for the run up because it will be a beauty. And I have to agree with the godfather.
Good to hear you back, godfather. And yeah, that's crazy trying to trade, change offices
and houses after 25 years. I can only imagine half the stuff you found laying around when you're cleaning everything out. But anyway, inflation and spending,
it's just not getting any better right now. I thought they would try to get a wrap on it.
And it just seems like inflation's not doing any better. And spending, they're just spending too.
And you can't be doing that. That was Elon's whole thing you can't spend money like this and
expect the the economy to uh you know keep growing while you're shelling out tons of money so that's
an interesting thing right there i thought would be a little bit better and that tariff legal case
i think it's kind of bizarre too because i don't understand why our country would be arguing about
tariffs right now when
we can generate income. And most of the other countries are already agreeing to what they're
going to pay us. So I don't get that. But whatever. I think that's all political. And yeah, that's
what we're looking at. So when you get them kind of political battles running through the country,
you tend to see some redness. And that's what I think we're going to see. A little bit of pullback
and there will be opportunities. Walmart's up today.'m not sure why but they're up and they're one of the
few ones in energy uh gas and oil guys oil and gas and energy sector is looking good it's been
setting up for three weeks probably a month now so that one looks good and we'll go through some
individual ones and m congratulations on the new uh baby there that's awesome that'll keep you awake uh 24 7 that's for sure so i can only imagine how
exhausted you are you do shows all day long around the clock and you have a newborn that's pretty
wild so uh god bless you at that one and uh good to hear everybody back and i'll kick it back to
you emp and we'll go through some stocks and i'm going to steal it from you here. I just want to add a couple other factors on the
macro. Margin debts at a record $1 trillion. Positioning by hedge funds is that basically
max long exposure. Ethereum last time it went below the 20 DMA,
caused a vicious two-day crash end of July,
beginning of August, actually the first two days of August.
We had a 4% drawdown in two days, and we're still not there yet.
And also, earnings season basically over,
and there's a ton, a ton of economic data this week.
So if there is a macro concern or a dynamic of,
hey, let's have this macro pullback, plenty of economic data points this week. So if there is a macro concern or a dynamic of, hey, let's have this macro pullback,
plenty of economic data points this week that the bears can dig their teeth into.
You know, I do think that I'm leaning towards further downsides by maybe the 50 DMA
and QQQ. We got to watch that. The next supports a 551. All right. So I'm not too happy about the
macro at the moment, but I got two picks for you.
Now, the first one, I'm not going to tell you a lot about why I like it because we're going to save this for a Discord.
But Berna, we've talked about it here a lot, BYRN.
Currently, this is my largest trade position by far.
It's one of the largest bets I've made all year.
I'm expecting positive news on Berna this week as early as tomorrow
morning. I'm going to leave it at that
for the details and for the conviction and all that.
You'd have to join our Discord to find out
why. That's my largest position right
now, but stay tuned. Let's see if that
plays out. B-Y-R-N.
Second thing, I'm playing American
Eagle Outfitters, a quick trade here.
We'll see. I might carry someone to earnings.
They report tomorrow afternoon, AEO.
I expect that you're seeing the relative strength today.
I expect continued relative strength tomorrow.
Event anticipation run into the earnings report tomorrow.
It's going to be the first time management can give commentary on the Sydney Sweeney endorsement.
If that is causing increased sales, increased foot traffic, I think there's going to be a lot of people who want to be long into that report.
I likely, if I'm long into the report, it'll be very small.
I'm mostly in it for the event anticipation between now and 3.59 p.m. tomorrow afternoon.
But it is relatively a small cap, $2.3 billion, a big exciting story here going on right now,
and the potential for management to give good guidance based on
the sweetie stuff. So it could be very exciting. Those are the two stocks I have in mind for you
guys this week, BYRN and AEO. We got 11 minutes, so we're going to ask Moneymark and Godfather
to be real quick with their picks. Whoever wants to go, just unmute yourself. Let's go.
I'll go quickly. So when it comes to resource names, I do not do
individual stocks because I only trade resource names. I don't invest in resource names. So I
don't want to take individual company risk. But when it comes to resources right now, obviously
the counter to what's going on in the equity markets with the raise or the rise in global interest
rates is gold. So, you know, it's a small cap show. So I'll throw JNUG as, you know,
the ETF on the smaller gold names as appropriate for this show. But frankly, I think you want to
continue to be long gold here. This is the best way to express a positive correlation to what we're seeing in
terms of global rates rising, despite cutting by central banks across the board.
The other one, I'll note relative strength in a market that's seeing a lot of smaller cap names
flounder is MBOT, MicroBot Medical.
I've talked about this at length.
I don't have time to get into the thesis, but essentially they have a cardiovascular surgery tool.
It's an endovascular surgical robot.
This company is going to get bought.
It's as simple as that.
The CEO is XJ&J.
One of the directors is former business development
head and head of M&A strategic partnerships
at J&J their
CMO is ex-Boston Scientific these guys know what they're doing
this thing is going to get approved
and yeah it's going to get bought probably
by Stryker maybe Siemens or Medtronic
doesn't really matter but look the last major Yeah, it's going to get bought probably by Striker, maybe Siemens or Medtronic.
It doesn't really matter.
But look, the last major deal in this space went for 23 times enterprise value to sales.
So this is a tiny market cap relative to those kind of valuations.
I'll throw out two other names not going into the theses this week because of the time constraint.
But if you're playing small caps, you really want to play things that are adjacent to core themes in the market.
AI continues to be the core theme.
Physical AI is a core second derivative play, if you will.
The two companies that excel in that group are OUST and BZAI.
in that group are OUST and BZAI. OUST is ahead in terms of their hardware and software combined
solutions in the market and as a result sees a EV to sales that's closing in on eight times.
BZAI has some skepticism about their product launch as they've just kind of come out of
trials into commercial production and
implementation. And as a result, it's trading at around three times. So you can see that,
you know, the potential opportunity there is the market gains more confidence. So I'll
leave it there.
Money Mark.
Good stuff. Awesome. Did Money Mark go? mark go no money mark next let's go
money mark you there i think this thing popped over the listener i'm not sure if it popped
i'll just yeah i'll run through real quick and uh it's funny uh ben burn it i've been talking
about it on my show it The thing looks beautiful, man.
I mean, I've even been saying that was one of your babies right there on the show, BYRN.
I have to agree with you.
That thing's been setting up for about the last five days, and now it looks perfect right there.
And not sure what's going on.
You know the fundamentals better than me.
But it does look really good, I have to agree.
And I was just going to talk about Open Door because we've been talking about it for a while. going on you know the fundamentals better to me but it does look really good i have to agree and
i was just going to talk about open door because we've been talking about it for a while and it is
curling back up guys it's up like six percent today and it does look like it's trying to move
back to that five hour area so i know a lot of people talk about open online and everywhere else
it seems to be a big big deal nowadays and we talked about it in the 50 cent
area down on this show so open door is curling back up it's in a pretty bullish channel too
obviously you'll have that stair stepping up and down but it looks pretty good as of right now and
i'll throw it back to you if uh money mark is there i don't know if he's still on or not but uh
there you go ben i'll throw it back to you and that's uh what we have and yeah
jnog holy cow gold is looking beautiful i was mentioning that in the night note and uh that's
popped up and even nug t is a good one and that's popped up so that's what i have for you for today
i know we have an early out time and something going on so right right back to you, Ben. Yeah, well, we want to stick around as part
of the small cap show here. One 30, we'll be interviewing a chairman of a very interesting
company. So I guess money Mark fell off as probably going to request, but man, gold, I saw that. I
mean, I was so clear on Friday at one point I was 99% long GLD and all my other positions are on
margin. I wish I kept it till now, but I sold basically
my entire position at like 1030 a.m. this morning and kept on going. But pretty impressive.
Berna, I wonder, do you place any credence in bullish or bearish engulfing candles? If you look
at the daily, Berna has an opportunity here to put a bullish engulfing candle in today. Do you consider that with your technical analysis?
I really don't know any of the technical terms of things.
I just know that thing's about to pop off the 20.
It's so weird what I look at because I don't really know any of the real terminology of things.
I just know certain looks and patterns.
And when I see that thing, it just alerts me.
But I just know that thing it just like alerts me but i just know
that thing looks really good and uh like i say when i know it looks really good the thing's gonna
pop up i'm gonna be in that one with you there ben because it is gonna run in the next day or
two it's just running crawling off that 20 perfectly you can see the macd rsi everything's
in sync and with the market even pulling back today it still looks super
strong so it just tells you something's going on here it's holding itself over to 20 and had that
nice little pullback into the 1942 it almost had that little pullback dip and rip kind of look
today so yeah i have to agree it looks good i know the market isn't the best conditions
but that thing is looking good with the conditions being what they are
So yeah, I like I said, I don't golfing candles. I don't even know what that I kind of know what that means
But like your big green candle, but I'm not gonna say I know any terminology
I am totally self-taught and just make up my own lingo
So I can't say that I know exactly I don't want to
BS anybody and act like I do because I just know what the charts look like from looking at them for over 20 years. I don't have no education in this except being self-taught. So that's all I have.
We get the last four minutes here.
Right after that, we're going to be interviewing the chairman of TONX.
It used to be verb ticker symbol change today.
Very, very interesting company having to do with Telegram, Telegram app.
But Money Mark, you can unmute yourself.
Yes, sir.
Finally.
Technical difficulties.
Way to keep me down to four minutes, though.
That's perfect.
Real quick.
So I'm in agreement with The Godfather regarding gold.
A great play on that.
G-E-O-D-F.
That's had a nice little pullback.
I think it's ready to head back up.
It is backed by, they have some great assets.
I've talked about this one before.
And the stronger the gold industry is, the stronger this one will be.
Highly undervalued name there, so you don't have to.
I definitely wouldn't buy gold, right?
So the godfather gave you a name there to give you exposure to gold.
This is another one to give you exposure to gold.
Don't buy gold.
Buy these derivatives that get you more leverage.
That's one.
Two, CTLPP. uh c t l p p so c t lp cantaloupe was acquired and c t l p p is the preferred shares on that
they are having a special shareholder meeting this thursday to approve the acquisition
and there is zero indication i've talked to investment bankers about this zero indications
that this deal will fall through so that makes this as close to a hundred percent bet for the deal to close as you get and so about two weeks
after the special shareholder meeting on thursday we should see the deal close and ctlpp is trading
for about three percent under the acquisition price of $62.30. That means you get 3% for three weeks. In a market like this,
in any market, by the way, getting 3% for three weeks is phenomenal. So just a little tip there.
Just on the theme of being picky and careful, TSSI, that was a pick I gave you guys at under $3 a share.
It ran to $30 a share.
So we got a 10 bagger out of that stock.
And at that point, I was already out and told you the valuation from a mathematical perspective
was too high for the risk at $21.
And now it is down to 13 because of the results that Dell gave.
Rough guidance, rough margins, plus the threat
of competition coming in. So just a cautionary tale there. And what I have done, just to put a
bow on this, is pivot away from TSSI, having been my largest AI name, to gatekeeper systems G K P R F is now my personal largest position and the
reason being I broke it on this show a couple months ago that they had won a
23 million dollar 30 million Canadian the largest deal in their history almost
as large as their entire revenue from last year with New York City, the MTA, the largest
transit authority in North America. They're already doing business with number three and
number five. That's Toronto and Philadelphia. So they are the dominant player out there right now.
The only other disruptor out there is a company called Bus Patrol. And their business model has been to give all the equipment away and try to make money on residuals on the back end.
Well, guess what?
That's put them in financial disarray.
They've got a ton of debt now.
And that has given Gatekeeper the impetus to go into these deals and say, do you really want to take a chance that this company is going to be around in the future?
And these municipalities, on top of seeing the gatekeeper, has the better solution to say,
we don't want to risk our jobs.
We don't want to risk our reputations.
And so they're going with gatekeeper.
Hey, Mark.
Yep.
Did they ever PR this yet or publicly acknowledge it on a CC or anything?
Well, after I broke the news that they had been selected by New York, they were forced to PR it.
So they did PR the selection.
But after the selection, the selection was ratified, which means this is going through.
They just need to sign the contract.
The contract is going to get signed any day or any week now.
And they'll also, on top of PR-ing that they had won this deal.
Where did they PR it?
I'm looking at the stream.
I don't see it.
I would have to find that for you.
I think they might have filed.
There might have been a SEC filing, not a press release?
Yeah, it might have been.
It would have been a Cedar filing, the SEC in Canada.
Oh, I see.
Okay.
Right.
So now they've got the number one, number three and number five.
Imagine who number two and number four is going to go with transit authorities in North America.
And there is a mandate that approximately two years from right now, every train in America that is government trains are going to have to have monitoring cameras on them. And this is the number one
player when it comes to monitoring cameras, especially when you're incorporating AI into the
equation to keep an eye on what's going on out there instead of having people do it.
So they're winning these deals left and right. The CEO, there was an obscure interview that was
done with him a couple of weeks ago where he stated that he has now remember this
was a 23 million dollar deal he stated that in their pipeline is now a 70 million dollar deal
also a hundred million dollar deal and i've already uh stated that the deal that they got
with long island it's only one eighth of the total New
York market. So that's an additional $200 million deal to be won. And this is a company that only
did 37 million in revenue last year. So we're going like, this is going to be this next two
years. I wouldn't want to be in the stock after two years from now, because the comps are going
to get rough, but I don't think they're going to be public by then, because they've just got this flood of business that's going to come in.
And then after that, all those cameras are going to generate recurring AI monitoring revenue. So
I see this stock going to three bucks over the next year or so. It's still in the low ones. And
there you go, folks. That's my largest AI holding at this point awesome
by the way haven't had a loser in 15 months now
no 13 that's awesome all right good job money mark happy to hear about GK PRF
I've been following that story and we got to move to our next segment you want
to change the title there so we're gonna be interviewing the chairman of tonx right now Manny and
this is a very interesting story I think everyone should stick around here
because it regards regarding the telegram app and you guys all know about
telegram and there's very few if any opportunities to invest in telegram
besides for this one so very excited to hear about this. There it is. TUNX Chairman
interview up there. Let's see. Manny, are you here? I'm here, guys. Thanks for having me. Hope
everyone had a great Labor Day weekend. Beautiful. Thank you. And before we get started, any opening
words there? Yeah, just as always, anytime we bring on people onto these spaces, it is for
educational purposes only, not a recommendation to buy any stock or
security out there. Please do your own due diligence. We just like to work with different
people to get the word out there as well. So this definitely is one of those opportunities,
and we're excited to have Manny on here. And Manny, if you want to, just give us a quick
If you want to, just give us a quick introduction and then I'll let Ben kind of handle some of the question portion of this.
introduction, and then I'll let Ben kind of handle some of the question portion of this.
Sure. Happy to. Again, thanks for giving me such a distinguished audience.
So my name is Manny. I'm an entrepreneur who happens to be an investor.
I started my own investment business in my late 20s called Kingsway Capital, based in London.
Took it from zero to five billion in assets.
And we are focused originally on frontier and emerging market equities, did some frontier and emerging market venture capital, including fintech, got into crypto roughly five years ago.
And we are focused originally on frontier and emerging market equities.
And now had, before I took this role, roughly $2.5 billion in crypto.
And Toncoin, which is the layer one blockchain integrating with Telegram, has been by far my biggest um you know token investment
and um we um invested in ton coin starting roughly three and a half years ago i joined the foundation
board um became president of foundation we're also ton coin is publicly backed by sequoia benchmark
ribbit vy capital which is one of the biggest backers of Elon. And then I just basically architected this,
for lack of a better word, first and only Ton digital asset treasury company. Now just rebranded
this morning with the ticker TonX. And I'm very, very excited to be talking to you today. I'm the
executive chairman, the biggest investor. And yeah, we really want to talk maybe about first a bit about Telegram,
then about Ton, and then most importantly about the company.
Yeah, absolutely.
And before we dig into that, I just want to highlight what you said,
a ticker symbol changed today from VIRB, V-E-R-B, to TonX, T-O-N-X.
I think the timing is really good here.
I just want to add from a technical perspective,
we're at the 50 D dma rsi is oversold
disclaimer i do own some of this and as em alluded to there manny is a sponsor of this program but
that's not going to stop me from getting into this stuff um so yeah let's hear about correct me if i'm
wrong first is this i think this might be the only way to invest kind of directly or tangentially into Telegram
and the Telegram ecosystem.
I'd love to hear your take on what is this Telegram ecosystem worth, how much is it worth,
and what part of it do you have?
Absolutely.
I mean, look, Telegram is, in my mind, an N of one asset run by an N of one founder. You know, Telegram has over a billion monthly active users
and is growing.
That puts it as the number two spot globally
in terms of messaging apps.
And, you know, the first billion is the hardest, right?
It is still growing.
The plan is to go from one billion to two billion
to three billion, maybe four.
You know, WhatsApp sits roughly at three billion.
And it
adds roughly two and a half million users a
day. And
WhatsApp isn't growing.
And it is also the number six app
in the entire world in terms of number of
users in social media.
Now let's go through the list of the other five
and ask the question, which of them are doing
crypto? You've got basically
WhatsApp, Facebook, and Instagram. So far at least haven't been allowed.
And I think Zuckerberg might well try to go back into stablecoins, and I think that would
validate our thesis.
I mean, arguably it's a trillion dollar idea.
Don't take my word for it, but consider that if you're Zuckerberg sitting in what, 1.8
trillion market cap, how to move your needle?
He thought this could.
And then the other two big apps, which are in China, you know, one is Tencent, WeChat. You know, Tencent became Asia's
most valuable corporation with the trillion in peak market cap. And of course, ByteDance owns
TikTok. Neither can do, they do crypto, right? So if you exclude those five, WhatsApp, Instagram,
Facebook, WeChat, and ByteDance, Telegram is actually the world's number one that has done it.
It's live. It's deployed.
So if any of you gives me your Telegram handle right now,
I can send you TonCoin from anywhere in the world
by pressing a button for a fraction of a penny, right,
at the speed of light.
And the wallet in the US has only launched in July.
So this is brand new.
Telegram has 86 million or so users in the
US and is growing. And importantly, you know, Toncoin is not yet fully available in the
US. This is pre-Coinbase. This is pre-Gemini listing. Robinhood just flicked it on last
week where everyone's on holiday. Toncoin is also not yet listed on the largest Korean
exchange, which is Upbit, which is bigger than Coinbase.
And it's one of the biggest things in crypto that no one's ever heard about, right?
And then, so Telegram is really exciting.
What Telegram can do with Ton inside it is pretty special, right?
So, of course, imagine you have a wallet inside the app now, right?
And again, you can look up Telegram wallet and you see how it works,
but it's literally really improving the UI, UX
by a factor of 10.
And imagine one door inside Telegram
into the world of crypto,
behind that door, the entire sort of city of crypto, right?
You've got the wallet in the US,
sadly only in self-custodial form,
but internationally, you've got it both
in self-custodial and non-custodial.
And then you've got, of course, all the applications from stablecoins to DeFi and NFTs. You can own your username on Telegram.
You can't do that on X, right?
And those usernames have become very popular and valuable.
You can own gifts, you know, and Snoop Dogg just launched a bunch of gifts and other celebrities are queuing up.
You can do gaming.
And really, I'm happy to talk a lot more about the use cases,
but it's a rabbit hole, right?
And basically, the way I sort of look at the crypto cycle,
again, keep in mind, I'm an investor myself.
Of course, Bitcoin has done very well,
and that's normally how these cycles start.
But I think this time, Bitcoin had an unusually strong relative performance
until quite recently against the altcoins for, I guess,
the obvious reason that only Bitcoin had the institutional bid, right?
You had the ETF, and then you had the treasury companies, right?
And you didn't have them in altcoins until quite recently, right?
Ethereum, you've just seen the impact of what the half a dozen to a dozen
Ethereum treasury companies have already had on Ethereum,
arguably just getting started. And there's at least five Solana duds
in the capital markets right now that I know of.
And I think that will also have an impact on Sol.
And so now, of course, Ton also has one, which is this company, right?
And this is the only way, effectively, to get equity exposure to, of course, to Ton, but also indirectly to Telegram.
And Telegram is not a Mac 7 company, but maybe a Mac 15 or Mac 20 company, right?
And indeed, I think, you know, in crypto, it could well play out like the Mac 7.
I mean, it's, of course, my theory only, right?
But hear me out.
You know, what I mean by that, look, I can't tell you whether it's 3, 5, or 7, right?
But a small number of crypto protocols are clearly candidates to become trillion-dollar protocols.
Bitcoin's at 2 trillion, right?
Already there.
And going higher, in my opinion.
But if Bitcoin goes from 2 to 4 trillion, that's only a 2x, right?
Ethereum is at half a trillion, clearly the next candidate.
And if Ethereum is a trillion, it's a 2x again, right? And I think that will happen, right? Ethereum is at half a trillion, clearly the next candidate. And if Ethereum is a trillion, it's a 2x again, right? And I think that will
happen, right? But, you know, quote-unquote only a 2x. You know, Solana is at 100 billion.
You know, that would be, you know, 10x to go to trillion. But Ton's at, like, high single
digit billion, right? So that was, like, 50 times smaller than Ethereum and, like,
12 times smaller than Solana. So if you believe, like I do, that if Ton is in that
club, right? And we're not really competing with those guys, it's not like Apple competed with Google
and Google competed with them. I mean, of course, they're competing, but it's not like they ate their lunch. Everything got
bigger. And I think this is the same thing. And then, of course, the treasury company
is another way to play it, but I'll pause here.
So just to really simple high level, Ton is the digital currency of
Telegram. And Telegram really simple high level ton is the digital currency of telegram right and right and telegram
is so massive like the way i thought of it it's like a economy onto itself with the digital
currency or ton what can you tell us about you know when this ton digital currency was introduced
in telegram and how much business uh or is being transacted with that or what are the use cases is
it yeah no it? People sending
money to each other? What's the
value of this?
It's a great
analogy to talk about almost like
a digital nation. I recorded actually with
Balaji Srinivasan last night.
For those of you who don't know,
very early Stanford professor,
got a lot of people into Bitcoin in the early 2010s,
was CTO of Coinbase, and then
GP at A16Z, and then he authored the network state.
And his theory is that blockchains are basically
network states, and I raised him the network continent. I think this is sort of
America and cyberspace, the new world. And for those of you who don't know why America
is called America, I can enlighten you.
So America was named in honor of Amerigo Vespucci, a Florentine Italian explorer, which is true.
But Vespucci was a European gentleman, so he wasn't so full of himself to name himself
after himself.
It was a random German guy from my village, true story.
So his name was Martin Waldseemüller, and he basically made the first map in 1507
and asked the question,
what should we call this new place,
the new world, right?
And he named it in honor of Amerigo Vespucci
having thought he found it,
which isn't true.
Long story short,
this is basically America in cyberspace
where we've got a billion users already,
and we have an opportunity
to own a fraction of,
I don't know,
America, as you know, was owned, like Alaska was owned by the Russians,
and the French owned Louisiana, and like, you know, the Duke of Westminster owned, I think,
much of Virginia. And so you can own a piece of this. How big is the, like, you know, the nation
state? I mean, we have got like, you know, a billion telegram users, right? That is, you know,
soon to be the biggest, you know, population of any physical country in the world, you know, a billion Telegram users, right, that is, you know, soon to be the biggest, you know, population of any physical country in the world.
You know, as you know, China and India, roughly at 1.4, will overtake that.
And it arguably is going to be one of the richest countries in the world as well.
If you think about the people who are on Telegram, all of crypto more or less runs on Telegram, right, in terms of messaging at least.
Now, look, not every Telegram user is yet on Ton.
You know, the stated goal is to have, you know, to start with a third of messaging at least. Now, look, not every Telegram user is yet on Tone. The stated goal is to start with a third of the user base.
They would put it today at 300 million users.
We're roughly a third there.
We probably got 100 million wallet activations.
There might be some duplications in there,
but it's all on-chain data, right?
And this basically went from like 2 million
to like 100 in the last 18 months.
And this is only really 18 months old.
Crucially, it has avoided the US so far.
And that was a self-imposed regulation
under Biden-Harris, maybe the right call.
But of course, now under the new administration,
you know, Ton is making a decisive market entry to the US.
The wallet went live in July only.
This is like six weeks ago.
You know, we're not even yet
on the largest crypto exchange in the US.
That's Coinbase.
Now, Coinbase Ventures already invested in TonCoin
you can look at that online
and Robinhood flicked it just on
again in the last week
and Gemini is missing and USDC is missing
let's just say that's all coming
and of course this company is also public
and this is again a new thing that
got lost in the summer lull
the thing we've realized
is that this is a race.
In Ethereum, there's Bitmine leading, but there's also five others.
The same in Solana.
In Ton, there is no second best TonFreshi company.
We're the only one, the most dominant one by default.
I'll pause here.
Ton, I'm just checking on coin market cap
is worth $8 billion market cap.
How much of that, Dion?
What percent of 8 billion of these coins, Dion?
Yeah, so basically on the last press release we did,
was it now 12 days ago?
It's like just over 3%.
But you keep in mind, we own more Toncoin
than Saylor owns Bitcoin, right? And of course, much, much more percentage of
let's say Bitmine owns of Ethereum. Like in fact, we own more
coin of any other ecosystem like that, right? We could be more
aggressive if we choose to, and I ask myself, why not, right?
Because this is like, why don't we go to 4%, 5%, 6%, 7%, 8%,
and just be outdoing Sayor being Sailor, right?
And, you know, it's been discussed and we will...
Is it me or do you guys hear him?
Sorry, sorry, ready to cut out?
You're good now.
Great, sorry for that. Sorry, so ready to cut out? You're good. Great.
Sorry for that.
Cut out again?
No, I'm here.
The last thing we heard when you were talking about the Sailor and the owning about 8%, I think, was the last piece that came through clearly.
No, no.
So Sailor, like, you know, just the point I want to make, right, is that, you know, this is a winner takes most game, in my humble opinion.
Sailor figured this out. And, you know, he is, what, 30 times bigger than the number two,
right? And it doesn't mean that the number two can't perform well. Of course, it can,
Metaplanet and others, right? But I don't think they can catch up with Saylor. The reason for that is, it's massive economies of scale in raising capital, especially the cost of the capital,
right? I mean, Saylor can snip a finger, raise another billion dollars. And, you know, I think massive economies of scale in raising capital, especially the cost of the capital.
I mean, say I can snip a finger, raise another billion dollars,
and I think people are much less excited about Bitcoin treasury company number 175.
And now in Ethereum, there's a race.
I think we really respect the BitMine, Beam, and our team,
and we're actually sort of emulating or copying their playbook. Happy to talk about in detail what that means.
But there's five or six other contenders, right?
And in Tonda is no race.
We are the number one.
We're the only one as well.
And above that, we are more dominant than any of the other duds.
We own more percent of Toncoin already than Saylor owns of Bitcoin, right?
And no one's ever heard about us yet.
And of course, we also have Telegram, right? Which, you know, people have heard about. yet and of course we also have telegram right which you
know people have heard about and um and that's a real company right as i said number six app in
the entire world and and and so we're just getting started and um you know we're um you know really
introducing ourselves for the very very first time to the u.s equity investor this is my very very
first twitter spaces or x spaces ever awesome is there any like with ethereum i
know there's staking revenue that can be had yes can you get revenue somehow from this of course
you know this is i think a huge advantage we have over the bitcoin companies right
where you know they don't have native yield we do right now of course as do the solana and
ethereum ones too right now the staking yield is around 5% on a gross basis.
And if you do the math, our latest NAF print was around $800 million of treasury.
That's like 40 million gross.
And even if you pay some fees away to delegated staking,
that's in the 30s of millions of revenue, day one.
And the key to understand is that we have a pretty lean cost base. I mean, this is like
building an asset management business. Hell, I've built a multi-billion dollar asset management
business myself. And it's again where you charge a very small percentage of a very large number.
Abracadabra, it's still a large number. And at least on the cash flow basis we want this business profitable
we want to also you know eventually consider owning our own staking infrastructure we still
don't pay any fees away and have no leakage there from gross to net and then maybe maybe why don't
we do delegated staking right and again i can't promise this and this is sort of you know something
we're thinking about right but like you know all the big ton investors uh who hold the coins um
are also big shareholders in the company already, right?
And, you know, they need to, of course, stake their coins somewhere, and they need to pay some staking provider to do that.
Why don't they let all the profits accrue in the list go, right?
Where you get a multiple, circle trades pretty well, right?
So imagine you have not only a balance sheet, hopefully with a multiple, but also a P&L or cash flow statement, also hopefully with a multiple.
Double that, right?
And then next, why don't we go further?
Why don't we talk about the stablecoins, right?
Now, it's been discussed, right?
Again, I can't promise that this happens.
And if it happens, I can't promise that it will 100% benefit this company.
100% benefit this company, but I can promise I'm going to work for the common stockholder.
But I can promise I'm going to work for the common stockholder, right?
And I can tell you that Telegram-Ton stablecoin could be a big idea.
Now, this is simple mani math, right?
Hear me out.
Imagine $1,000 in the stablecoin per person, which $1,000 in your bank account is, for
the average Telegram user, not a crazy amount of money.
Keep in mind, there's rich people on Telegram, there's also poor people on Telegram, right?
But if $1,000 times a billion people,
it's a trillion-dollar AUM business, right?
At a 3% net interest margin,
there will be $30 billion of cash flow a year.
Now, even if you pay half of that straight to Telegram,
which you probably would,
Circle Coinbase, right, distribution fee,
you'd still have $15 billion left, right?
And maybe that's a pipe train,
you can cut that number in half a couple times, but maybe there's a big business here, right?
So we're definitely going to do everything we can to drive shareholder value
and we're super excited about that. Maybe I did the math
wrong. You said 3% of 8 billion, I'm coming to
240 million, but I just heard you say you have 800 million worth of the coin.
Yeah, I mean, again, I need to refer in this case because of RegFD to the last NAF statement,
which was done roughly two weeks ago. So you look at our website, and that was $800 million
of the coin, right? And the gross staking yield will be around four and a half to five. And of
course, we're already squeezing the staking
leakage fees. You pay from
gross to net, you pay some staking
fees away. So maybe
conservatively apply a 4%.
I mean, this is all public data. You can look up
what you get on the staking site
on Ton. But then
you will have
4% times 800 million.
And of course, NAF is fluctuating.
It's a function of the number of coins and the spot price.
Again, everyone with a calculator can figure that out.
And that should be a baseline assumption
for what we can generate in terms of staking revenues.
And then I just made two examples,
delegated staking where we do this for third parties
and next the stable coin where we could generate real cash flows in addition to the
balance sheet, which of course is the starting point for every digital asset treasury company,
including ours.
Okay, so I'm trying to look it up.
Do you remember what you last reported two weeks ago?
Like, did you report the NAV per share?
Yeah, I mean, we didn't do it on a per share basis, but the share count is public.
So basically, it was just shy of $800 million, that includes cash, and the coin was a bit
higher than it is today.
And at that point, I think it was roughly just shy of $ bucks a share, which, you know, again, if you do
the math from there today, what the coin did, so the coin has dropped a bit, which frankly
suits us as one of the biggest net buyers of it, right?
But the stock's actually down a lot.
I don't want to comment on that too much other than that maybe it's worth, you know, listening
to the opening remarks of, you remarks of this could be interesting.
Okay, got it.
Roughly the NAV, you're right around, not really a premium for this, I would say.
That's a nice characterization compared to some of these other treasury companies which
have a premium.
Will, Emp, do you have any comments or questions? Dougie does. Dougie does. Let's
go to Dougie first. How's it going? All right. I have some questions here. Verb, V-E-R-B,
familiar with that stock ticker. So did you acquire them? Did you merge with them and
then create T-O-N-X? Is that how that worked? T-O-N strategy? Yeah, so technically speaking, neither.
There was no change of control.
We didn't merge anything.
We did a $558 million common equity pipe,
which is the way BitMine did it with BMNR and Ethereum.
I'm happy to explain why we did it this way,
but I think it's the best way of going about pivoting an existing listed
company with a digital asset strategy.
It's the fastest.
We closed this transaction the week of announcement.
So we announced it on August 4th, closed that Friday, and then also announced a billion dollar
ATM that same week.
And we just renamed it, both the company and the ticker
this morning before market open again it's all press release on the website all right perfect
so i'm going to be watching this one because that chart is looking pretty good and you said it was
down it's dipping down a little bit but you are going to be bouncing up we'll watch for the bottom
and call that out and then so the ton coin So you have a coin that's obviously running through Telegram.
And can you buy it on the Phantom wallet?
Are you familiar with Phantom wallet?
Not yet.
Not yet.
I'm familiar.
But assume people have talked to Phantom.
But again, for me, this is, again, massive opportunity, right?
Like, you're not on Coinbase yet.
But again, I can try to speculate
what might be happening there,
but, you know, just assume if you're Walmart,
it might make sense to list Coca-Cola, right?
At some point, right?
And it's just come on Robinhood.
It's not yet on Gemini.
It's not yet on Coinbase, not yet on Phantom.
But, you know, this is Telegram, right?
This is not like a Mickey Mouse project. You know, Telegram has Phantom. But, you know, this is Telegram, right? This is not like a Mickey Mouse project.
You know, Telegram has like, I don't know,
10 times more users than Coinbase has, right?
Just to give you a sense, right?
And of course, Coinbase is huge
in terms of institutional investors,
which is what we're also super keen on.
But, you know, this is all yet to come.
Yeah, no, I would assume just being on Spaces. Super early for Toncoin, super early. Yeah, yeah no i would assume just super early super early yeah
no i just assumed just being on space is getting the word out there because i didn't even know
about it and i follow these pretty closely i do spaces on all these things the meme coins everything
in that space and uh yeah i would assume that you know it's going to get picked up on somebody's
phantom while it's a dex greener and things of that nature and that's where you're really going
to start seeing the volume pick up because obviously, like you said, Telegram's not
a little Mickey Mouse company. It's huge. I actually just started to use Telegram probably
in the last month in a couple of different chats. So it is very popular. I realized that a lot of
people are really starting to use it now. And I know it's been around for a while, but it seems
like the popularity is exploding. Everybody's like Telegram, Telegram, it now. And I know it's been around for a while, but it seems like the popularity is exploding.
Everybody's like, telegram, telegram, telegram.
So when they said you were coming on, I was like, that's so crazy.
I just started using it.
So that's interesting.
If you want to just be my little guinea pig here, maybe don't say it publicly, but if you DM me your telegram handle, I'll send you TonCoin while we are on the spaces.
Yeah, I'll shoot you in DM right now.
Perfect.
Sounds perfect.
And then once you got it, you can explain.
We can do it live on the show, basically.
Yeah, absolutely.
And I do spaces.
In addition to this one, this is more of a small cap show, but we'll talk about TO and X. But yeah, I'd be more than happy
we can talk about the
Ton coin and things of that nature as well.
So yeah, I'll shoot you a DM and I'll shoot it
back to Ben.
Great.
Do we have a hard stop at 1 p.m. or we got a couple minutes?
We don't have a hard stop today.
I got time.
Manny, a couple questions.
By the way, if anyone else has a question, just raise your hand and maybe even have some
time for audience questions.
I don't know if we have time, so you can raise your hand.
But Manny, there was a press release last week about some sort of event happening this
Friday.
Can you tell us about that?
Yeah, what we're doing is I'm releasing my first so-called chairman's message, which will be a recorded presentation, including slides, where I'm probably going to address investors for, let's say, something like 15 minutes.
You know what we're doing and what we've done so far.
I mean, it's sort of going to strike the right balance between, you know, sort of totally new investors, fresh pair of eyes, but also folks who are already familiar with Telegram, Ton, and the
company.
And we want to give some heads up.
So this will be dropped on the website on Friday after market close.
And so people have the whole weekend to consume it and then hopefully be interested, you know,
to take a fresh look on Monday morning, the 8th.
Okay, awesome. Amp, how do you feel about taking
an audience question here? Very good. I mean, yeah, let's do it.
All right, we got JayAnth. Let's see JayAnth. What's on his mind over here?
It's connecting. All right, while that's connecting, oh, there you go.
Jan, there you go.
You can unmute yourself.
Oh, I see you dropped down.
I'll toss a question into the mix here.
Manny, as my audience here and me personally as well,
so it's kind of a two part or two, twofold question here.
How can we follow along with the progression of everything?
What's the best way to stay connected with your community?
Is it Telegram?
I know a lot of these projects do hang out in that Telegram space,
which I don't think can be understated how big that is.
The fact that you guys have that partnership over there is huge.
But how can we follow along? I'm curious, where can I follow up on this? Frankly, just follow me on X.
It's at Manus Thoughts, of course. I'm speaking from that handle right now. I've got the very
same consistent handle also on Telegram, which is a channel. And we also have a corporate Telegram and X handle.
It's at tonstrat.
So that's T-O-N-S-T-R-A-T.
And all this is pretty new.
So we've probably got up to 10,000 followers,
but expected to go up a lot.
Now, look, there's, of course, in Telegram,
or at ton blockchain,
it's probably got 2 million followers or 2.5
that's the Ton official
run by the Ton Foundation which I used to chair
as president until recently
X-Handle and then there's Telegram groups
with like 10 million people in them
and at TonCoin will be the biggest
Daily Ton.
There's Pavel Duro of the Founders channel with over 10 million people in it.
So, but basically, look, if you go through my basically X feed, you know, you'll find basically all the relevant information.
I've also done a number of longer form podcasts, live interviews in the last, really in the last few weeks only. Like I've been, you know, really going, starting this in August, like only like three weeks ago. But in my X feed, you'll hopefully
find all the relevant ones. And then hopefully on Telegram, you can also follow me there.
Beautiful. One follow-up question I always like to ask is, what's a roadmap look like for you
guys as we go over the next quarter, a few quarters going? Is there certain milestone
events you guys are hoping to get to?
What's the roadmap look like today?
Sure.
Yeah, look, I mean, of course,
I don't want to steal the thunder
of my chairman's message,
but to give you a little bit of preview,
we're really executing on a post-launch plan.
Everyone's basically back to the office today, right?
So this week is a heavy lift
in terms of getting the word out.
We are going to do the same thing next week.
We have, again, the chairman's message will release a more concrete roadmap.
We're going to hit Asia very hard in the back half of the month.
So I'll be in Seoul, Korea for Korean Blockchain Week, giving a keynote speech.
Korea, keep in mind, I think is on a per capita basis,
by far the biggest retail market for
blockchain or
crypto in the world.
Upbit, the local exchange, is bigger than Coinbase
and keep in mind South Korea has
a much smaller population than
the United States.
So very excited about Korea.
Telegram is huge in Asia
at large, right?
And then I'll be in Hong Kong, I'll be at Token 2049 in Singapore.
I'll also give you a keynote speech there.
That's probably the biggest crypto event for the remainder of the year.
I'm spending quite a bit of time in Dubai.
And then of course, the US is our biggest focus, right?
And so we have folks in New York right now, and we're going gonna ring the bell on NASDAQ, we're gonna talk about the
opportunities we have in staking, the opportunities we have in the stablecoin world and also the
wonderful world of NFTs and gaming and telegram gifts. So there's a lot coming. It's almost like
a launch of telegram in the US effectively, where it's already been, again, widely used.
But keep in mind, in the US, surprising maybe to outsiders, no single messaging app is truly
dominant.
WhatsApp is big in the US, but it's relatively speaking much, much bigger outside of the
US, whether that's in Europe or in emerging markets.
And the reason for that is because in Europe, you've got 30, 40 different countries, right? So sending
text message was always expensive.
So people much more quickly adopted
the messaging apps,
right? And
that wasn't the case in the US where text message
is still used. iMessage, no one
uses iMessage outside of the US, candidly,
right? In the US, of course, a massive
iOS market share.
And then, yeah, people use Signal, but Signal is quite small.
And then people use also Telegram, right?
And Telegram is, again, growing.
It's the biggest free speech platform in the entire world.
It's 50% bigger than X, right?
And it's a different product, and it's not as dominant in the US
as it is in other parts of the world.
But that's changing, right?
So this is really, I think, an interesting story to tell.
And there's a lot coming down the pike in terms of literally every week and certainly
every month we'll have major updates.
And so definitely stay tuned and follow me on X and then I'll keep dropping on a daily
basis.
Man, one last thing for me. T1X, I assume, is pretty much available on all the trading platforms, but for whatever
reason it's not available on Fidelity, where I have most of my money.
I'd like to buy it there, but I can't.
Are you aware of that?
Yeah, we are aware of that.
Yeah, look, I mean, this is again a potential upside here, right?
The fact that Ton is not on Coinbase or on Phantom Wallet and the stock is not even on Fidelity yet.
You know, there's a saying, the early bird catches the worm, right?
You know, imagine like in the beginning Bitcoin wasn't really easy to buy, right?
And so I think it's a negative but also a positive. We know about it, we're fixing
it. As you know, Abby Johnson is a massive proponent of Bitcoin. And it's of course
like a super tank of a company. And this is in our understanding a legacy issue that will
be fixed in due time. But we've checked, for instance, I don't know, what are the big ones? Schwab or Ameritrade and interactive brokers, and that
seems to be all working. So really Fidelity is the one that seems to be missing. But
if there is a way to use another platform, again, that might be worth doing.
Thank you. That's all I got.
Thank you. That's all I got. Amp, anyone else on the panel up here, if you have any
Amp, anyone else on the panel up here, if you have any comments or questions?
This is the time. Amp, any closing thoughts before you give us Florida Manny to close it up?
Yeah, I was still wondering if one of you guys could send me your Telegram handle,
I want to demo the wallet. I mean, I asked Dougie, he's DMed me.
Anyone DM me a Telegram handle, you get free coins. Just to, I want to, you know,
then hear from you how... I already free coins. I want to then hear
from you how... I already got it.
I did that with you earlier.
Okay, good.
No one should go
empty-handed.
Great.
Amp, any
final words?
For me, this is the spot where I usually just, I've got my notes here,
and I just start to dive in to, I mean, I love the opportunity. I really appreciate Manny for
coming on today. Manny, the last thing I'll ask you is, what's the one thing that you would want
to leave with my audience today? Obviously, a lot of great information here. I know several of us
will be diving into this a little bit deeper. What's the one thing that you would say, hey, make sure you pay attention to this and definitely
check this out. This is like our stand apart thing. Obviously, you also mentioned that you
have a release coming up soon that I'm sure we'll all be keeping our eye out for.
Yeah, look, luckily, I'm a simple mind, right? And I think this is luckily not that complicated.
a simple mind, right? And I think this is luckily not that complicated. First, you've got, of course,
get convinced that Telegram is a real thing, right? That's probably the smallest leap of faith here,
right? So that's number one. I would encourage you also to study the founder. He's like literally
Elon-level good, right? I mean, he is the only living human being who's not only built an app
that a billion people use every month, there's arguably five or six others of those, but he's the only one who owns 100%
of that app. Telegram is a private company, and yes, you
can buy Telegram bonds, but that's 9% a year, not per month, right?
And if you want equity exposure, this is the only company, right?
And so then you've got to be convinced that Ton is an
exciting standalone investment case, right?
The coin, which again, there's not very complicated because we are, again, an exclusive partnership with Telegram, right?
We're not yet in the US.
That's coming.
And we had so far, you know, had, of course, not only the lack of demand of capital from the US.
And of course, there's still, you know, stuff coming.
Like, you know, we talked about what's missing, right?
But we also didn't have a treasury company.
Now, now we have one, right?
So I would say the timing is also pretty excellent, right?
And then, you know, again, the timing of this particular space is very opportunistic because,
you know, this stock was, you know, I won't comment, of course, much on the stock price
I'm not supposed to, but let's just say that you look in the chart this was like a
20 25 stock and last week on pretty low volume it went to like you know like more like a low to
mid-teens kind of stock and and just look at the past press releases and and what's sort of been
happening right again uh it doesn't take you know more than-level math to understand that this is potentially interesting here.
And so what I would leave you with is that we're in this for the long term.
We have, I think, an unfair competitive advantage with Telegram.
We have also no competition in a sense.
There is not 15 other ton related in a
treasury companies out there there is no second best and we're the most dominant
of all the treasury companies if you actually do the math right and and we're
just getting started and hopefully we've got you know competent management as an
old saying you know I'm from humility out of the window for a minute right but
never trust you know a thin chef, a fat personal trainer, or poor investment manager.
We eat our own cooking here, and we're all in.
And so we're along with you, whatever you invest, we invested orders of magnitude more,
and also we're locked up in the stock.
This is, we're not even thinking about selling it.
This is a long journey that we're excited to be partners with you and we'll be very
transparent on the shareholder basis.
So definitely, investor relations, stay
tuned. And if this is useful, I'm happy
to do this more often. I'm very excited to
be your guest on the show.
Beautiful, Manny. Appreciate
your time. Ben, any
final comments you want to leave with us today
before I close this out? No,
I was just also going to say beautiful. I mean,
it's such a unique opportunity to
accompany as big as Telegram,
and this is the only way to at least
tangentially play it. So it's
very interesting. And no one
knows about it yet, guys. Like, literally, this is
the other thing. Today's the first day. And then,
you know, usually in situations
like this, there's a scarcity premium.
So, yeah, I was able to grab some in E-Trade.
Not my big money account yet.
I hope to do that with Fidelity.
But, you know, I think there probably is an opportunity here,
and I'm looking forward to that scarcity premium
that typically comes with situations like this.
Absolutely.
Great.
Well, happy to be on the show.
Happy to do this again.
And I'm really, really excited to shed some light on this.
Thanks for giving me your time.
And yeah, all the best for a new start to the week here.
Absolutely.
Well, you see Manny or Manuel Stott's account up here.
Make sure you give that a follow
so you can follow along with the story as it continues to develop. Big shout out. Appreciate Manny coming on Stott's account up here. Make sure you give that a follow so you can follow along with the story
as it continues to develop.
Big shout out.
Appreciate Manny coming on,
spending his time
so that we get this early look.
I mean, on the first day here.
Wow, very, very exciting.
And if you're not aware
of how big Telegram is,
put that on your homework list as well.
Wouldn't you say, Ben?
Yeah, yeah, absolutely.
Especially for US investors, they may not appreciate how
big it is. It's much, much bigger internationally and domestically here, but it is growing. So
as I said the other week, it's an economy onto itself. So definitely a very interesting story
here. 100%. Well, big shout out to the crew. Thanks for being flexible today as we had the holiday
yesterday. Couldn't miss the small cap show here on Wolf Financial. Each and every Monday,
we'll be back to our normal schedule. 1 p.m. Eastern next week. You see the crew up here.
Make sure you give them all a follow. Money Mark, Dougie Fresh, Godfather. It's great to have all
you guys back and myself being able to come back as well. So we can all get on the same page here,
share some great thoughts and ideas.
And I know the audience really enjoys it.
I always get a ton of comments on this space.
So big shout out to the crew.
Make sure you're following them.
And of course, make sure you're following Manny.
We appreciate his time today.
And then you see my co-host, Ben, over at Story Trading.
We will be off for a little bit here.
And our Stock Pick show that we normally do on Monday is also tonight. A little bit different time. It's a half hour later. So 5.30
PM Eastern tonight. We have socks on spaces for a couple hours during power hour. There's a great
conversation happening off the back of that. And then at 5.30 right here on Wolf Financial,
I'll open up and we'll take a look at who's our big winners for the stock picks. And I'll say this, there is one clear leader right now who had a 2X BABA long.
Have you been following along at all with the BABA story and everything going on there?
I'm sure you probably have if you're trading the markets.
Somebody picked that last week, the ABX.
You'll have to tune in and see who that was at 530 tonight.
Appreciate everyone for tuning in.
This whole space was recorded.
If you missed anything from Tesla to small caps,
and then the great interview here with Manny and T-O-N-X
is that ticker to put on your radar there.
Make sure you go back, check the recording.
I'm closing out now.
We'll see you guys on the next space. Thank you.
