Telltales

Value Hiding in Plain Sight

Mike Nicoletti — Wed, 15 Jul 2026 21:37:49 GMT

Hormuz risk pushes Hunt’s oil call toward $80 (not $90–100), the team hunts for value on a high market — and lands on hyperscaler infrastructure over AI models — while healthcare delivers the first MRD-guided cancer approval and a live UNH margin-recovery setup.

The Cashflow Memo

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Key Takeaways

Hunt on Hormuz: a multi-week/month US–Iran stalemate keeps crude closer to $80 than $65 (not $90–100); producers still budget off the 2027 strip, so higher spot just widens backwardation rather than spurring rig activity.
Value on page one of the memo: Amazon, Microsoft (~20x earnings), and Google/Alphabet (~30x) look reasonable once hyperscaler CapEx is treated as optional and data-center replacement cost is priced as a real asset; Jason argues models are commoditizing and the durable value is token infrastructure (Amazon Trainium + hosting overlooked).
Oracle near a 52-week low after the OpenAI capacity commitment and ~$110B net debt looks more value trap than bargain; IBM’s mainframe weakness this week is a signal that legacy IT budgets are being redirected to AI, and the hosts float that canceled OpenAI deals could be equity-accretive if capacity re-contracts on the open market.
Memory inflation (gigawatt DC cost maybe doubled) is the live constraint on Nvidia: if hyperscaler CapEx does not re-rate another 30–40%, chip budgets get crowded out even if token demand stays strong; TSMC’s $60B CapEx year still screens cheap net of Taiwan political risk.
Healthcare: first FDA approval of a cancer treatment gated on an MRD (molecular residual disease) blood test (Roche/Genentech, bladder) validates the MRD-supplier thesis; UNH expected to show margin bounce on high-20s/low-30s premium hikes; BioNTech preferred over Moderna on cash discipline; Vertex’s non-opioid pain drug is inflecting as PBM formulary frictions ease; Harrow’s Q1 CVS co-pay buy-down error (negative revenue on formulary patients) is the near-term watch item.

Show Notes

[00:00:00] Intro & Welcome Mike opens Telltales; grab this week’s Cash Flow Memo at telltales.us.

[00:00:26] Exhibits A–C: Deficit, Hormuz & Oil Structure Hunt frames a multi-week Hormuz stalemate as closer-to-$80 crude with wider backwardation, producers still deciding off the 2027 strip; Exhibit A deficit runs roughly flat YoY through May, and any eventual sovereign-credit discipline will hit healthcare first.

[00:04:34] Where Is the Value? Hyperscalers on Page One Mike and Jason make the case for Amazon, Microsoft (~20x), and Google (~30x) as infrastructure bets: CapEx is optional, replacement cost of installed data centers is high, and OpenAI lease stress only reinforces that tokens-and-capacity — not the model layer — is where value accrues. Amazon’s Trainium and hosting playbook get special attention.

[00:08:24] Oracle: Cheap or Value Trap? Near a 52-week low with ~$110B net debt and heavy OpenAI-linked CapEx, Oracle draws a Charter-style leverage caution; IBM’s mainframe weakness is read as AI budget cannibalization of legacy software, and the hosts float that canceled OpenAI deals could re-rate capacity more cleanly.

[00:11:07] Nvidia, TSMC, Micron & the Memory Tax Nvidia and TSMC still screen as cheap on the memo; Jason’s live risk is memory cost doubling the price of a gigawatt of data center, crowding chip orders if hyperscaler CapEx doesn’t re-rate another 30–40%.

[00:12:34] Meta, Netflix & Content Share Meta’s cash-flow machine is hard to own without trusting Zuck’s CapEx (well above maintenance for the ad AI flywheel); Netflix at ~$73 looks like a value trap as market-share fears and content mix (Paramount improving) pressure the stock after walking away from Warner.

[00:15:43] Healthcare: MRD Approval, UNH Margins, Lilly & Cash-Rich Biotechs First FDA approval of a treatment administered off an MRD molecular test (Roche/Genentech, bladder cancer) validates the residual-disease thesis; UNH expected to print a margin bounce on high-20s/low-30s premium hikes; Lilly stays expensive for a reason; BioNTech preferred to Moderna on post-COVID cash discipline.

[00:21:29] Vertex Pipeline & Harrow/CVS Fix Vertex: kidney PDUFA path, non-opioid pain drug prescription data inflecting as PBM formulary issues ease, and a type-1 diabetes stem-cell program advancing; Harrow’s Q1 CVS co-pay buy-down created negative revenue on formulary patients — corrected, but Q2 commentary is the tell.

[00:24:54] Next Week & Close Hunt tees up page-20-and-back value hunting for next week; World Cup final Sunday in New Jersey; back in seven days.

Get the full Cash Flow Memo with updated financials on ~80 companies at telltales.us — new episodes every week.

Cashtags

$AMZN $BNTX $BRK.B $BWA $CHTR $CVS $GOOGL $HROW $HYNX $IROC $JPM $KO $LLY $META $MRNA $MSFT $MU $NFLX $NVDA $ORCL $PFE $PZG $TSM $UBER $UNH $VRTX

This post and the information herein are intended for informational purposes only. The views expressed herein are the author’s alone and do not constitute an offer to sell, or a recommendation to purchase, or a solicitation of an offer to buy, any security, nor a recommendation for any investment product or service. While certain information contained herein has been obtained from sources believed to be reliable, neither the author nor any of his employers or their affiliates have independently verified this information, and its accuracy and completeness cannot be guaranteed. Accordingly, no representation or warranty, express or implied, is made as to, and no reliance should be placed on, the fairness, accuracy, timeliness or completeness of this information. The author and all employers and their affiliated persons assume no liability for this information and no obligation to update the information or analysis contained herein in the future.

Weekend Update - W2628

Mike Nicoletti — Sun, 12 Jul 2026 14:01:14 GMT

▶ Explore this week’s Tape — live, sortable, drill-down →

Micron and Intel Poured the Same Concrete This Week. The Market Paid One and Punished the Other.

Micron and Intel spent the same seven days making the same bet: tens of billions of dollars, poured into American fabs, on the promise that the chips coming out the other end will pay for the concrete. The market paid one and punished the other. Micron raised its U.S. commitment to a quarter-trillion dollars and poured first concrete in Clay, New York a full quarter ahead of schedule, and the stock treated it as vindication.¹ ² Intel spent the week watching its process-node timeline slip toward 2027 and its oldest rival pass it in the one number that was supposed to be safe. Same reshoring headline. Opposite verdict.

The tell isn’t who’s spending. Both are spending. The tell is whose cash already showed up.

Page three of the Cash Flow Memo put both names side by side this week, and the cash flow statements underneath them could not look less alike. Micron’s free cash flow grew almost nine hundred percent year over year, to roughly twenty-six billion dollars trailing, and the stock rose with it — about forty times trailing free cash flow, which is not a stock getting more expensive so much as a company whose cash generation finally caught its own multiple from behind.³ The two-hundred-fifty-billion-dollar pledge and the early concrete are Micron telling you, per Bloomberg, that it reads this as a supercycle and not a spike.⁴ That’s the bull case, and the cash flow statement is genuinely backing it.

Here’s the part the show didn’t have room for. Memory is the most violently cyclical business in semiconductors, and a cash-flow explosion of this size has, in every prior cycle, been the sound a top makes — peak DRAM pricing, printed straight to the cash flow line, right before it reverts. The entire bull thesis is that this time is structurally different: HBM demand from the AI buildout, long-dated contracts, three suppliers finally acting disciplined instead of flooding the market. Grant all of it, and you still owe yourself the honest shape of it. The contracted, AI-tied book is a slice; the merchant DRAM that fills out the rest still rides the spot cycle, and the swing factor that decides which way the whole thing breaks isn’t Micron at all. It’s whether Samsung and SK Hynix hold supply discipline or reach for share. A nine-hundred-percent cash number tells you the cycle is at its best. It does not tell you the cycle is over.

Intel is the same lesson photographed from the other side. There’s no honest multiple to put on it — free cash flow is negative, capex ran about thirteen billion trailing, and none of that spending has turned into a profitable 18A yield yet.⁵ The number that actually moved this week wasn’t a valuation ratio; it was five point eight billion to five point one billion, AMD reported over Intel in data-center revenue, a line that had never crossed before.⁶ Intel is spending upstream of execution it cannot yet prove. Micron is spending downstream of demand it can already bank. The market isn’t anti-capex or pro-capex this week. It’s pricing the timing of the payoff — and it sorted the two names accordingly.

The cashflow read is in Marcus’s column below; short version, the best yield-and-growth combination on the entire tape this week isn’t even a chip name. It’s the copper going into the buildings both of these companies are racing to fill.

What changes the read is a calendar, not an opinion. Taiwan Semi reports Thursday, and it’s the real test of whether Micron’s supercycle extends across the chip complex or stays a memory-only story; ASML reports Wednesday, the upstream tell on whether the orders behind all this concrete are still coming.⁷⁸ On Micron itself, the test on the next print is whether DRAM pricing holds — the thesis breaks the day spot rolls over and the contracted slice can’t carry the merchant book. On Intel, the test isn’t an earnings beat at all. It’s whether 18A yields profitably on the 2027 timeline this week’s reporting just laid out. Mark both.

Wall Street’s consensus on the chip complex: memory and logic are one semiconductor trade. Micron and Intel just spent a week proving they’re two — one compounding, one pricing in a turnaround a year later than it hoped. The harder question is the one the cash explosion buries: whether Micron’s nine hundred percent is a new plateau, or the same old memory peak wearing an AI badge.

The Tape — W2628

Universe of 94 cashflow-memo names, snap dates 2026-07-03 → 2026-07-10. Composite is rank-sum percentile of FCF Yield + NTM Revenue Growth (higher = better balance). Banks and finance-book names shown separately.

Telltales Yield — Top 10

From the Cashflow Desk — Marcus Graham

The best-balanced name on the tape this week isn’t a chip stock or a software stock — it’s a copper miner. Freeport-McMoRan tops the composite at a 6.7% FCF yield against 20.4% NTM revenue growth, at 14.9x EV/FCF. That pairing — cash-cow yield bolted to growth-stock top line — is the AI power buildout showing up one layer beneath the silicon. Every data center Micron and Intel are racing to feed needs copper by the ton, and the tape is starting to pay the picks-and-shovels before the second-order names catch a bid. Consensus still files Freeport under cyclical commodity, which is the read that misses when a secular demand leg gets bolted onto a cyclical business. The test is the Q2 print later this month: whether realized copper pricing confirms the growth the tape is already paying for.

Telltales Yield — Bottom 10

This Week’s Reporters

Sector Medians

Debt / FCF Watch (highest leverage on TTM FCF)

Weekly Price Movement

Top 5 (week-over-week price)

Bottom 5 (week-over-week price)

Banks (shown separately — FCF metric not meaningful)

Finance-book — FCF not comparable

Customer-float / captive-finance / reserve businesses (IBKR broker float, KMX CarMax Auto Finance, PYPL customer funds, CRCL stablecoin reserves). The memo’s operating-FCF method overstates their FCF, so they are held off the ranked leaderboard pending the P&L-waterfall rebuild.

Data Gaps

91 of 91 ranked-eligible names ranked. 0 dropped for missing FCF yield or NTM revenue growth; 7 shown separately (banks + finance-book, FCF not comparable).

Source: cashflow-memo master_2026-07-10.csv. NTM growth from analyst-estimates consensus. Composite is a percentile rank, not a recommendation.

The Issue — This Week's Brief

The Issue — Weekend Update W2628

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The Cashflow Memo

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W2628 — Micron’s Cash Flow Explosion, Intel’s Data-Center Loss, and Satellites Coming for Cable

Micron’s cash flow explosion, Intel’s data-center loss, and satellites coming for cable.

The Telltales Weekend Update. Ava Cabot and analyst Marcus Graham walk through what happened this week — and what’s coming next — across the companies in the Cash Flow Memo. About 14 minutes. No filler.

Download the memo at telltales.us. Hunt, Jason, and Mike are back Wednesday on episode E2629.

Chapter markers

Time | Segment
0:00 | Opening disclaimer
0:15 | Cold open — throughline + prior-Wed callback
0:50 | Theme — Satellites Come for Cable (Comcast, Charter, T-Mobile)
5:00 | Deep dive — Micron vs. Intel
9:15 | Rapid-fire (NextEra Energy, Apple, Broadcom)
11:45 | Close — Consensus Watch + forward week
12:15 | Closing disclaimer

Full transcript

Opening disclaimer

Ava: The following conversation is intended for informational purposes only. You should always do your own work to determine if an investment is suitable for you.

Cold open

Ava: You’re listening to the Telltales Weekend Update. I’m Ava Cabot.

Marcus: And I’m Marcus Graham — the cashflow desk.

Ava: Quick note: the show is produced entirely with AI tools, and both voices you’re hearing are AI-generated. Send feedback through the Substack.

Ava: Micron just proved what it looks like to win the right side of a technology cycle. Intel proved what it looks like to lose one. Same week, same memo page, completely different cash flow statements — one company’s free cash flow is up almost 900%, the other’s is negative. And it wasn’t just semiconductors — Comcast, Charter, and T-Mobile all got hit with the same question from Wall Street this week: what happens to your subscriber base when a satellite can do what your cable line does? Two banks think it’s a real problem. One thinks it’s overblown. We’ll get into who’s actually right, per the numbers.

Ava: On Wednesday, Hunt, Jason, and Mike ran their mid-year predictions scorecard — grading calls on pharma M&A, the AI buildout, and Tesla’s Robotaxi race against Waymo, closing out the full review without needing a second week[^ep-e2628]. This weekend, two different incumbent stories: who’s getting outflanked, and who’s spending like they know it.

Theme — Satellites Come for Cable

Ava: On page 6 of the Cash Flow Memo this week — Comcast, Charter, and T-Mobile all got the same verdict delivered from three different directions. The threat has a name now: Starlink. It’s been a hypothetical for two years. This week, for the first time, the sell side started putting actual subscriber-loss numbers on it instead of just gesturing at the risk — and the three companies are responding to that same threat in three completely different ways.

Ava: Comcast is dealing with it by spending on two fronts at once. Comcast-owned Sky agreed to buy ITV’s media and entertainment business for up to £1.6 billion — roughly $2.1 billion — with a £200 million earn-out riding on future ad performance[^cmcsa-sky-itv-acquisition-20260706]. Closer to home, Comcast also hit a construction milestone this week, wiring 15,700 new homes and businesses in New Jersey for Xfinity[^cmcsa-phillipsburg-expansion-20260707] — the fiber build going one direction while Wall Street models the satellite bleed going the other. And that’s the real story: Morgan Stanley cut its Comcast price target to $30 from $33 this week, now modeling Starlink at 16 million U.S. broadband subscribers by 2030, costing Comcast and Charter combined 400,000–500,000 broadband subscribers a year[^cmcsa-morgan-stanley-target-20260707]. Marcus — is 6.5 times too cheap, or exactly right?

Marcus: Comcast is the cheapest stock in the entire memo, and the market’s telling you exactly why it’s willing to leave it there. 6.5 times trailing free cash flow, on a 15% yield[^memo-cmcsa-evfcf-20260331]. Free cash flow was already down about 21% year over year going into this[^memo-cmcsa-growth-20260331]. That’s not a value stock. That’s a stock priced for a shrinking subscriber base — and this week Morgan Stanley just told you how much more shrinking they expect. The test is whether the ITV content actually slows the bleed, or whether Morgan Stanley’s subscriber-loss estimate turns out to be the optimistic one.

Ava: Charter’s getting hit even harder — and it’s not just one bank. Barclays slashed its price target from $200 to $130 this week[^chtr-barclays-target-20260708], and Wells Fargo cut theirs too, citing the same deteriorating broadband trend[^chtr-wells-fargo-target-20260707]. Charter also confirmed it’s shutting down a Network Operations Center team this week[^chtr-noc-closure-20260709] — cost-cutting on the ground while two banks cut targets on paper. The one piece of good news: a California regulator recommended approval of Charter’s $34.5 billion acquisition of Cox Communications, clearing a real hurdle toward closing[^chtr-cpuc-recommendation-20260709]. Marcus, the cashflow take.

Marcus: Charter’s the one carrying real balance-sheet risk in this story. 12.5 times trailing free cash flow, but the number that actually matters is leverage — debt to free cash flow at 10.5 times[^memo-chtr-evfcf-20260331][^memo-chtr-debtfcf-20260331]. Free cash flow’s already down 12% year over year[^memo-chtr-growth-20260331]. That kind of price target cut from Barclays in one note isn’t analyst noise — that’s a bank telling you the subscriber math and the leverage math are now the same problem. Watch the leverage ratio, not the multiple. That’s what breaks first if Cox doesn’t close clean or the bleed accelerates.

Ava: And then there’s T-Mobile — the one name in this trio Wall Street can’t agree on. Bank of America upgraded T-Mobile to Buy this week, $220 price target, arguing the market is straight-up overreacting to satellite fears[^tmus-bofa-upgrade-20260706]. Two days later, Wells Fargo initiated coverage at Equal Weight, $170 target, citing Starlink as a real threat to postpaid growth[^tmus-wf-initiation-20260708]. It wasn’t a clean week operationally either — a network outage on July 7 hit more than 2,000 users[^tmus-outage-20260707]. And in the middle of that split analyst decision, T-Mobile also lost a 28-year veteran — Chief Business and Product Officer Mike Katz stepped down, staying on only as an advisor through December[^tmus-katz-exit-20260707]. Marcus — who’s actually right here?

Marcus: T-Mobile’s the only one of these three actually growing into its number. Just under 16 times trailing free cash flow, and free cash flow’s up 6% year over year — not down, up[^memo-tmus-evfcf-20260331][^memo-tmus-growth-20260331]. Management’s still buying back stock, $12 billion trailing twelve months[^memo-tmus-buyback-20260331]. That’s not a balance sheet bracing for a satellite hit. Bank of America and Wells Fargo disagree because the numbers genuinely don’t show the damage yet at T-Mobile — the disagreement is really about which cable and wireless name gets hit first, and right now T-Mobile’s cash flow statement is voting with BofA.

Ava: Verizon’s in the same boat, for what it’s worth — Wells Fargo started coverage there this week too, same Starlink logic, same Equal Weight[^vz-wells-fargo-equal-weight-20260708]. Three telecom names, one satellite story, and completely different balance sheets underneath it. Same page of the memo, three different answers to the same question.

Deep dive — Micron vs. Intel

Ava: The deep dive this week is page 3 of the memo — Micron and Intel. Same industry, same seven days, opposite direction entirely. Both companies make chips. Both are spending tens of billions on U.S. manufacturing. And this week, one of them got paid for it and the other got punished for it. One company just told the market it’s betting a quarter-trillion dollars on a supercycle that isn’t slowing down. The other just watched its oldest rival pass it in the one number that was supposed to be safe.

Ava: Micron raised its U.S. manufacturing commitment to $250 billion through 2035 — $50 billion more than the number it announced earlier this year — and poured first concrete at its new fab in Clay, New York, more than a full quarter ahead of schedule[^mu-investment-expansion-20260709][^mu-nyc-fab-concrete-20260709]. It also put another $3 billion into the domestic supply chain this week, including financing to GlobalWafers for a Texas wafer facility[^mu-supply-chain-20260709]. Intel had a rougher week — and it actually started on a high note. Intel stock got an early lift Monday when the Broadcom-Apple chip deal triggered a broader semiconductor rally, up 5% on the read-through[^intc-broadcom-apple-20260706]. That lift didn’t last. Reports surfaced that its 18A and 18A-P manufacturing nodes won’t hit profitable yields until late 2026 at the earliest — more likely 2027[^intc-stock-decline-20260708]. The stock dropped nearly 10% on July 7, another almost 8% on July 8 — a 21% decline in seven trading days[^intc-stock-decline-20260708]. And in the same window, AMD reported more first-quarter data-center revenue than Intel for the first time ever — $5.8 billion to Intel’s $5.1 billion[^intc-amd-datacenterdominance-20260708]. Marcus, start with Micron.

Marcus: Micron just re-priced itself without anyone noticing, because the earnings caught up to the multiple instead of the multiple getting cut. The memo has Micron at about 41 times trailing free cash flow now, on $26 billion of trailing FCF — up about 879% from a year ago[^memo-mu-evfcf-20260528][^memo-mu-growth-20260528]. That’s not a stock getting more expensive. That’s a company whose cash generation exploded faster than the stock price did. The pledge increase and the ahead-of-schedule fab are Micron telling you it believes this isn’t a one-quarter DRAM spike. Watch whether pricing holds through the next print — that’s the whole bet.

Ava: Now the other side of that page.

Marcus: Intel didn’t lose the data-center chip war on a spreadsheet — it lost it on a delayed process node. Capex ran about $13 billion trailing twelve months[^memo-intc-capex-20260328], and none of that spending has translated into a profitable 18A yield yet, which is why free cash flow is negative and there’s no honest multiple to put on this stock right now. The number that actually matters isn’t a valuation ratio — it’s $5.8 billion versus $5.1 billion, AMD over Intel in data-center revenue, a line that has never crossed before[^intc-amd-datacenterdominance-20260708]. The test isn’t the next earnings beat. It’s whether 18A actually yields profitably on the 2027 timeline this report just laid out.

Marcus: Same memo page, same week. One company’s balance sheet just got permission to spend more. The other’s still waiting on a process node that isn’t yielding yet.

Ava: Micron’s betting on being early. Intel’s betting on catching up. Mark the next print for both.

Rapid-fire

Ava: Rapid-fire. Two more stories this week, no deep analytical beat — just the signal, quick.

Ava: NextEra Energy filed the paperwork on the biggest utility merger of the year. The SEC S-4 went in on July 9 — roughly $67 billion, NextEra absorbing Dominion Energy, each Dominion share converting into NextEra stock plus a cash payment, targeting close in the second half of 2027[^nee-dominion-s4-20260709]. Here’s the tension: the Cash Flow Memo already had NextEra’s free cash flow down 65% year over year before any of this[^memo-nee-growth-20260331]. They’re announcing the sector’s largest deal in years off a balance sheet that’s already stretched. NextEra reports its own second-quarter numbers on July 24[^nee-earnings-date-20260710] — that’s the print to watch for how this financing actually gets structured.

Ava: Apple and Broadcom extended their chip partnership through 2031 — $30 billion, more than 15 billion U.S.-made chips, including a $1.5 billion facility expansion in Fort Collins, Colorado[^aapl-avgo-chipdeal-20260708]. Apple’s already sitting at about 35 times trailing free cash flow[^memo-aapl-evfcf-20260328] — this is a company paying up for supply-chain certainty, not hunting for a cheap deal. Same week, the EU’s top court rejected Apple’s appeal and upheld its gatekeeper designation under the Digital Markets Act, for both iOS and the App Store[^aapl-eu-antitrust-20260708]. Broadcom, on the other side of the chip deal, got downgraded to Hold by Erste Group — their read is a 35-times forward multiple against Nvidia’s 22, even with the strong margins[^avgo-downgrade-20260707]. One company paying for certainty, one company getting told its certainty is already priced in. Apple’s own Q3 print lands July 30, off guidance of 14–17% revenue growth on iPhone 17 demand[^aapl-q3-call-20260709] — that’s the number that tells you whether paying for certainty was worth it.

Close

Ava: That’s the show. Wall Street’s consensus on cable and wireless: satellites are coming for all three names the same way. Two banks agree on Comcast and Charter — but Bank of America just broke ranks on T-Mobile, and this week T-Mobile’s own cash flow statement backed them up. Consensus isn’t as unanimous as the headlines make it sound. And on chips: consensus likes to treat memory and logic as the same semiconductor story. Micron and Intel just spent a week proving they’re not — one’s compounding, the other’s now pricing in a 2027 turnaround instead of a 2026 one.

Ava: Forward week: earnings season builds fast. JPMorgan and Goldman Sachs both report Tuesday[^earn-jpm][^earn-gs] — the first real read on how the banks are pricing credit risk into the back half of the year. ASML drops Wednesday, and Morgan Stanley reports the same day[^earn-asml][^earn-ms]. Thursday is stacked — Taiwan Semi, Netflix, and UnitedHealth, all in one session[^earn-tsm][^earn-nflx][^earn-unh]. Taiwan Semi in particular is the real test of whether Micron’s supercycle story extends to the rest of the chip complex, or stays a memory-only story. Hunt, Jason, and Mike are back Wednesday on episode E2629. Download the Cash Flow Memo at telltales.us.

Closing disclaimer

Ava: The views expressed on this podcast are the host alone and do not constitute an offer to sell or a recommendation to purchase, or a solicitation of an offer to buy any security, nor a recommendation for any investment product or service. While certain information contained herein has been obtained from sources believed to be reliable, neither the host nor any of their employers or their affiliates have independently verified this information, and its accuracy and completeness cannot be guaranteed. Accordingly, no representation or warranty, express or implied, is made as to, and no reliance should be placed on, the fairness, accuracy, timeliness, or completeness of this information. The host and all employers and their affiliated persons assume no liability for this information and no obligation to update the information or analysis contained herein in the future, and may or may not hold positions in the securities mentioned.

Sources

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Micron Boosts US Spending to $250 Billion to Feed Memory Boom. (2026, July 9). Bloomberg. https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2026-07-09/micron-boosts-us-spending-to-250-billion-amid-memory-demand
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Morgan Stanley Adjusts Price Target on Comcast to $30 From $33. (2026, July 7). MarketScreener. https://www.marketscreener.com/news/morgan-stanley-adjusts-price-target-on-comcast-to-30-from-33-ce7f5edbd08cf624
NextEra Energy, Inc. (2026, July 9). NextEra Energy and Dominion Energy to merge [Form S-4]. U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission. https://www.sec.gov/Archives/edgar/data/0000753308/000110465926082301/tm2614888-13_s4.htm
NextEra Energy, Inc. (2026, July 10). NextEra Energy announces date for release of second-quarter 2026 financial results [Press release]. PR Newswire via TradingView News. https://www.tradingview.com/news/prnewswire:3f783c3848b02:0-nextera-energy-announces-date-for-release-of-second-quarter-2026-financial-results/
Semiconductor Selloff Deepens As AI Spending Fears Hit Intel. (2026, July 8). Forbes. https://www.forbes.com/sites/petercohan/2026/07/08/intel-stock-down-21-inside-the-july-2026-semiconductor-selloff/
T-Mobile Down for Thousands of Users, Downdetector Shows. (2026, July 7). GV Wire. https://www.gvwire.com/2026/07/07/t-mobile-down-for-thousands-of-users-downdetector-shows/
T-Mobile US, Inc. (2026, July 7). T-Mobile Appoints Chris Sambar Chief Enterprise Officer and Evolves Leadership Team to Advance its Next Era of Strategic Growth and Innovation [Press release]. T-Mobile Newsroom. https://www.t-mobile.com/news/business/t-mobile-appoints-chris-sambar-chief-enterprise-officer
T-Mobile stock gains as BofA upgrades to Buy, says satellite fears overblown. (2026, July 6). Yahoo Finance. https://finance.yahoo.com/markets/stocks/articles/t-mobile-stock-gains-bofa-121406811.html
Wells Fargo cautious on AT&T, Verizon and T-Mobile as Starlink looms. (2026, July 8). Yahoo Finance. https://finance.yahoo.com/markets/stocks/articles/wells-fargo-cautious-t-verizon-123610956.html
Wells Fargo initiates T-Mobile stock coverage with Equal Weight rating. (2026, July 8). Investing.com. https://www.investing.com/news/analyst-ratings/wells-fargo-initiates-tmobile-stock-coverage-with-equal-weight-rating-93CH-4781310
Wells Fargo Maintains Underweight on Charter Communications, Lowers Price Target to $160. (2026, July 7). Sahm Capital. https://www.sahmcapital.com/news/content/wells-fargo-maintains-underweight-on-charter-communications-lowers-price-target-to-160-2026-07-07

Earnings slate references

Earnings dates sourced from the W2628 earnings slate (04. Publishing/shows/weekend-update/W2628/dryrun/earnings_slate.md), pulled 2026-07-10.

JPMorgan Chase (JPM) — 2026-07-14 (Tuesday), consensus EPS $5.52, consensus revenue $51.06B
Goldman Sachs (GS) — 2026-07-14 (Tuesday), consensus EPS $14.47, consensus revenue $16.22B
ASML (ASML) — 2026-07-15 (Wednesday), consensus EPS $7.98, consensus revenue $10.26B
Morgan Stanley (MS) — 2026-07-15 (Wednesday), consensus EPS $2.89, consensus revenue $19.65B
Taiwan Semiconductor (TSM) — 2026-07-16 (Thursday), consensus EPS $3.80, consensus revenue $39.97B
Netflix (NFLX) — 2026-07-16 (Thursday), consensus EPS $0.79, consensus revenue $12.58B
UnitedHealth (UNH) — 2026-07-16 (Thursday), consensus EPS $4.84, consensus revenue $110.76B

Internal data

Internal data is provided on a best efforts basis.

The Midyear Predictions Scorecard

Mike Nicoletti — Wed, 08 Jul 2026 23:23:33 GMT

Oil holds steady despite Hormuz drone strikes, SK Hynix tests a $25B US listing, and the team runs its mid-year predictions scorecard across energy, tech, and healthcare — including Vertex’s $10B endocrine bet and Palantir’s Karp taking on Anthropic and OpenAI.

The Cashflow Memo

7 6 26 20 Pager

590KB ∙ PDF file

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The Prediction Scorecard

https://telltales.topmarkcapital.com/predictions/

Key Takeaways

Despite Hormuz drone strikes on three ships, Hunt sees no material oil supply disruption — crude drifts to the high-$70s (vs. high-$60s) while natural gas holds flat near $3.50 through 2027, and Medicare/Medicaid (~$2T of $7T federal spending) remains the only credible deficit lever.
SK Hynix is raising $25B in the US equity market ahead of a July 10 listing, reviving Hunt’s overbuild concerns for memory (Samsung/Hynix/Micron); IBM’s 7-angstrom (0.7nm) research chip claims a density lead over TSMC’s current 2nm node (1.6nm planned for next year).
The Nvidia-Palantir open-source JV (government first, banks next) reflects Jason’s models are commodity thesis; Alex Karp’s CNBC appearance pressed Anthropic and OpenAI on enterprise data trust, positioning Palantir’s context-graph as the model-agnostic integration layer.
Predictions scorecard: 2026 pharma M&A tracks to a record pace (~$150B in H1, ahead of 2019, driven by deal volume not mega-deals — largest single transaction only $13B); Tesla Robotaxi needs a serious hockey stick to catch Waymo given still-thin Austin/Miami fleets; xAI’s Grok 4.5 (claimed near-Opus-4.7 quality, cheaper/faster, but only 500K context) keeps the xAI leads call alive.
Vertex is paying ~$10B for Kynetix (San Diego endocrine-disorder pipeline, one drug already FDA-approved) on a bet that microplastic-driven endocrine disease is a growing secular market; CMS now projects US healthcare spend hits $9T (21% of GDP) by 2034.

Show Notes

[00:00:00] Intro & Welcome Mike opens the show; download this week’s Cash Flow Memo at telltales.us.

[00:00:26] Exhibit C: Oil, Gas & Hormuz Risk Hunt argues the Hormuz drone strikes won’t meaningfully dent oil supply; he sees prices drifting into the high-$70s while natural gas holds flat near $3.50 through 2027.

[00:04:23] Exhibit A: The Deficit, Defense Spending & Medicare Defense spending rises in FY27, interest costs hold near 3.5%, and Hunt makes the case for a bipartisan Medicare-for-All push to rationalize the ~$2 trillion Medicare/Medicaid budget.

[00:06:18] Tech News: SK Hynix’s $25B Listing & IBM’s 7-Angstrom Chip SK Hynix raises $25B in the US ahead of a July 10 listing, raising overbuild concerns in memory; IBM claims a density lead over TSMC with a 7-angstrom (0.7nm) research chip.

[00:09:23] Palantir, Karp’s CNBC Meltdown & the AI Trust War Alex Karp challenges Anthropic and OpenAI on enterprise data trust; Mike breaks down Palantir’s context-graph pitch as the model-agnostic integration layer for the enterprise, alongside its custom-model partnership with Nvidia.

[00:13:17] Predictions Review: Energy & Nuclear US gas supply prediction hits 108 bcf/d; TerraPower’s Wyoming construction permit keeps the Gen IV nuclear call on track, while $4.50-5 natural gas and China oil demand growth both stall out.

[00:16:21] Predictions Review: Tech, Robotaxis & Quantum Risk to Bitcoin Tesla Robotaxi needs a serious hockey stick to catch Waymo’s ride volume; new Google research shrinks the qubit count needed to crack Bitcoin encryption, pulling forward the threat timeline.

[00:21:43] Predictions Review: Healthcare, Pharma M&A & GLP-1s 2026 pharma M&A tracks to a record ~$150B first half; Vertex pays ~$10B for endocrine-disorder specialist Kynetix, and a new Medicare GLP-1 bridge program offers $50/month prescriptions through year-end.

[00:30:06] Wrap-Up Hunt and the team close out the predictions review largely unscathed.

Get the full Cash Flow Memo with updated financials on ~80 companies at telltales.us — new episodes every week. Track how our calls are actually playing out at our predictions scorecard.

Cashtags

Weekend Update - W2627

Mike Nicoletti — Sun, 05 Jul 2026 15:28:39 GMT

▶ Explore this week’s Tape — live, sortable, drill-down →

Microsoft Is Funding the Next AI Layer With the Last One

Enterprise AI stopped being a story about models this week and became a story about invoices. On July second, Microsoft — page one of the Cash Flow Memo — stood up a unit called Frontier Co.: two and a half billion dollars, six thousand people, one job, which is to take AI products the last mile into enterprise deployment.¹ Two days later it moved to cut up to five thousand roles from sales, consulting, and Xbox.² The new layer is being paid for with the headcount of the old one. That is not a hiring plan. It is a company rebuilding itself around the part of AI that actually sends a bill.

The model layer got three years of narrative. The deployment layer — the boring work of installing the thing, retraining the seat, wiring it into the workflow — is where the money changes hands, and the market has not repriced for that yet. Microsoft just showed you how the transition lands in a real profit-and-loss statement before it lands in a revenue line: deployment headcount up, legacy headcount down, net headcount roughly flat, and the revenue you are supposedly buying still not visible. The screens know how to price a growth story. They do not know how to price a margin-mix reallocation that hasn’t reached the top line.

We have watched Microsoft run this exact play once before. The last decade’s version was the move from packaged software to subscription — the company retooled its sales motion and its cost base around the cloud years ahead of the recurring revenue, wore an ex-growth multiple through the gap, and re-rated hard only once the ARR became legible. Frontier Co. is the same bet, one rung up the stack. The reorg comes first. The revenue is the lagging indicator. The interval between them is exactly where a name gets mispriced.

The pricing tells landed the same week, on both ends of the stack. Microsoft made the Copilot Business seat a permanent product at twenty-one dollars a month³ — the output price, now fixed. And AWS, per a Yahoo Finance report, raised GPU instance prices about twenty percent on July first⁴ — the input price, moving up. Read those two together and you are watching enterprise-AI unit economics get discovered in real time: the cost of compute rising, the price of the seat set. The names that compound from here are the ones that can lift the output price faster than the input cost climbs. Microsoft, sitting on the seat, can. Most of the memo, buying the compute, cannot.

One honest caveat on the input side, because it is doing a lot of work: the AWS move is one vendor’s list price on specific instances. Azure and Google have not publicly matched, and a list price is not what a committed customer actually pays. Whether it holds through the next wave of capacity — the sixty-five-to-seventy-five-billion-dollars-per-gigawatt data-center builds Hunt, Jason, and Mike walked through on Wednesday⁵ — is the tell for whether this is structural scarcity or a headline. Don’t let one instance-price line stand in for the whole compute market.

The cashflow read is in Marcus’s column below — short version, Microsoft is paying about thirty-eight times trailing free cash flow⁶ for a deployment curve that isn’t in the numbers yet, on capex already running close to a hundred billion a year.⁷ Palantir, the pure-play version of the same government-and-enterprise bet, asks a hundred and eight.⁸

What changes the read is retention, not growth. The test on the next print, due late this month, is whether Copilot seat retention and attach start to show up inside Microsoft Cloud growth before the capex compounds past them. If deployment headcount grows and the seats don’t stick, that is the tell that enterprises are buying the org, not the outcome — and the whole bet inverts. Watch the AWS price too: if Azure and Google haven’t matched within a quarter, the twenty-percent move was a one-vendor list-price event, not the scarcity signal it read as. Mark the calendar for both.

Wall Street’s consensus on enterprise AI: show us the revenue, then we’ll pay for it. But the org charts and the price tags moved this week, and the revenue line always arrives last. The last time Microsoft reorganized ahead of its own revenue, the people who waited for the number paid up for the wait.

The Tape — W2627

Universe of 94 cashflow-memo names, snap dates 2026-07-02 → 2026-07-03. Composite is rank-sum percentile of FCF Yield + NTM Revenue Growth (higher = better balance). Banks and finance-book names shown separately.

Telltales Yield — Top 10

From the Cashflow Desk — Marcus Graham

The enterprise-AI trade got expensive this week, and the cheapest way to own it is sitting at number four on the board. Salesforce already licenses a seat inside nearly every enterprise now buying AI deployment — and the memo has it at 10.5x trailing free cash flow, a 9.5% FCF yield, against single-digit NTM growth. Palantir asks ~108x for a version of the same government-and-enterprise AI story. That gap is either the market correctly pricing Salesforce as ex-growth, or an unpriced option on Agentforce turning installed seats into AI attach. The table can’t tell you which. The test on the next print is whether agent adoption shows up in current RPO and net seat expansion — or whether single-digit growth is the new ceiling.

Telltales Yield — Bottom 10

This Week’s Reporters

No universe names reporting in the coming 7 days.

Sector Medians

Debt / FCF Watch (highest leverage on TTM FCF)

Weekly Price Movement

Top 5 (week-over-week price)

Bottom 5 (week-over-week price)

Banks (shown separately — FCF metric not meaningful)

Finance-book — FCF not comparable

Data Gaps

91 of 91 ranked-eligible names ranked. 0 dropped for missing FCF yield or NTM revenue growth; 7 shown separately (banks + finance-book, FCF not comparable).

Source: cashflow-memo master_2026-07-03.csv. NTM growth from analyst-estimates consensus. Composite is a percentile rank, not a recommendation.

The Issue — This Week's Brief

The Issue — Weekend Update W2627

287KB ∙ PDF file

Download

The Cashflow Memo

6 29 26 20 Pager

612KB ∙ PDF file

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W2627 — Tesla Blew Past Delivery Estimates, Comcast Split Itself into Cash, and Enterprise AI Started Setting Prices

Tesla blew past delivery estimates, Comcast split itself into cash, and enterprise AI started setting prices.

Download the memo at telltales.us. Hunt, Jason, and Mike are back Wednesday on episode E2628.

Chapter markers

Time | Segment
0:00 | Opening disclaimer
0:15 | Cold open — throughline + prior-Wed callback
0:45 | Theme — AI Goes to Work (Microsoft, Palantir)
4:45 | Deep dive — Two Multiples (Tesla, Comcast)
8:45 | Rapid-fire (Walmart, Harrow, Eli Lilly)
11:45 | Close — Consensus Watch + earnings season preview
12:30 | Closing disclaimer

Full transcript

Opening disclaimer

Ava: The following conversation is intended for informational purposes only. You should always do your own work to determine if an investment is suitable for you.

Cold open

Ava: You’re listening to the Telltales Weekend Update. I’m Ava Cabot.

Marcus: And I’m Marcus Graham — the cashflow desk.

Ava: Quick note: the show is produced entirely with AI tools, and both voices you’re hearing are AI-generated. Send feedback through the Substack.

Ava: Enterprise AI went from story to price action this week. Microsoft committed $2.5 billion and 6,000 employees to a dedicated AI implementation unit — and simultaneously flagged cuts to up to 5,000 more in legacy functions. Palantir won the U.S. Army’s data backbone contract for its highest-priority modernization program. And AWS quietly raised GPU instance prices 20% on July 1[^amzn-gpu-pricing-20260701] — the first open, on-record pricing signal that compute scarcity is structural, not cyclic. Meanwhile, two companies at opposite ends of the Cash Flow Memo’s valuation spectrum each delivered exactly what they promised. And the market’s reaction told you what it’s currently willing to pay for.

Ava: On Wednesday, Hunt, Jason, and Mike worked through the cost of building the AI infrastructure itself — data center builds now running $65–75 billion per gigawatt, memory running at 30–40% of the total buildout cost[^ep-e2627]. This weekend, we pick up on the demand side: who is deploying that infrastructure, at what scale, and what the cash flow math says about what the market believes will pay for it.

Theme — AI Goes to Work

Ava: On page one of the Cash Flow Memo this week — Microsoft moved. Not in the abstract direction of AI, but in the direction of paying for it organizationally. On July 2, Microsoft committed $2.5 billion and is deploying 6,000 employees into a new entity called Frontier Co. — a dedicated AI implementation unit built specifically to take AI products from development into enterprise deployment[^msft-frontier-ai-20260702]. On July 1, Microsoft also made Copilot Business a permanent SKU at $21 per user per month[^msft-copilot-sku-20260701], the pricing structure that the deployment unit is built around. And on July 3, the company announced it is cutting up to 5,000 employees from sales, consulting, and Xbox[^msft-layoffs-20260703]. Microsoft is funding the AI deployment bet with the headcount from the pre-AI org. That is a choice. Marcus — the cashflow frame.

Marcus: Microsoft just put a price tag on the deployment layer — and it’s the capex number that makes this interesting. The memo had Microsoft at about 38 times trailing free cash flow on roughly $76 billion of trailing FCF going into this[^memo-msft-evfcf-20260331][^memo-msft-fcf-20260331]. Capex is running close to $100 billion trailing twelve[^memo-msft-capex-20260331]. That’s not a rounding error — that’s a declared bet on infrastructure before the Copilot revenue compounding is visible in the numbers. The test on the next print: whether Copilot dollar retention starts to justify the capex ahead of it. 38 times is what you pay when you believe the deployment curve is real. This week Microsoft told you it believes.

Ava: On the government side of the same argument: Palantir. The U.S. Army this month selected Palantir Foundry as the cloud data layer for NGC2 — Next Generation Command and Control — described by the Army as its highest-priority modernization effort[^pltr-army-ngc2-20260622]. On June 29, Palantir and Nvidia launched an engine for deploying Nvidia’s Nemotron open models in sovereign, air-gapped government environments[^pltr-nvidia-sovereign-ai-20260629]. The market digested all of it on July 1: Palantir up 7.8%, adding about $22 billion to its market value in a single session[^pltr-stock-rally-20260701]. DA Davidson followed on July 2 with a Buy upgrade and a $175 target[^pltr-da-davidson-upgrade-20260702]. Marcus — at 108 times free cash flow, what exactly is the market paying for?

Marcus: Palantir is the closest thing the memo has to a pure-play on government AI becoming mandatory infrastructure rather than optional tooling. The memo has Palantir at about 108 times trailing free cash flow on roughly $2.7 billion of trailing FCF[^memo-pltr-evfcf-20260331][^memo-pltr-fcf-20260331]. Revenue ran about 85% growth year over year[^memo-pltr-rev-20260331]. That growth rate is real — but at this multiple, you are paying for every NATO-adjacent government following the Army’s architecture choice. NGC2 makes that thesis credibly possible. It doesn’t make it certain. The difference between possible and certain is where the risk lives.

Ava: That’s the theme this week. AI isn’t just being built anymore — it’s going to work. AWS pricing compute as a scarce resource. Microsoft organizing its headcount around deployment. Palantir wiring the Army’s command layer into Foundry. The abstract investment argument just became a series of operating decisions with dollar amounts attached.

Deep dive — Two Multiples, One Week

Ava: The deep dive this week is a comparison. Two companies moved on the same week for completely different reasons — and they sit at opposite ends of what the market is currently willing to pay for. Tesla — also on page one of the memo this week — at just under 200 times trailing free cash flow. Comcast at 6.5 times trailing free cash flow. One company delivered a delivery beat. One delivered a restructuring announcement. The market applauded both. But the questions each answer are completely different.

Ava: Tesla reported Q2 deliveries of 480,000 vehicles — up 25% year over year and marking the company’s first year-over-year delivery growth since 2023[^tsla-q2-deliveries-20260702]. That beat sell-side consensus by 74,000 units, or about 18% above where even the most bullish estimates were sitting[^tsla-deliveries-beat-20260702]. Comcast on June 29 announced it would spin off NBCUniversal and Sky into a new, separate publicly traded entity via a tax-free split expected to complete in approximately one year[^cmcsa-nbcu-spinoff-20260629]. Comcast is retaining a 19.9% stake in NBCUniversal for up to a year before monetizing[^cmcsa-ownership-20260629]. Comcast shares surged 21% in premarket on the announcement[^cmcsa-stock-surge-20260629]. Two very different proofs of value. Marcus — start with Tesla.

Marcus: Tesla just proved the car business still works. Going into the Q2 financial print — which lands July 22[^tsla-earnings-schedule-20260702] — the memo had Tesla at just under 200 times trailing free cash flow on about $7 billion of trailing FCF, up more than double from the prior 12 months[^memo-tsla-evfcf-20260331][^memo-tsla-fcf-20260331]. The delivery beat answers one question: the demand is real, the business isn’t broken. The multiple asks a second question the delivery print does not answer: whether the autonomy layer scales into a standalone revenue stream. Those are different theses. One was validated this week. The other is what you are paying 200 times cash flow to believe.

Ava: 200 times. Take a moment with that number.

Marcus: On Comcast — the spinoff unlocks something the combined company had been hiding for years. The memo had Comcast at 6.5 times trailing free cash flow at about a 15% yield, on roughly $25 billion of trailing FCF going into the announcement[^memo-cmcsa-evfcf-20260331][^memo-cmcsa-fcf-20260331]. The broadband and cable infrastructure stays at Comcast — that’s the cash machine. The content SpinCo gets the narrative and the hype. How the debt distributes between the two entities during separation determines which stub actually screens cheaper at the stub level — that’s the number to watch during the 12 months of separation. The swing factor is whether broadband subscribers hold through the streaming transition once the content discount is removed.

Ava: Goldman Sachs cut their price target to $26 this week[^cmcsa-gs-downgrade-20260702]. The broadband company was always 6.5 times — the content assets were the noise that obscured it.

Marcus: That’s the argument. And it’s the cleanest sum-of-the-parts unlock in the memo universe right now. A 15% free cash flow yield on a broadband business with over 60 million subscribers is a different conversation once you don’t have to price it alongside Peacock.

Ava: One name at nearly 200 times trailing free cash flow. One at 6.5 times. Both moved meaningfully on the same week. What the comparison says is something about where narrative premium lives right now versus where current cash generation prices. Tesla delivery beats don’t price autonomy — they confirm the baseline. Comcast restructurings don’t create cash — they reveal it. The market decided this week exactly how it wants to pay for each kind of proof.

Rapid-fire

Ava: Rapid-fire. Three names, no deep analytical beat — just the week’s signal.

Ava: Walmart. Cleveland Research flagged slowing U.S. comparable store sales and raised questions about whether Walmart is lowering prices aggressively to clear excess inventory, raising doubts on near-term sales guidance and merchandise margins[^wmt-comps-slowdown-20260701]. The stock dropped 8.5% on the note[^wmt-margin-strategy-20260701]. Then June non-farm payrolls came in significantly below economist projections on July 2 — eased rate concerns, institutional buyers stepped in, and Walmart bounced 3%[^wmt-rebound-payrolls-20260702]. The memo has Walmart at 62 times trailing free cash flow at a 1.5% yield. At 62 times, you are priced for flawless execution at 4% revenue growth. A Cleveland Research comp note is not a blip. It’s a thesis stress test. The bounce doesn’t resolve the question; it just means the question waits for next quarter.

Ava: Harrow. The BYOOVIZ commercial launch happened July 1 — an FDA-approved interchangeable biosimilar referencing Lucentis, commercialized through Harrow’s exclusive agreement with Samsung Bioepis[^hrow-byooviz-launch-20260701]. BYOOVIZ is Harrow’s entry into the anti-VEGF market, which runs roughly $9 billion annually. Harrow’s full-year revenue guidance is $350–$365 million — the BYOOVIZ ramp is load-bearing for that number. At 48 times trailing free cash flow on a smaller-cap name, the launch velocity matters. The first signal on the ramp arrives with the Q2 print.

Ava: Eli Lilly. The Medicare GLP-1 Bridge Program launched July 1, giving eligible Medicare Part D patients access to Foundayo — that’s orforglipron — and Zepbound at a $50 monthly copay[^lly-medicare-glp1-20260701]. The same week, the FDA selected Lilly for its PreCheck manufacturing fast-lane pilot, with Lilly’s active pharmaceutical ingredient plant in Indiana now in the program[^lly-fda-precheck-20260629]. Lilly’s full-year revenue guide is $82–$85 billion[^lly-q1-2026-20260430]. The memo has it at 81 times trailing free cash flow. The access expansion thesis just got two pieces of infrastructure in one week. The ramp is what the multiple is betting on — and a House investigation into China clinical trials with a July 17 deadline is the counter-catalyst to watch.

Close

Ava: That’s the show. Wall Street’s consensus on Tesla: the delivery beat validates the autonomy thesis. It validates the car thesis. But those are different theses at very different prices. A delivery beat confirms the baseline business isn’t broken. It doesn’t price the autonomy layer — that’s a separate bet, and it’s still a bet.

Ava: Earnings season opens this coming week. JPMorgan and Goldman Sachs both report Tuesday[^earn-jpm][^earn-gs]. ASML drops Wednesday — which means the export control story and the Netherlands joining the Pax Silica alliance get a revenue number attached to them, with China at roughly 20% of projected 2026 systems revenue[^asml-decline-20260701]. Morgan Stanley also Wednesday[^earn-ms]. Thursday is stacked: Netflix, TSM, and UnitedHealth all in one session[^earn-nflx][^earn-tsm][^earn-unh]. Seven reports in four days. The opening bell of Q2 earnings season. Hunt, Jason, and Mike promised the mid-year predictions scorecard on Wednesday — and Hunt’s exact words were, next week we’ll all be kind of embarrassed by how poorly our predictions went[^ep-e2627]. Looking forward to it. They’re back Wednesday on episode E2628. Download the Cash Flow Memo at telltales.us.

Closing disclaimer

Sources

AWS raising GPU instance prices 20% on July 1. (2026, July 1). Yahoo Finance. https://finance.yahoo.com/technology/ai/articles/aws-raising-gpu-instance-prices-134420295.html
ASML Holding NV Stock (ASML) Moved Down by 6.02% on Jul 1: What Investors Need To Know. (2026, July 1). TradingKey. https://www.tradingkey.com/news/market-movers/262004606-market-movers-asml-20260701
Comcast announces it will spin off NBCUniversal and Sky from cable business. (2026, June 29). CNBC. https://www.cnbc.com/2026/06/29/comcast-announces-it-will-spin-off-media-and-tech-wings-into-separate-public-companies.html
Comcast (NASDAQ:CMCSA) Given New $26.00 Price Target at The Goldman Sachs Group. (2026, July 2). Markets Daily. https://www.themarketsdaily.com/2026/07/02/comcast-nasdaqcmcsa-given-new-26-00-price-target-at-the-goldman-sachs-group.html
Comcast NBCUniversal Spinoff Splits 65 Million Subscribers Across Two New Companies. (2026, June 29). Tech Times. https://www.techtimes.com/articles/319337/20260629/comcast-nbcuniversal-spinoff-splits-65-million-subscribers-across-two-new-companies.htm
Comcast stock surges as cable giant announces company split. (2026, June 29). Yahoo Finance. https://finance.yahoo.com/markets/article/comcast-stock-surges-as-cable-giant-announces-company-split-123931766.html
Eli Lilly and Company. (2026, April 30). Lilly reports first-quarter 2026 financial results, raises full year guidance, and highlights momentum of new medicines [Press release]. Eli Lilly Investor Relations. https://investor.lilly.com/news-releases/news-release-details/lilly-reports-first-quarter-2026-financial-results-raises-full
GlobeNewswire. (2026, July 1). Harrow Announces Commercial Launch of BYOOVIZ® in the United States [Press release]. https://www.globenewswire.com/news-release/2026/07/01/3320502/0/en/Harrow-Announces-Commercial-Launch-of-BYOOVIZ-in-the-United-States.html
Microsoft 365 Business Plans With Copilot Go Permanent for SMBs (July 2026). (2026, July 1). Windows Forum. https://windowsforum.com/threads/microsoft-365-business-plans-with-copilot-go-permanent-for-smbs-july-2026.425116/
Microsoft commits $2.5 billion and 6,000 employees to new AI implementation unit. (2026, July 2). CNBC. https://www.cnbc.com/2026/07/02/microsoft-commits-2point5-billion-6000-employees-ai-implementation-unit.html
Microsoft eyes another wave of layoffs that could hit 5,000 workers next week. (2026, July 3). Fox Business. https://www.foxbusiness.com/economy/microsoft-eyes-another-wave-layoffs-hit-5000-workers-next-week
Palantir Technologies. (2026, June 22). Palantir Secures Foundational Role in NGC2 Data Layer [Press release]. Palantir Investor Relations. https://investors.palantir.com/news-details/2026/Palantir-Secures-Foundational-Role-in-NGC2-Data-Layer/
Palantir Technologies. (2026, June 29). Palantir Launches Engine for Deploying NVIDIA Nemotron Open Models in Sovereign Environments [Press release]. Palantir Investor Relations. https://investors.palantir.com/news-details/2026/Palantir-Launches-Engine-for-Deploying-NVIDIA-Nemotron-Open-Models-in-Sovereign-Environments/
Palantir shares have struggled this year. D.A. Davidson says buy the dip. (2026, July 2). CNBC. https://www.cnbc.com/2026/07/02/palantir-shares-have-struggled-this-year-da-davidson-says-buy-the-dip.html
Palantir (NASDAQ: PLTR) Wins Role As Data Architecture Backbone For US Army’s NGC2 Command Program. (2026, June 27). Foreign Policy Journal. https://www.foreignpolicyjournal.com/2026/06/27/palantir-nasdaq-pltr-wins-role-as-data-architecture-backbone-for-us-armys-ngc2-command-program/
PR Newswire. (2026, July 1). What Medicare Part D patients need to know about accessing Foundayo (orforglipron) and Zepbound (tirzepatide) for weight management [Press release]. https://www.prnewswire.com/news-releases/what-medicare-part-d-patients-need-to-know-about-accessing-foundayo-orforglipron-and-zepbound-tirzepatide-for-weight-management-302810143.html
Tesla, Inc. (2026, July 2). Tesla Second Quarter 2026 Production, Deliveries and Deployments [Press release]. Tesla Investor Relations. https://ir.tesla.com/press-release/tesla-second-quarter-2026-production-deliveries-and-deployments
U.S. Food and Drug Administration. (2026, June 29). FDA Selects Seven Participants for PreCheck Pilot Program to Advance U.S. Drug Manufacturing. https://www.fda.gov/news-events/press-announcements/fda-selects-seven-participants-precheck-pilot-program-advance-us-drug-manufacturing
Walmart (WMT) Is Down 8.6% After Slowing U.S. Comps Raise Questions On Margin Strategy. (2026, July 1). Yahoo Finance. https://finance.yahoo.com/markets/stocks/articles/walmart-wmt-down-8-6-051142700.html
Walmart Inc Stock (WMT) Moved Up by 3.15% on Jul 2: What Investors Need To Know. (2026, July 2). TradingKey. https://www.tradingkey.com/news/market-movers/262007772-market-movers-wmt-20260702
Why Walmart Plunged Today. (2026, July 1). Yahoo Finance. https://finance.yahoo.com/markets/stocks/articles/why-walmart-plunged-today-185051907.html

Earnings slate references

Earnings dates sourced from the W2627 earnings slate (04. Publishing/shows/weekend-update/W2627/dryrun/earnings_slate.md), pulled 2026-07-04.

JPMorgan Chase (JPM) — 2026-07-14 (Tuesday), consensus EPS $5.61, consensus revenue $49.82B
Goldman Sachs (GS) — 2026-07-14 (Tuesday), consensus EPS $14.01, consensus revenue $16.02B
ASML (ASML) — 2026-07-15 (Wednesday), consensus EPS $7.98, consensus revenue $10.37B
Morgan Stanley (MS) — 2026-07-15 (Wednesday), consensus EPS $2.83, consensus revenue $19.29B
Netflix (NFLX) — 2026-07-16 (Thursday), consensus EPS $0.79, consensus revenue $12.58B
Taiwan Semiconductor (TSM) — 2026-07-16 (Thursday), consensus EPS $3.77, consensus revenue $40.02B
UnitedHealth (UNH) — 2026-07-16 (Thursday), consensus EPS $4.84, consensus revenue $110.76B

Internal data

Internal data is provided on a best efforts basis.

Regulatory Capture Comes for the Labs

Mike Nicoletti — Wed, 01 Jul 2026 22:03:52 GMT

Mike, Hunt, and Jason run the exhibits fast, then dig into the AI buildout math that keeps getting worse, Oracle’s brutal week, and a healthcare block anchored by Lilly’s 340B fight. As always, download the Cashflow Memo at telltales.us.

The Cashflow Memo

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Key Takeaways

Oil has settled into a ~$70 floor with backwardation nearly gone (~$3 now vs. the $90 near-month / $75 twelve-month spread at the Iran peak), and Hunt reads the Strait of Hormuz drone tit-for-tat as an indefinite status quo gated by cargo insurance, not Iranian intent, while Northeast heat firms nat gas as power prices spike toward 15c/kWh.
The White House is clearing Anthropic’s Fable-05 (announced today) while still restricting OpenAI’s latest, a few-weeks delay the hosts dismiss as trivial and as the regulatory capture the labs originally lobbied for, with no real risk of Chinese models leapfrogging on the pause.
AI data center cost has jumped to $65–75B per gigawatt (up from $30–50B earlier this year) with memory alone now 30–40% of the build per Gavin Baker, and a structural memory shortage (Micron plus the two Koreans running low capex) plus rumored TSMC price hikes leave no one immune and make the space-based data center thesis incrementally more compelling.
Oracle logged its worst week since 2001 on a bloated risk section and dependence on OpenAI’s questionable funding, but the bull case is replacement cost: contracted capacity is worth more than Oracle spent, so the levered buildout bet holds as long as a customer exists, not necessarily OpenAI.
Eli Lilly is pressing the 340B program (now 16% of US drug sales) by demanding hospitals prove need, with Bill Cassidy legislation this week codifying the fight, while Lantheus’s FDA setback was manufacturer-controls-only (not efficacy) and dovetails with the FDA’s new PreCheck pre-clearance pilot, and Vertex’s non-opioid painkiller is climbing a flatter S-curve than hoped.

Show Notes

[00:00] Welcome & The Cashflow Memo Mike opens with the week’s format across energy, technology, and healthcare.

[00:25] Oil at $70: Hormuz & Collapsed Backwardation Hunt on the Strait of Hormuz status quo, backwardation collapsing to ~$3, and why cargo insurance sets the real ceiling on tanker traffic.

[02:26] Gas, Heat & Power Prices The Northeast heat wave firming nat gas as stressed power markets spike toward 15c/kWh.

[07:23] Russia-Ukraine Stalemate & Venezuela Refinery drone strikes and fuel shortages with muted oil impact, plus Venezuela’s earthquake and the Gulf Coast’s fit for heavy crude.

[11:56] Washington Clears Anthropic’s Fable-05 The White House allows Fable-05 while restricting OpenAI; regulatory capture and why the delay barely matters.

[14:22] Chinese Models, Sonnet 5 & Tiered Pricing Distillation, token efficiency, and Sonnet 5 as a two-generation-old model upgraded — tiered effort as a pricing strategy.

[16:04] The $75B Gigawatt & the Memory Shortage Data center cost doubling to $65–75B/GW, memory at 30–40% of the build, and a shortage that capex can’t quickly fix.

[16:50] Oracle’s Worst Week Since 2001 The oversized risk section, OpenAI dependence, and the replacement-cost bull case.

[18:18] Data Centers in Space Why orbit starts to pencil out when labor and time are the only knobs left to turn.

[21:15] Healthcare: Pfizer, Lantheus & FDA PreCheck Pfizer’s patent-cliff cheapness, Lantheus’s manufacturer-only FDA rejection, and the FDA’s new pre-clearance pilot.

[23:53] BioNTech, Moderna & Vertex’s Slow S-Curve Cash positions, pipeline burn, and a flatter-than-hoped non-opioid painkiller adoption curve.

[25:07] Eli Lilly and the 340B Fight 16% of US drug sales flow through 340B; Lilly demands proof of need as Cassidy legislation codifies the battle.

[27:37] Harrow Litigation & Mid-Year Predictions Preview A December 7th jury trial over a compounded product, and a predictions scorecard coming next week.

Subscribe for weekly cashflow-driven investing across energy, technology, and healthcare, and grab the memo at telltales.us.

Cashtags

Weekend Update - W2626

Mike Nicoletti — Sun, 28 Jun 2026 13:03:24 GMT

▶ Explore this week’s Tape — live, sortable, drill-down →

The Week Memory Stopped Being a Commodity

For forty years, memory was the worst business in technology. Brutally cyclical, structurally commoditized, a graveyard of balance sheets that overbuilt into every upcycle and got buried in the glut that followed. You did not own memory. You rented it, for one cycle, and you got out before the supply caught up. This week Micron told you that business is over — and the people still pricing it as a cycle are fighting the last war.

Start with the number that actually matters, and it is not the print. Yes, Micron guided next quarter to fifty billion dollars against a Street modeling forty-three, and yes, the market cap crossed a trillion.¹ Spikes like that are exactly what the cyclical bears are built to fade. The thing that should stop you is buried below the headline: sixteen legally binding take-or-pay contracts, locking in roughly a fifth of Micron’s DRAM capacity through the end of the decade.² Take-or-pay is the language of pipelines and LNG terminals, not chips. It is what a supplier signs when the buyer is more afraid of not having the product than of overpaying for it. That sentence has never been true about memory before.

This is a capital-cycle story, and the cleanest analog is crude. The oil majors spent decades destroying their own returns by spending every dollar of cash flow drilling into the next price spike. Then, somewhere after 2015, the survivors consolidated and discovered discipline — capex restraint, returns over volume, supply that no longer rushed to kill every upcycle. The multiples did not re-rate because demand exploded. They re-rated because the industry stopped overbuilding. Memory now has three players who matter, AI demand that arrives on multi-year contracts instead of a consumer whim, and customers signing away their option to walk. That is not a cycle turning. That is a commodity becoming a toll road.

And you can read the toll on everyone downstream. Apple raised prices on fourteen products this week and took its worst single day in over a year, with Tim Cook calling the memory spike a hundred-year flood unlike anything in his forty years.³ A company that prints a hundred-thirty billion in trailing free cash flow does not pass costs to the customer over a blip — it eats them. It passes them when the input is structural, and the same week it is quietly lobbying Washington to buy from a blacklisted Chinese supplier just to get the parts.⁴ Oracle is funding its AI cloud with a twenty-four-billion-dollar free-cash-flow deficit and forty billion more in planned debt, the whole build premised on memory it has to secure years out.⁵ Broadcom and OpenAI unveiled a chip designed to cut inference cost in half — which is what you do when the underlying components got expensive enough to engineer around. Every one of those moves is a payment, in a different currency, to the same toll booth.

The cashflow read is in Marcus’s column below — short version: the Cash Flow Memo had Micron going into the print at a hundred-plus times trailing free cash flow, and it was the wrong frame, because the contracts changed what the denominator will look like.

What changes the read is the supply side, and the calendar is short. The test is whether Samsung and SK Hynix hold the same discipline or break ranks and flood capacity into these prices — the move that has ended every prior memory upcycle. Watch the fiscal-2027 capex commitments from all three, and watch whether more take-or-pay contracts get signed or this stays a sixteen-deal anomaly. The thesis breaks the moment one of the three decides that share matters more than price. It always has before.

Wall Street’s consensus on memory: enjoy the spike, the cycle always rolls over, it always has. Sixteen take-or-pay contracts running to 2030 say the cartel finally learned what the oil majors learned — that the most valuable thing you can do with a commodity is refuse to make too much of it.

The Tape — W2626

Universe of 94 cashflow-memo names, snap dates 2026-06-19 → 2026-06-27. Composite is rank-sum percentile of FCF Yield + NTM Revenue Growth (higher = better balance). Banks and finance-book names shown separately.

Telltales Yield — Top 10

From the Cashflow Desk — Marcus Graham

Micron isn’t in this table, and that’s the point — the print is too fresh and the fiscal-year filing hasn’t landed, so the memo number is already stale. Going into the quarter the memo had it at 102x trailing FCF, which was the wrong frame even then. The reframe is the contract book: 16 take-or-pay deals locking roughly a fifth of DRAM capacity through 2030. Take-or-pay converts a commodity denominator into something closer to contracted revenue, and the screens won’t reprice that until the filings show it. The test is the next fiscal-year filing — and whether Samsung and SK Hynix sign the same paper or break ranks on price.

Telltales Yield — Bottom 10

This Week’s Reporters

Sector Medians

Debt / FCF Watch (highest leverage on TTM FCF)

Weekly Price Movement

Top 5 (week-over-week price)

Bottom 5 (week-over-week price)

Banks (shown separately — FCF metric not meaningful)

Finance-book — FCF not comparable

Data Gaps

90 of 90 ranked-eligible names ranked. 0 dropped for missing FCF yield or NTM revenue growth; 7 shown separately (banks + finance-book, FCF not comparable).

Source: cashflow-memo master_2026-06-27.csv. NTM growth from analyst-estimates consensus. Composite is a percentile rank, not a recommendation.

The Issue — This Week's Brief

The Issue — Weekend Update W2626

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The Cashflow Memo

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Memory Hits Escape Velocity

The week the memory shortage stopped looking like a cycle, and everything downstream paid the bill.

The Telltales Weekend Update. Ava Cabot and analyst Marcus Graham walk through what happened this week — and what’s coming next — across the 90-plus companies in the Cash Flow Memo. About 13 minutes. No filler. Download the memo at telltales.us. Hunt, Jason, and Mike are back Wednesday on episode E2627.

Chapter markers

Time | Segment
0:15 | Cold open — memory’s escape velocity
0:45 | Theme — memory’s downstream: Apple and Oracle
4:45 | Deep dive — Micron and Broadcom
9:00 | Rapid-fire — Nike, pharma, Meta, Tesla
12:15 | Close — Consensus Watch + forward week

Full transcript

Cold open

Ava: You’re listening to the Telltales Weekend Update. I’m Ava Cabot.

Marcus: And I’m Marcus Graham — the cashflow desk.

Ava: Quick note: the show is produced entirely with AI tools, and both voices you’re hearing are AI-generated. Send feedback through the Substack. We’re still in pilot, so tell us what’s working and what isn’t.

Ava: Here’s the one thing to take from this week. Memory hit escape velocity. And everything downstream — Apple’s price tags, Oracle’s balance sheet, the chips hyperscalers are now designing just to get out from under the cost — is a consequence of that one fact. On Wednesday’s show, episode 2626, Hunt, Jason, and Mike flagged the memory squeeze forcing Apple to raise prices.[^ep-e2626] Then Micron reported. And the squeeze stopped looking like a cycle and started looking like a supercycle.

Theme — memory’s downstream

Ava: Start where it hits you at the checkout. Apple just told you the memory shortage has reached the price tag. The company raised prices on 14 products this week — MacBooks up $200, the iPad up to $449, Vision Pro now $3,699.[^aapl-price-hikes-20260625] The stock had its worst day in over a year, down about 6%, roughly $265 billion of market value gone in a session.[^aapl-stock-decline-20260625] And Tim Cook didn’t hedge it. He told the Wall Street Journal memory and storage prices have quadrupled in three quarters, and called it, quote, a hundred-year flood, unlike anything he’s seen in over 40 years.[^aapl-cook-quote-20260625]

Ava: And then the quiet part. The same week Apple raised your prices, it was lobbying the Trump administration for permission to buy memory from ChangXin — a Chinese maker that sits on the Pentagon’s blacklist.[^aapl-cxmt-lobby-20260627] That’s how short memory is. And the talent is chasing the same scarcity — Apple’s head of Vision Pro and smart-glasses engineering left this week for OpenAI’s hardware unit, after seven years on the project.[^aapl-meade-openai-20260626] Marcus — Apple can afford to eat this. Why is it passing it on?

Marcus: Because the flood is real and Apple is telling you it can’t source its way around it. This is a company that prints cash — the memo had Apple at 35 times trailing free cash flow at a roughly 3% yield going in, on about $130 billion of trailing free cash flow.[^memo-aapl-evfcf-20260627][^memo-aapl-fcf-20260627] A company with that cash machine raises prices on the customer only when the input cost is structural, not a blip. The price hikes aren’t the story. The lobbying to buy from a blacklisted supplier is the story. That’s a hardware company admitting the supply chain it actually wants is the one it’s not allowed to use.

Ava: From the checkout to the data center. Oracle is building the AI cloud with borrowed money and a shrinking payroll. The company cut 21,000 jobs over the past year, about 13% of the workforce, while it pours money into infrastructure.[^orcl-layoffs-20260627] Free cash flow for fiscal 2026 swung to a deficit of nearly $24 billion, driven by $55.7 billion in capital spending.[^orcl-fcf-20260627] And it’s guiding next year to $90 billion in revenue while planning to raise another $40 billion in debt.[^orcl-guidance-20260627][^orcl-financing-20260627] Marcus, what does that infrastructure actually cost?

Marcus: It costs the balance sheet, and Oracle’s making that bet out loud. There’s no multiple to anchor here — when you spend $55.7 billion on capex and free cash flow runs a $24 billion deficit, the price-to-cash-flow frame just doesn’t apply.[^memo-orcl-fcf-20260627] So don’t pretend it does. What you’re actually underwriting is whether $40 billion in fresh debt turns into $90 billion of durable cloud revenue, or into stranded capacity.

Ava: A bet, not a business yet.

Marcus: Not yet. And the tell will be the financing. Oracle already raised $43 billion in debt this past year, and it’s planning $40 billion more.[^orcl-financing-20260627] When a company funds the build with the bond market instead of its own cash flow, the bond market gets a vote on the strategy. On page 2 of the memo, Oracle sits right next to Broadcom — the two sides of the same AI infrastructure trade. One is borrowing to build it. The other is selling the shovels at a profit. Hold that thought.

Deep dive — Micron and Broadcom

Ava: Here’s the deep dive, and it’s really one argument. Same week, same end-market, two completely different stories. Micron printed the memory supercycle in raw numbers. Broadcom showed you exactly what the hyperscalers will pay to escape its downstream cost. Two sides of one trade.

Ava: The headlines, side by side. Micron reported fiscal Q3 revenue of $41.5 billion — against prior guidance of around $24 billion — and then guided next quarter to $50 billion, when Wall Street was modeling $43 billion.[^mu-q3-revenue-20260627][^mu-q4-guidance-20260627] The stock jumped 16% and the market cap crossed $1 trillion.[^mu-stock-surge-20260627][^mu-market-cap-20260627] Meanwhile Broadcom and OpenAI unveiled a custom inference chip called Jalapeño, built to cut AI inference cost by about half versus a standard GPU.[^avgo-jalapeno-chip-20260627][^avgo-jalapeno-cost-20260627] Marcus — which one is the bigger surprise?

Marcus: Micron, and it’s not close. Going into this print the memo had Micron at 102 times trailing free cash flow — and I want to be clear, those numbers are now ancient history; we re-anchor when the fiscal-year filing lands.[^memo-mu-evfcf-20260627] Forget the multiple. The thing that matters is buried in the release: 16 legally binding take-or-pay contracts that lock in roughly 20% of Micron’s DRAM capacity through the end of 2030.[^mu-customer-agreements-20260627] That’s not a cycle. A cycle is when prices spike and supply floods in to kill them. This is customers signing five-year contracts to guarantee they get product at all. The cycle didn’t turn. The structure changed.

Ava: But every memory bull has been burned by the next air pocket. What stops this from rolling over the way it always has?

Marcus: The mix. Micron’s data center revenue went up more than sevenfold year over year, to about $11.5 billion in the quarter.[^mu-datacenter-20260627] The old memory cycle ran on phones and PCs — discretionary demand that turns on a dime. This run is driven by AI training and inference clusters, where the buyer is a hyperscaler signing multi-year capacity. Contracted demand doesn’t air-pocket the way discretionary demand does. The real risk isn’t a sudden glut — it’s that the build pauses. And the take-or-pay contracts are written so that even if a customer pauses, Micron still gets paid. That’s the difference between this and 2018.

Ava: So why is Broadcom the other half of this?

Marcus: Because Jalapeño is what you do when the input you depend on just got that expensive. Broadcom’s memo profile is the mirror image of Micron’s — about 68 times trailing free cash flow at a 1.5% yield, a real cash generator priced like one.[^memo-avgo-evfcf-20260627][^memo-avgo-fcfyield-20260627] And its AI semiconductor revenue is already running over $10 billion a quarter, guided toward more than $100 billion in fiscal 2027.[^avgo-fy2027-guidance-20260627] The Jalapeño chip — 50% cheaper inference, co-designed with OpenAI — is the hyperscalers saying out loud that GPU economics hurt enough to design around. Nvidia is the chip everyone’s now trying to engineer their way past. That’s not a knock on Nvidia. That’s a tell on how expensive the whole stack got.

Ava: And does Jalapeño actually dent Nvidia, or is it a negotiating chip?

Marcus: Both, and that’s the point. One custom processor doesn’t break a software moat that took 15 years to build. But it changes every procurement meeting — now the hyperscaler has a credible second source to wave around. The forward test for Broadcom is just as simple: does that $100 billion fiscal-2027 AI number actually show up, or does it stay a slide in a deck? If it shows up, 68 times trailing was cheap. If it slips, it was the top. Either way, Broadcom gets paid to build the escape hatch.

Marcus: Here’s the line that ties it together. Memory is the new crude oil. And like crude, the people who locked in supply before the price doubled look smarter every single quarter. Micron just signed the people who locked in.

Ava: Memory is the new crude oil. Sit with that one.

Rapid-fire

Ava: Rapid fire. Step away from memory for a minute.

Ava: Nike is the turnaround that keeps not arriving, and Tuesday it gets graded. The company reports Q4 results Tuesday afternoon, with the stock sitting at a 52-week low of $40, down about 35% on the year.[^nke-q4-earnings-20260627][^nke-52wk-low-20260627] KeyBanc downgraded it this week on slow turnaround progress and headwinds in China and Europe.[^nke-keybanc-downgrade-20260627] And here’s the crossover detail — Nike’s new finance chief is David Denton, hired straight out of the Pfizer CFO seat.[^nke-denton-cfo-20260627]

Ava: Which brings us to pharma, where the week was busy. On page 15 of the memo — Pfizer and Moderna. Pfizer got an FDA approval expanding its IBRANCE breast-cancer regimen, and it’s pushing 10 Phase 3 studies this year on its monthly GLP-1, berobenatide — the obesity option the market isn’t really pricing.[^pfe-ibrance-approval-20260627][^pfe-berobenatide-phase3-20260627] Pfizer trades around 16 times free cash flow at a 6% yield, so you’re paid to wait.[^memo-pfe-evfcf-20260627] And Moderna got a unanimous, 9-0 FDA advisory vote backing its mRNA flu vaccine, with a decision due August 5 — which would be the first mRNA flu shot licensed in the US.[^mrna-flu-vac-20260627] The stock jumped about 12% on the news.[^mrna-stock-jump-20260627] Two names, one page, two very different clocks — Pfizer’s a yield-and-optionality story you can hold, Moderna’s a binary that resolves August 5.

Ava: Meta showed you the memory supercycle hitting the biggest ad budget in tech. It raised its 2026 capital spending guide to between $125 and $145 billion, blaming higher component pricing and data-center costs.[^meta-capex-20260627] Same flood, different shore. It also unveiled in-house AI smart glasses at $299 and a prediction-market app called Arena.[^meta-glasses-20260627][^meta-prediction-market-20260627]

Ava: And Tesla — the number to watch lands Thursday. Tesla reports Q2 deliveries July 2, with consensus around 406,000 vehicles and Goldman up at 420,000 on a European recovery.[^tsla-q2-schedule-20260627][^tsla-gs-forecast-20260627] One analyst cut the stock to Sell this week, citing energy storage revenue down 12% and robotaxi delays.[^tsla-downgrade-20260627] The delivery print is the first real read on whether Europe offsets China.

Close

Ava: That’s the show. Wall Street’s consensus on Micron: the memory cycle always rolls over, it always has. 16 take-or-pay contracts running through 2030 say maybe not this time. Keep score with me on that one.

Ava: Forward week: Nike reports Tuesday, Tesla deliveries Thursday, and Moderna’s FDA clock runs toward August 5. Everything you heard today traces back to one chart — the price of memory — and the Cash Flow Memo is where we watch it propagate through all 90-plus names. Download it at telltales.us. Hunt, Jason, and Mike are back Wednesday on episode E2627.

Sources

Apple posts worst day in over a year after MacBook and iPad price hikes. (2026, June 25). CNBC. https://www.cnbc.com/2026/06/25/apple-macbook-ipad-price-hike-memory.html
Apple seeks US approval to buy chips from blacklisted CXMT: FT. (2026, June 27). Bloomberg. https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2026-06-27/apple-seeks-us-approval-to-buy-chips-from-blacklisted-cxmt-ft
Apple shares sink after price hikes hit iPads and Macs. (2026, June 25). Bloomberg. https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2026-06-25/apple-raises-mac-and-ipad-prices-to-counter-memory-shortages
Apple’s Vision Pro and smart glasses chief Paul Meade is leaving for OpenAI. (2026, June 26). Bloomberg. https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2026-06-26/apple-s-vision-pro-and-smart-glasses-chief-paul-meade-is-leaving-for-openai
Broadcom (AVGO) earnings report Q2 2026. (2026, June 3). CNBC. https://www.cnbc.com/2026/06/03/broadcom-avgo-earnings-report-q2-2026.html
FDA advisory panel votes 9-0 in favor of Moderna’s mRNA flu vaccine, setting stage for August decision. (2026, June 18). BioPharm International. https://www.biopharminternational.com/view/fda-advisory-panel-votes-9-0-in-favor-of-moderna-s-mrna-flu-vaccine-setting-stage-for-august-decision
FDA approves Pfizer’s IBRANCE regimen for HR+, HER2+ metastatic breast cancer frontline maintenance. (2026, June 24). BusinessWire. https://www.businesswire.com/news/home/20260617408304/en/FDA-Approves-Pfizers-IBRANCE-Regimen-for-HR-HER2-Metastatic-Breast-Cancer-Frontline-Maintenance
Goldman Sachs raises Tesla Q2 2026 delivery forecast to 420K. (2026, June 26). Basenor. https://www.basenor.com/blogs/news/goldman-sachs-raises-tesla-q2-2026-delivery-forecast-to-420k
KeyBanc lowers Nike rating to Sector Weight on near-term uncertainty. (2026, June 26). Investing.com. https://www.investing.com/news/stock-market-news/keybanc-lowers-nike-rating-to-sector-weight-on-nearterm-uncertainty-4762387
Meta plans to release AI-powered prediction market app, documents show. (2026, June 24). NPR. https://www.npr.org/2026/06/24/nx-s1-5869486/meta-prediction-market-app-ai
Meta Platforms, Inc. (2026). Form 8-K, FY2026 [Q1 results / 2026 capex guidance]. SEC EDGAR. https://www.sec.gov/Archives/edgar/data/0001326801/000162828026003832/meta-12312025xexhibit991.htm
Micron posts $41.5B Q3 revenue, guides Q4 to $50B. (2026, June 24). StockTitan. https://www.stocktitan.net/news/MU/micron-technology-inc-reports-record-results-for-the-third-quarter-6f50161e5zxh.html
Micron sales forecast tops estimates on memory-chip demand. (2026, June 24). Bloomberg. https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2026-06-24/micron-sales-forecast-tops-estimates-on-insatiable-memory-demand
Micron stock hits record high after Q3 earnings. (2026, June 24). TradingKey. https://www.tradingkey.com/analysis/stocks/us-stocks/261995206-micron-mu-q3-memory-shortage-cycle-ai-2027-samsung-skhynix-capex-tradingkey
Micron Technology stock could go parabolic after June 24. Here’s why. (2026, June 24). Yahoo Finance. https://finance.yahoo.com/markets/stocks/articles/prediction-micron-technology-stock-could-110200571.html
MRNA stock surges as flu win and pipeline shift grab attention. (2026, June 26). Timothy Sykes News. https://www.timothysykes.com/news/moderna-inc-mrna-news-2026_06_26-2/
Nike names Pfizer CFO David Denton as next finance chief. (2026, June 23). Bloomberg. https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2026-06-23/nike-hires-pfizer-cfo-denton-to-take-over-for-departing-friend
NIKE, Inc. (2026, June). NIKE, Inc. announces fourth quarter fiscal 2026 earnings and conference call [Press release]. Nike Investor Relations. https://investors.nike.com/investors/news-events-and-reports/investor-news/investor-news-details/2026/NIKE-Inc–Announces-Fourth-Quarter-Fiscal-2026-Earnings-and-Conference-Call/default.aspx
Nike stock hits 52-week low. (2026, June 26). Investing.com. https://www.investing.com/news/company-news/nike-stock-hits-52week-low-at-4132-usd-93CH-4758516
Broadcom Inc. (2026, June 24). OpenAI and Broadcom unveil LLM-optimized intelligence processor [Press release]. Broadcom Investor Relations. https://investors.broadcom.com/news-releases/news-release-details/openai-and-broadcom-unveil-llm-optimized-intelligence-processor
OpenAI launches custom AI chip Jalapeño with Broadcom (AVGO). (2026, June 24). GuruFocus. https://www.gurufocus.com/news/8930240/openai-launches-custom-ai-chip-jalapeno-with-broadcom-avgo
Oracle Corporation. (2026, June 10). Oracle announces record Q4 and FY 2026 results driven by Cloud Infrastructure & Cloud Applications [Press release]. Oracle Investor Relations. https://investor.oracle.com/investor-news/news-details/2026/Oracle-Announces-Record-Q4-and-FY-2026-Results-Driven-by-Cloud-Infrastructure–Cloud-Applications/default.aspx
Oracle lays off 21,000 employees in just 12 months due to AI adoption and costly AI infrastructure ambitions. (2026, June 23). Tom’s Hardware. https://www.tomshardware.com/tech-industry/artificial-intelligence/oracle-lays-off-21-000-employees-in-just-12-months-due-to-ai-adoption-and-costly-ai-infrastructure-ambitions-says-layoffs-will-continue-as-internal-ai-deployment-grows
Oracle Q4 earnings and revenue top estimates; hyperscaler plans more debt issuance to support massive capex push. (2026, June 11). Sherwood News. https://sherwood.news/tech/oracle-q4-earnings-and-revenue-top-estimates/
Oracle shares slide as hefty AI spending, debt plans spook investors. (2026, June 11). The Spokesman-Review. https://www.spokesman.com/stories/2026/jun/11/oracle-shares-slide-as-hefty-ai-spending-debt-plan/
Robust Phase 2b efficacy and favorable tolerability support monthly dosing for Pfizer’s GLP-1 RA berobenatide. (2026, June 5). BioSpace. https://www.biospace.com/press-releases/robust-phase-2b-efficacy-and-favorable-tolerability-support-monthly-dosing-for-pfizers-glp-1-ra-berobenatide
Tesla downgraded to Sell, citing energy storage and robotaxi delays. (2026). Yahoo Finance. https://finance.yahoo.com/news/tesla-stock-drops-as-new-morgan-stanley-analyst-downgrades-shares-citing-valuation-164741776.html
Tesla Q2 2026 analyst delivery consensus. (2026, June 26). Electrek. https://electrek.co/2026/06/26/tesla-q2-2026-delivery-consensus-406000/

Internal data

Internal data is provided on a best efforts basis.

Who Owns Your Data Now

Mike Nicoletti — Thu, 25 Jun 2026 13:15:03 GMT

Mike Nicoletti, Hunt Lawrence, and Jason Wallace dig into the looming Treasury market stress, proprietary-data risk in the age of frontier AI models, and a Medicare for All blueprint that could reshape healthcare investing. A 30-minute tour across energy, technology, and healthcare, anchored by this week’s Cash Flow Memo.

The Cashflow Memo

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Key Takeaways

Hunt puts better-than-even odds on a 2008-style Treasury market dislocation within 12-24 months as ~$2.5T of new government paper collides with the incoming Fed chair’s plan to run the balance sheet from ~$7T down to ~$1.5T, plus the financing wave funding AI data centers (SpaceX alone just did $25B of public debt after its equity raise).
The only fiscal lever large enough to bend the deficit is healthcare, and Hunt floats Medicare for All run by an independent, Fed-style administrator (he names Dr. Oz) that ends the ~$600B/year Medicaid transfer to states; investment read is to avoid new healthcare positions broadly but identify the specific winners of a restructured system.
Apple is running Apple Intelligence inference on Nvidia Blackwell inside Google Cloud (not TPUs) specifically because Nvidia uniquely offers encrypted-data-in-memory, making proprietary-data protection the new competitive axis for frontier-model compute.
On a forced 5-year choice between Nvidia and Alphabet, the hosts lean Nvidia on relative value: ~$160B free cash flow trending toward ~$200B with minimal CapEx (vs. Apple’s $120B and Alphabet’s heavy capital program compressing its FCF), framed as the picks-and-shovels seller in the AI buildout.
The memory-supply shortage is forcing Apple to raise device prices (an estimated +$275 on the iPhone Pro just to hold gross margin); Micron reports tonight, and the squeeze is driving a stack-wide efficiency push (Nvidia cites ~2.5x inference efficiency gains since OpenAI’s 5.5 models).

Show Notes

[00:26] Oil Holds in the 70s, and a Treasury Warning Hunt sees no change in the oil supply/demand picture, WTI holding around $71, and lower oil prices paradoxically supporting natural gas via reduced Permian growth. He lays out a better-than-50% case for a 2008-style Treasury dislocation in the next 12-24 months, with healthcare as the only spending lever big enough to matter.

[05:23] Medicare for All and Fixing Sick Care The hosts debate whether the U.S. can shift from triaging illness to keeping people healthy, why insurers’ one-year underwriting horizon works against long-term health, and how government’s interest in Medicare aligns with prevention.

[08:07] Proprietary Data in the Age of Frontier Models How do Lilly, Citadel, or a startup protect proprietary information when agents can analyze anything on the open internet? Apple’s choice to run inference on Nvidia Blackwell for encrypted-in-memory data, cloud providers’ security track record, and the new attack surface agents introduce.

[17:42] Nvidia vs. Alphabet for Five Years A forced one-stock choice: Alphabet as the chicken bet spanning search, cloud, Gemini, and DeepMind, versus Nvidia’s ~$160B-trending-$200B free cash flow on minimal CapEx. Plus the memory shortage forcing a ~$275 iPhone price hike and a stack-wide efficiency race.

[23:44] Healthcare Science: CRISPR, the FDA, and China A generalizable CRISPR approach that shreds cancerous tumor DNA, an FDA program to cut 6-12 months off Phase 1 trials by partnering biotechs with academic centers, and the competitive threat from faster-moving Chinese biotech.

[29:49] Closing: Medicare for All, the Fed, and the Financing Wave Dr. Oz as a Fed-style independent Medicare administrator, identifying the healthcare winners of a restructured system, and the collision of Treasury issuance with massive data-center financing (SpaceX’s $25B debt raise).

Download this week’s Cash Flow Memo at telltales.us, and subscribe for energy, tech, and healthcare insights every Wednesday.

Cashtags

Weekend Update - W2625

Mike Nicoletti — Sun, 21 Jun 2026 15:37:25 GMT

▶ Explore this week’s Tape — live, sortable, drill-down →

Three Bottlenecks, One Multiple, and Only One Monopoly

The AI argument flipped sides this week. For two years the only question that mattered was whether anyone would actually buy all this compute, and Wednesday’s show put that one to bed. The question left standing is whether the supply chain can physically build it — the lithography, the power, the memory. And in the rush to own the chokepoints, the market did something lazy. It paid all three the same monopoly multiple. Only one of them is a monopoly.

Start with the one that is. ASML makes the machine that etches the most advanced chips on earth, and it makes it alone — no second source, no roadmap to one, no credible challenger inside a decade. The Cash Flow Memo has it trading around sixty times free cash flow, on roughly eleven billion dollars of trailing free cash flow translated from euros.¹² That is a monopoly multiple, and for once it is bolted to an actual monopoly. The thing that can dent it is not a competitor — it is a government. Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick told ASML, per Bloomberg, that he is concerned a top-tier extreme-ultraviolet machine may have reached China in violation of export controls; the company denied it has ever shipped one there.³ Notice what the risk actually is. Not the machine. The map of who is allowed to buy it. ASML’s customer list is the only variable that has ever moved this stock, and it is the one variable ASML does not control.

Now the two the market is paying as if they were ASML. GE Vernova booked more data-center power orders last quarter than it did in all of the prior year, and its turbine backlog now stretches past a hundred-ten gigawatts into 2029.⁴ ⁵ Free cash flow grew almost four hundred percent.⁶ Real demand, real scarcity — for now. But a gas turbine is not an EUV machine. Siemens Energy and Mitsubishi build them too, and slot scarcity is the kind of bottleneck competition fills in three or four years, not three or four decades. GE Vernova is renting its scarcity. The order book is genuine; the durability is the open question, and a thirty-times multiple is pricing the scarcity as if it were permanent.

Then memory — the bottleneck with the longest rap sheet. Micron reports Wednesday with its entire 2026 high-bandwidth-memory output already sold under contract and DRAM pricing set to jump fifty percent this quarter.⁷ ⁸ The cashflow read is in Marcus’s column below — short version, the trailing multiple is the cheap number, not the scary one. But here is the part the show had no room for: memory is the one bottleneck on this list that has detonated itself before. Every prior cycle ended the same way. All three makers see the shortage, all three turn the capex spigot at once, supply overshoots demand, and the pricing that looked structural turns out to have been a moment. Micron is committing roughly two hundred billion dollars to new capacity, and its two competitors are spending into the same shortage.⁹ That is either supply discipline or the seed of the next glut, and you cannot tell which from inside the shortage. You never can. That is what makes memory memory.

So three bottlenecks, three very different half-lives, and a tape paying all three the monopoly rate. The durable one — the cornered machine — arguably earns it. The other two are borrowing the multiple from the durable one, and the loan comes due the day a competitor adds a turbine line or a third memory maker blinks first on capex.

What changes the read is Wednesday, and the tell is Micron’s gross-margin guide. Guide above where consensus already sits and the cycle is still accelerating into the glut question, not away from it.¹⁰ Merely meet it, and a sold-out company that only meets gets sold on the news. The trade across the whole supply chain breaks the moment any one of the three memory makers signals it is racing the other two to fill capacity rather than pacing itself.

Wall Street’s consensus on the supply chain: own the bottleneck, any bottleneck, at any multiple. The math says own the one nobody else can build — and rent the other two only as long as the scarcity lasts.

The Tape — W2625

Universe of 94 cashflow-memo names, snap dates 2026-06-15 → 2026-06-19. Composite is rank-sum percentile of FCF Yield + NTM Revenue Growth (higher = better balance). Banks and finance-book names shown separately.

Telltales Yield — Top 10

From the Cashflow Desk — Marcus Graham

Micron reports Wednesday, and the reporters table holds the whole argument in two cells that read like a contradiction: a 1.0% trailing FCF yield sitting right beside 64% forward revenue growth. Trailing, Micron screens at 102x free cash flow — and that is a cyclical at the bottom of its cash cycle, where the trailing multiple measures the past and tells you nothing about the print. The 1.0% yield is the trough. The 64% is the market pricing what sold-out capacity earns once contract prices reset higher. The cheap-looking cell is the lie; the expensive-looking one is the tell. The test Wednesday is the gross-margin guide — clear where consensus already sits with the cycle still accelerating, or a sold-out name that merely meets gets sold on the news.

Telltales Yield — Bottom 10

This Week’s Reporters

Sector Medians

Debt / FCF Watch (highest leverage on TTM FCF)

Weekly Price Movement

Top 5 (week-over-week price)

Bottom 5 (week-over-week price)

Banks (shown separately — FCF metric not meaningful)

Finance-book — FCF not comparable

Data Gaps

90 of 90 ranked-eligible names ranked. 0 dropped for missing FCF yield or NTM revenue growth; 7 shown separately (banks + finance-book, FCF not comparable).

Source: cashflow-memo master_2026-06-19.csv. NTM growth from analyst-estimates consensus. Composite is a percentile rank, not a recommendation.

The Issue — This Week's Brief

The Issue — Weekend Update W2625

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The Cashflow Memo

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The Week AI Became a Supply Story

The bottleneck moved from demand to supply this week. Micron’s Wednesday print is the first real test.

The Telltales Weekend Update. Ava Cabot and analyst Marcus Graham walk through what happened this week — and what’s coming next — across the 86 companies in the Cash Flow Memo. About 13 minutes. No filler. Download the memo at telltales.us. Hunt, Jason, and Mike are back Wednesday on episode E2626.

Chapter markers

Time | Segment
0:15 | Cold open — the supply side of AI
0:45 | Theme — the two hardest things to build (ASML, GE Vernova)
4:45 | Deep dive — Micron, the print that sets the cycle
8:45 | Rapid-fire — Moderna, FedEx, Nike, Cheniere, Intel
11:45 | Close — Consensus Watch + the week ahead

Full transcript

Opening disclaimer

Ava: The following conversation is intended for informational purposes only. You should always do your own work to determine if an investment is suitable for you.

Cold open

Ava: You’re listening to the Telltales Weekend Update. I’m Ava Cabot.

Marcus: And I’m Marcus Graham — the cashflow desk.

Ava: Quick note: the show is produced entirely with AI tools, and both voices you’re hearing are AI-generated. Send feedback through the Substack. This is still a pilot, so tell us what’s working and what isn’t.

Ava: And one more thing before we start — this one lands on Father’s Day. So happy Father’s Day to all the dads listening. We’re glad you’re spending part of the morning with us.

Ava: Here’s the week in one sentence. The argument about whether anyone will actually buy all this AI compute? That got settled on Wednesday’s show. This week the question flipped to the other side of the ledger — can we build the supply. The machines that print the chips, the power that runs them, and the memory that feeds them. All three flashed at once. Three different stories, one spine — the build is now gated by what can physically be manufactured, not by whether the demand shows up. On this week’s Telltales, episode 2625, Hunt, Jason, and Mike spent the hour on the demand side — NVIDIA at $5 trillion, the end of the subsidized-token era, who actually pays for the compute.[^ep-e2625b] We’re taking the other half. The supply chain that has to deliver before any of that demand means a thing.

Theme — The two hardest things to build

Ava: Two things in this build are genuinely hard to make. One is the machine that etches the chip. The other is the electricity that runs it. Both made news this week, and both made it for the same reason — the demand has gotten ahead of the supply. Start with the machine almost nobody owns. This week the US government told the company that makes it that one of those machines may have ended up somewhere it isn’t allowed to go. US Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick told ASML’s leadership he’s concerned one of its top-tier extreme-ultraviolet lithography machines may have reached China, in violation of export controls.[^asml-us-export-concern-20260619] ASML denied it flatly — says it has never shipped an EUV machine to China.[^asml-us-export-concern-20260619] This on the same company that just raised its full-year guide to €36–40 billion on AI demand.[^asml-q1-earnings-20260619] Marcus — what does a monopoly on the most important machine in the world actually cost?

Marcus: ASML is the only company on earth that can make this machine, and the market has always paid it like one. The memo has ASML at about 62 times free cash flow,[^memo-asml-evfcf-20260619] on roughly $11 billion of trailing free cash flow, translated from euros.[^memo-asml-fcf-20260619] That’s a monopoly multiple for a monopoly. The export-control story doesn’t touch the cash — it touches who’s allowed to be a customer. And for this name, the customer list is the only variable that has ever mattered. A monopoly is worth 62 times right up until a government starts deciding who it can sell to.

Ava: So the risk isn’t the machine. It’s the map of where it’s allowed to ship. And if Lutnick’s concern turns out to be real — if a top-tier machine genuinely reached China — the read-through isn’t just one company’s quarter. It’s that the export-control wall the entire AI-chip supply chain is built on has a crack in it.[^asml-us-export-concern-20260619] That’s the bigger story, and it’s why a denial isn’t the end of this one. Now the other hard thing — and it’s the boring one, right up until it’s the bottleneck. Electricity. GE Vernova booked more data-center power orders in a single quarter than it did in all of last year. $2.4 billion of electrification equipment orders for data centers in the first quarter alone.[^gev-data-center-orders-20260619] Its gas-turbine backlog now stretches past 110 gigawatts into 2029,[^gev-turbine-backlog-20260619] and Bernstein just opened coverage with an Outperform, calling it a play on the AI power boom.[^gev-bernstein-20260619] Marcus — second one. What’s the cash say?

Marcus: The power names spent a decade as widow-and-orphan utilities. GE Vernova just stopped being one. The memo has it at about 33 times free cash flow,[^memo-gev-evfcf-20260619] and free cash flow grew almost 400% year over year.[^memo-gev-fcf-20260619] That’s not a utility growth rate — that’s an order book repricing to AI in real time. $2.4 billion of data-center orders in one quarter[^gev-data-center-orders-20260619] is the tell. The thing I’d watch is conversion: that backlog only matters if the turbine slots actually deliver on schedule and don’t slip. The orders are real. The execution is the open question.

Deep dive — Micron

Ava: Now the print that sets the whole cycle. Micron — page 5 of the memo, sharing it with GE Vernova, power and memory side by side — reports Wednesday after the close,[^earn-mu] and the question isn’t whether they beat. The question is whether there’s any memory left to sell. Because Micron’s entire 2026 high-bandwidth-memory production is already sold out — every chip, under binding contract, before the year is even half over.[^mu-hbm-sold-out-20260619] And DRAM contract pricing is set to jump 50–55% this quarter alone versus the end of last year.[^mu-dram-pricing-cycle-20260619] Marcus — when the product’s sold out a year ahead, what are we actually pricing?

Marcus: Here’s the trap on this one. Trailing, Micron screens at 102 times free cash flow.[^memo-mu-evfcf-20260619] Ignore that number. It’s a cyclical at the bottom of its cash-flow cycle, and a trailing multiple on a cyclical at the trough is noise — it tells you about the past, not the print. Free cash flow already grew more than 500% off the bottom,[^memo-mu-fcf-20260619] and the forward revenue line is up about 64%.[^memo-mu-ntmrev-20260619] You don’t value this on what it earned. You value it on what sold-out capacity earns at much higher pricing. And against that, 102 times trailing is the cheap number, not the scary one.

Ava: So the terrifying multiple is the cheap one. Marcus’s favorite kind of sentence.

Marcus: It is. And the supply side is the part the bears can’t model. Micron is committing roughly $200 billion to new capacity.[^mu-capex-expansion-20260619] You do not put $200 billion against a cycle you think is about to roll over. That’s management telling you the shortage is structural, not a head-fake. It’s the same story Nvidia’s Rubin platform is telling from the other side of the table — Micron is the qualified high-bandwidth-memory supplier into it, shipping in volume.[^mu-rubin-hbm4-20260619]

Ava: And the hiring backs it up.

Marcus: It does. Per the Talnexis hiring tracker, Micron is the #3 hiring floor on the entire board — 3,000 open roles, 181 of them added just this week.[^tlnx-mu-hiringfloor-20260619] You don’t staff like that into a cycle you expect to break. The one thing I’d actually watch Wednesday is the gross-margin guide — guide above where consensus already sits[^mu-margin-guidance-20260619] and the cycle’s still accelerating. Merely meet it and the stock’s already there, and a sold-out company that only meets is a sell-the-news.

Ava: So what actually breaks this?

Marcus: Two things, and I’d weight them. The real risk was never demand — it’s supply discipline. If all three memory makers turn the capex spigot at once, you get a glut, and the cycle ends the way every memory cycle has ended. I’d put that around 30%. The nearer risk is mix — if high-bandwidth memory crowds out standard DRAM capacity, the blended margin doesn’t reach what the Street’s penciling in. Call that another 10%. Which leaves the base case at 60% — and it’s the boring one: sold out, pricing up 50%, the capacity already committed. The cash shows up whether the multiple believes it or not.

Ava: So 30% it ends in tears, 10% it just muddles through on margin, 60% it prints money — and Marcus will at least give you the whole distribution instead of selling you a price target. 81% gross margin on what used to be a commodity.[^mu-margin-guidance-20260619] Read that twice. Broadcom and Oracle spent Wednesday’s show proving the demand is real.[^ep-e2625b] Micron on Wednesday tells you whether the supply can keep up. Same trade, opposite end of the table.

Rapid-fire

Ava: Rapid-fire. Five names, and markets open Monday.

Ava: Moderna had its best week in four years, and for once it had nothing to do with COVID. An FDA advisory panel voted 9-0 to endorse its mRNA flu vaccine for adults 50 and older,[^mrna-flu-vaccine-approval-20260619] with a final FDA decision expected by August 5. The stock jumped 28%.[^mrna-stock-jump-20260619] Free cash flow is still negative here — this is an optionality name, not a cash machine — but it’s the first real commercial catalyst since the COVID franchise rolled over.

Ava: Two reporters sit together on page 17 of the memo, and they’re back to back next week. FedEx is first, Tuesday after the close.[^earn-fdx] The number that matters isn’t the quarter — it’s the breakup. The Freight spinoff is on track: 80.1% of the shares distributed to FedEx holders, and Freight pays a $4.1 billion special dividend back to the parent on the way out.[^fdx-freight-spinoff-taxfree-20260619] Add $1 billion of cost cuts this year from the DRIVE program,[^fdx-drive-program-20260619] and a forward guide that just got raised.[^fdx-guidance-raise-20260619] A cleaner, lighter FedEx is the entire thesis.

Ava: Nike reports the following Tuesday, June 30.[^earn-nke] This is the clearest test yet of whether Elliott Hill’s turnaround is real. The headwinds are brutal — a $1.5 billion annual tariff hit that took gross margin down 300 basis points,[^nke-tariff-cost-20260619] China down 16%,[^nke-china-decline-20260619] digital down 14%.[^nke-digital-decline-20260619] Win Now has to show up in a number Tuesday, not a slogan. First place it can.

Ava: Cheniere keeps building while everyone else watches the oil price. It signed a $4.69 billion engineering contract with Bechtel for the Sabine Pass expansion,[^lng-sabine-pass-epc-20260619] with a final investment decision targeted for early 2027, and it just finished Corpus Christi Trains 5 and 6.[^lng-corpus-christi-progress-20260619] And it throws off nearly an 8% free-cash-flow yield while it does it.[^memo-lng-fcfyield-20260619] The cash machine of the energy names.

Ava: And Intel had a genuinely good week on the factory floor — which is the only place that matters for this story. Its 18A-P process entered risk production: 9% more performance at the same power.[^intc-18ap-20260619] And NVIDIA is evaluating that node for a future design.[^intc-nvidia-18a-20260619] No order yet. But the whole Intel thesis comes down to whether anyone outside Intel will manufacture on its leading node — and NVIDIA kicking the tires is the first real evidence in years.

Ava: And one to file away for the fall. Vertex got its kidney-disease drug, povetacicept, accepted for FDA review this week — its first real move into a major indication beyond cystic fibrosis, with a decision due November 30.[^vrtx-povetacicept-20260619] Not a Monday catalyst. But a real one on the calendar.

Close

Ava: That’s the show. Wall Street’s consensus on Micron heading into Wednesday: 30 analysts, unanimous Buy, an average target around $1,015 on a stock that’s already there.[^mu-analyst-target-revisions-20260619] Consensus says the supercycle is priced in. Consensus has been wrong about memory at every single turn of this cycle. Hiring data this week from Talnexis — talnexis.com. The throughline one more time: the AI demand debate is over. Whether the supply chain can deliver — the lithography, the power, the memory — is the only question left, and Wednesday’s Micron print is the first real answer. Hunt, Jason, and Mike are back Wednesday on episode 2626, picking up whether proprietary data can actually be protected.[^ep-e2625b] Download the Cash Flow Memo at telltales.us. I’m Ava Cabot. Thanks for listening.

Closing disclaimer

Sources

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Micron Technology: HBM sold out for 2026 — Wall Street is still underpricing. (2026, June 19). Seeking Alpha. https://seekingalpha.com/article/4881338-micron-technology-hbm-sold-out-for-2026-wall-street-is-still-underpricing
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US tells ASML it is concerned China may have top chip tool. (2026, June 19). Bloomberg. https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2026-06-19/us-tells-asml-it-s-concerned-china-may-have-top-chip-tool
Utility Dive. (2026). GE Vernova bullish on electrical infrastructure as turbine backlog grows. https://www.utilitydive.com/news/ge-vernova-bullish-on-electrical-infrastructure-as-turbine-backlog-grows/803631/
Utility Dive. (2026). GE Vernova expects to end 2025 with an 80 GW gas turbine backlog that stretches into 2029. https://www.utilitydive.com/news/ge-vernova-expects-to-end-2025-with-an-80-gw-gas-turbine-backlog-that-stretches-into-2029/807662/
Vertex Pharmaceuticals. (2026). Vertex announces US FDA acceptance of biologics license application for povetacicept [Press release]. https://news.vrtx.com/news-releases/news-release-details/vertex-announces-us-fda-acceptance-biologics-license-application
Yahoo Finance. (2026). Intel bets on 18A, Xeon 6. https://finance.yahoo.com/sectors/technology/articles/intel-bets-18a-xeon-6-070403655.html

Internal data

Internal data is provided on a best efforts basis.

Forward earnings

FDX — FedEx, 2026-06-23 (Tuesday) AMC, fiscal Q4 2026. Consensus EPS 5.91 / revenue $24.04B. Earnings calendar.
MU — Micron, 2026-06-24 (Wednesday) AMC, fiscal Q3 2026. (Consensus columns unreliable this week; report date verified.) Earnings calendar.
NKE — Nike, 2026-06-30 (Tuesday) AMC, fiscal Q4 2026. Consensus EPS 0.11 / revenue $10.85B. Earnings calendar.

Hiring intelligence (Talnexis)

MU — Micron #3 hiring floor (3,061 open roles, +181 in the 7-day window), detected 2026-06-19. Source: Talnexis hiring intelligence, https://www.talnexis.com/

The End of the Subsidized-Token Era

Mike Nicoletti — Sat, 20 Jun 2026 04:20:30 GMT

All three hosts in one room: a macro tour through oil, gas and a new Fed chair, then a deep dive on NVIDIA at $5 trillion, the software stack’s capex problem, and the Anthropic export-control fight that turns proprietary data into the next moat.

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Key Takeaways

Macro (Hunt’s exhibits): Oil sits ~$80 heading toward $70 (vs $60 on its way to $50 when the Iran event started), with backwardation compressing to under $10; natural gas averages ~$3.50 across both ’26 and ’27. New Fed chair Kevin Warsh signaled aggressive balance-sheet runoff (~$750B/yr toward a target near $1.5T) and a possible bias to hike — a lot of paper for the market to absorb against a ~$1.5T deficit.
NVIDIA at ~$5T is turning into a value stock: free cash flow on a $200-250B run-rate by year-end (vs a record ~$160B). The bull case has shifted from the chip cycle to TAM expansion — server → rack → row → full reference data-center design, an x86-killer CPU, and direct buildouts for cash-rich non-hyperscalers like Eli Lilly (~$20B FCF), Exxon/Chevron, and Citadel — though AI capex at ~3% of GDP raises a law-of-large-numbers ceiling on incremental budget growth.
Software dispersion is about capex risk: Salesforce screens cheap at ~18x FCF because it owns its own data centers and will likely have to deploy GPUs (capex rising from ~zero), while ServiceNow trades >50x renting AWS; Snowflake stays cash-light on heavy SBC but saw NRR re-accelerate on ~30% revenue growth as its AI product (chat over enterprise data) ramps.
The Anthropic throughline: a cyber-capable model released to ~40 entities (JPMorgan et al.), Amazon/Jassy lobbying Washington for export controls, the guardrailed Fable version jailbroken within two days, and distillation risk from Tencent/Alibaba (~1 year behind). The hosts read Jassy’s move as AWS self-protection, not public spirit — AWS was almost certainly one of the 40.
AI economics as a J-curve, proprietary data as the new moat: OpenAI/Anthropic head public with no profits against massive compute rent; the tell to watch is the end of the subsidized-token era (Uber/Lyft tripled fares post-IPO once VC subsidies ended). Microsoft blocked Anthropic’s models internally after a ToS change let Anthropic capture and train on user prompts (i.e., customer code) — a breach of trust that makes walled-off hosting (Citadel on Google) the real battleground.

Show Notes

[00:00] Intro & this week’s Cash Flow Memo Mike sets up the episode and points listeners to the memo at telltales.us.

[00:26] Exhibits A/B/C — Oil, Gas & the Fed Hunt’s five minutes: oil $80 toward $70 with backwardation under $10, nat gas ~$3.50 across ’26-’27, and new Fed chair Kevin Warsh signaling balance-sheet runoff and a possible hike bias.

[04:37] Apple & Snap — foldables, camera AirPods, AR glasses Apple’s underwhelming conference (a 2028 foldable, AirPods with cameras) versus Snap’s see-through AR glasses and why Meta’s audio-only glasses are the best product today.

[07:30] Why Amazon called Washington on Anthropic Anthropic’s cyber-capable model, the limited release to ~40 entities, and the hosts’ read that Jassy’s export-control push is AWS self-protection.

[10:53] Jailbreaking the guardrails & the China distillation risk The Fable guardrailed version cracked in two days, and why Tencent/Alibaba stay roughly a year behind.

[13:46] What is SpaceX worth? — AI’s J-curve to profits SpaceX public and +30%, OpenAI/Anthropic going public with no profits, and how to think about revenue growth that costs enormous compute.

[15:44] The end of the subsidized-token era Jason’s Uber/Lyft analogy: cheap VC-funded tokens today, tripled rates after the IPO.

[16:11] Microsoft’s per-seat agent bet Why fixed price-per-seat plus usage upside is the right model for a slow-moving enterprise base, and the job-displacement question.

[18:54] Software dispersion — Salesforce, ServiceNow & Snowflake Salesforce at 18x FCF and a coming GPU capex bill, ServiceNow renting AWS, and Snowflake’s NRR re-acceleration.

[21:34] Oracle, Broadcom & NVIDIA at $5 trillion Oracle and Broadcom’s pivots, then NVIDIA as a record-FCF value stock.

[24:45] NVIDIA’s next TAM — racks, rows, x86 & selling direct From server to full reference data-center design, going after the x86 CPU market, and building private clouds for enterprises.

[25:53] Healthcare & the cash-flow hunt — Lilly, Exxon/Chevron, Citadel NVIDIA chasing free-cash-flow-rich customers: Lilly’s walled-off AI buildout, oil majors, and Citadel’s Google deal.

[29:48] Proprietary data as the new moat Microsoft blocks Anthropic’s models after a ToS change to capture and train on customer prompts — a breach of trust.

[32:31] Next week & sign-off A teed-up deep dive on protecting proprietary data: defense versus offense, and whether anything can truly be walled off.

If these conversations have earned a place in your week, send the show to one person who’d genuinely enjoy it. Download the Cash Flow Memo at telltales.us.

Cashtags

The One Week We Were All in the Same Room

Mike Nicoletti — Fri, 19 Jun 2026 14:55:13 GMT

For the first time in four years, there’s no new Telltales episode this week.

The one week all three of us were finally in the same city — Hunt, Jason, and Mike, in one room in New York instead of scattered across two coasts — the recording gremlins picked their moment. The primary recording failed partway through. There’s a backup, and we’re actively working to recover it.

So here’s the plan: if we recover the audio, this week’s episode lands in your feed the moment it’s clean. If we don’t, no harm done — Hunt, Jason, and Mike are back in the chair next Wednesday, and Ava is back with the Weekend Update on Saturday.

While you wait, this week’s Cash Flow Memo is below. And if these conversations have earned a place in your week, send the show to one person who’d genuinely enjoy it. Almost all of our growth has come from listeners doing exactly that — and we don’t take a single recommendation for granted.

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Weekend Update - W2624

Mike Nicoletti — Mon, 15 Jun 2026 16:23:36 GMT

▶ Explore this week’s Tape — live, sortable, drill-down →

Good News, Sold: The AI Buildout’s First Bill Came Due

Every capital cycle has the same tell. It is not the day the spending stops. It is the day the market stops clapping for it — when a company does exactly what it promised and the stock falls anyway. This week the most expensive trade on earth hit that day three times.

Oracle delivered the backlog it told everyone it would deliver. A six-hundred-thirty-eight-billion-dollar pile of contracted future revenue, up more than three-and-a-half times in a year.¹ Cloud infrastructure revenue up ninety-three percent.² It did the thing. The stock fell ten percent.³

For two years the AI trade was a referendum on demand: is it real, how big, how fast. The bull won that argument. So the market moved the goalposts, the way it always does at this point in a buildout — from is the demand there to who pays to meet it, and what does the bill do to the balance sheet carrying it. Bill Maris said the quiet part on All-In this week: a trillion dollars of spend commitments sitting on sixty billion of revenue, and now you go to the public markets and hope retail picks up the difference.⁴ That is the bear case in one sentence. Three names walked straight into it this week, and the interesting part is that each of them is paying the bill a different way.

Oracle is borrowing it. Trailing free cash flow is already negative — they spent the better part of fifty billion dollars on capex to build the capacity behind that backlog, and the money to fund the next leg is coming out of the debt market into a tape that has stopped rewarding capital plans.⁵ NextEra is diluting for it. The biggest bet in the history of regulated utilities — a sixty-seven-billion-dollar, all-stock takeover of Dominion, built explicitly to wire thirty gigawatts of data-center power by twenty-thirty-five, Google and Meta already signed.⁶ All-stock is the tell. A utility already carrying sixteen times debt to free cash flow cannot borrow its way to the biggest deal in its sector’s history, so it is paying with equity and handing the cost to the shareholder it already has.⁷ The stock fell nine percent.⁸ Micron is the one name pre-selling it: its entire next fiscal year of high-bandwidth memory is already spoken for, certified into Nvidia’s roadmap, the demand contracted before the capacity ships.⁹

Three funding strategies — debt, equity, pre-sold demand — and one underlying wager: that AI demand is durable enough to convert all of it to cash before the interest comes due. The cashflow read is in Marcus’s column below; short version, two of these three have no multiple to quote because the denominator is still negative. Page one of the Cash Flow Memo this week is a capex ledger, not an earnings sheet.

This is what the back half of a capital cycle looks like, and it rhymes. The railroads, the fiber glut, the shale decade — the capital cycle never turns when the building stops. It turns when the market stops paying for the announcement and starts pricing the lag between the spend and the cash. The demand did not get worse this week. The accounting for it did.

The next data point is dated. Micron reports Wednesday the twenty-fourth.¹⁰ On the screen it trades at a hundred times trailing free cash flow, which sounds insane and tells you nothing — that is trough cash flow at the bottom of a memory cycle. Price it forward and consensus has it at a single-digit multiple of next year’s earnings,¹¹ with trailing cash flow already up more than five-fold off the low.¹² The test is not the headline print. It is whether the forward demand the whole buildout is leaning on shows up in one company’s order book. If Micron’s guide confirms, the bill looks affordable. If it wobbles, the cycle just got more expensive for all three.

Wall Street’s consensus on the AI buildout: too crowded, too expensive, too late. The stocks fell this week not because the demand soured — because the market finally started counting the cost. That is not the top. That is the capital cycle clearing its throat.

The Tape — W2624

Universe of 94 cashflow-memo names, snap dates 2026-06-05 → 2026-06-15. Composite is rank-sum percentile of FCF Yield + NTM Revenue Growth (higher = better balance). Banks and finance-book names shown separately.

Telltales Yield — Top 10

From the Cashflow Desk — Marcus Graham

Healthcare spent the week getting repriced by Washington, and the screens are tarring the whole sector with one brush. Regeneron is the name that brush gets wrong. It sits near the top of the board at 11.3x EV/FCF on an 8.8% free cash flow yield — cheaper than UnitedHealth, with no federal prosecutor auditing the numerator. That is the distinction the table cannot draw: UNH’s cash engine is the thing the DOJ is investigating; Regeneron’s is a drug franchise nobody has subpoenaed. Same sector, same de-rate, two completely different reasons for the cheap — one is cheap because the cash might be fiction, the other because it shares a GICS code with the one that might be. The test on the next print is whether biosimilar pressure on the franchise shows up in the cash line, or the de-rate was just guilt by association.

Telltales Yield — Bottom 10

This Week’s Reporters

Sector Medians

Debt / FCF Watch (highest leverage on TTM FCF)

Weekly Price Movement

Top 5 (week-over-week price)

Bottom 5 (week-over-week price)

Banks (shown separately — FCF metric not meaningful)

Finance-book — FCF not comparable

Data Gaps

90 of 90 ranked-eligible names ranked. 0 dropped for missing FCF yield or NTM revenue growth; 7 shown separately (banks + finance-book, FCF not comparable).

Source: cashflow-memo master_2026-06-15.csv. NTM growth from FMP analyst-estimates consensus. Composite is a percentile rank, not a recommendation.

The Issue — This Week's Brief

The Issue — Weekend Update W2624

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When Cheap Stopped Being Safe

The week being cheap stopped being safe, and the AI buildout kept spending anyway.

The Telltales Weekend Update. Ava Cabot and analyst Marcus Graham walk through what happened this week — and what’s coming next — across the universe of the Cash Flow Memo. About 13 minutes. No filler.

Download the memo at telltales.us. Hunt, Jason, and Mike are back Wednesday on episode 2625.

Chapter markers

Time | Segment
0:15 | Cold open
0:55 | Theme — the AI buildout’s bill: Oracle, NextEra, Micron
5:10 | Deep dive — UnitedHealth vs CarMax
9:25 | Rapid-fire — Moderna, Intel
11:30 | Close + Consensus Watch

Full transcript

Opening disclaimer

Ava: The following conversation is intended for informational purposes only. You should always do your own work to determine if an investment is suitable for you.

Cold open

Ava: You’re listening to the Telltales Weekend Update. I’m Ava Cabot.

Marcus: And I’m Marcus Graham — the cashflow desk.

Ava: Quick note: the show is produced entirely with AI tools, and both voices you’re hearing are AI-generated. Send feedback through the Substack. We’re still early — this is a pilot, and we want to hear what’s working.

Ava: Here’s the week. Being cheap stopped being safe. The cheapest large-cap in healthcare spent the week with a federal prosecutor at the door. The retail name everyone screens as cheap is being handed customers by a tariff. And while the market was busy repricing the cheap stuff, the most expensive trade on earth — the AI buildout — just kept writing bigger and bigger checks, and got punished for it anyway. On Wednesday’s main show, episode 2624, Hunt, Jason, and Mike worked through the economics of that buildout — the data centers, and the sheer physics of powering them.[^ep-e2624] We’re going to put the cashflow lens on the bill. Because this was the week the bill started showing up in three different places at once.

Theme — the AI buildout’s bill

Ava: Start with the most expensive trade in the market, because this week it got complicated. For two years the AI story was demand — is it real, how big, how fast. This week the question flipped to cost. Who delivers it, who powers it, and whose balance sheet carries it. And here’s the contrarian note hanging over the whole thing: as Bill Maris put it on All-In this week, quote, a trillion in spend commitments on $60 billion of revenue, and now you’re going to go to the public and hope that retail is going to pick that up.[^tp-maris-allin-20260609] Hold that thought. Because three companies just tested it.

Ava: Start with Oracle, because it did exactly what it promised and got punished for it. It delivered the backlog it said it would — and the stock fell 10% anyway.[^orcl-stock-20260610] Page 2 of the memo: remaining performance obligations hit a record $638 billion, up 363% year over year.[^orcl-rpo-20260610] Cloud infrastructure revenue up 93%.[^orcl-oci-growth-20260610] They did the thing. Marcus — why did doing the thing get them sold?

Marcus: Because the market stopped grading the backlog and started grading the bill. Oracle’s trailing free cash flow is negative — minus $21 billion[^memo-orcl-fcf-20260615] — because they spent $48 billion on capex over the last year to build the capacity behind that backlog.[^memo-orcl-capex-20260615] So there’s no multiple to quote. Don’t reach for one; it’s a negative number. What prices Oracle now is one question: does $638 billion of contracted intent convert to cash before the interest on the build eats them. They raised the capital plan into a tape that no longer claps for capital plans. Maris’s line is the bear case in one sentence — and Oracle just walked straight into it.

Ava: So next door, the power bill. NextEra just made the biggest bet in the history of regulated utilities — and got the same treatment Oracle did. A $67 billion, all-stock takeover of Dominion Energy, the largest regulated-utility deal ever, built explicitly to power AI data centers — 30 GW of it by 2035, with Google and Meta already signed on.[^nee-dominion-acquisition-20260610][^nee-datacenters-expansion-20260615] The stock fell 9%.[^nee-stock-decline-20260610] Marcus, what does the grid cost?

Marcus: It costs more than NextEra has. This is a utility that already carries 16x debt to free cash flow[^memo-nee-debtfcf-20260615] — and it’s buying the biggest deal in the sector’s history. They’re paying in stock, not debt, which is the tell: they’re funding the buildout by diluting, because the balance sheet can’t borrow its way there at 41x free cash flow.[^memo-nee-evfcf-20260615] The 9% drop isn’t the market rejecting data-center power. It’s the market asking who eats the cost of building it — and deciding, this week, that the answer is the existing shareholder.

Ava: And the third bill is memory, where Wall Street has completely lost its composure. Micron, page 5, reports a week from Wednesday — and ahead of it, price targets went from $550 to $1,750 in a matter of days.[^mu-pt-raise-20260608][^mu-analyst-targets-20260610] Micron got certified for Nvidia’s next-generation HBM4 memory, and its entire fiscal-year production is already spoken for.[^mu-hbm4-cert-20260610] One more tell you won’t see in the price: the Talnexis hiring tracker shows Micron added 200 roles last week, hiring at full-cycle pace.[^tlnx-mu-hiring-20260615] Marcus, the stock screens at 100x cash flow — is that insane?

Marcus: It looks insane and it isn’t, and that’s the whole trick with memory. The 100x figure is trailing free cash flow at the bottom of the cycle[^memo-mu-evfcf-20260615] — it tells you nothing. Price it forward: consensus earnings put Micron at about 7x next fiscal year.[^mu-fwd-pe-20260615] Trailing cash flow is already up more than 5x off the trough, and revenue is guided to grow 60%+.[^memo-mu-fcf-20260615] You don’t value a cyclical on a trough multiple; you value it on where the cash is going — and forward, this is a single-digit multiple. The risk isn’t the price. The risk is that the whole supercycle thesis — Oracle’s backlog, NextEra’s gigawatts, Micron’s HBM — is one connected bet that the AI demand is durable. Three names, one wager. The print on the 24th is the next data point on whether it holds.

Deep dive — UnitedHealth vs CarMax

Ava: Now the other half of the market — the cheap half. Two companies, both trading at single-digit-ish multiples, both cheap for a reason, and the reasons could not be more opposite. One is being investigated by the government for charging too much. The other is being handed customers by the government’s tariffs. Same week, two service businesses, two completely different verdicts on what cheap means.

Ava: Here are the headlines, side by side. UnitedHealth, all the way back on page 19 of the memo: the CEO, Andrew Witty, resigned; the company pulled its full-year guidance; and the Justice Department opened a criminal and civil probe into whether it inflated Medicare diagnoses to juice reimbursements.[^unh-ceo-resignation-20260615][^unh-guidance-pull-20260615][^unh-doj-probe-20260615] The stock is down about a third from its high.[^unh-stock-recovery-20260615] And CarMax, page 8, reports Wednesday — first print under a new CEO, with an activist on the register, into a tariff backdrop that’s pushing buyers out of new cars and straight onto its lots.[^kmx-cfo-transition-20260615][^kmx-activist-20260615][^kmx-tariffs-20260615] Marcus — which kind of cheap actually pays you?

Marcus: Take the scary one first. UnitedHealth trades at 14x trailing free cash flow, a 7% yield.[^memo-unh-evfcf-20260615] On the screen that’s the cheapest quality compounder in the market. Here’s the problem: the thing generating the cash is exactly what the DOJ is investigating. The free cash flow comes from Medicare Advantage billing, and a federal prosecutor is now asking whether that billing was fraudulent.[^unh-doj-probe-20260615] So you’re not buying 14x earnings. You’re buying 14x a number that’s under subpoena. Cheap doesn’t help you when the regulator is auditing the numerator.

Ava: And yet the stock just rebounded almost back to its high. Make that make sense.

Marcus: It doesn’t, and that’s the tell. In the same two weeks the probe widened, six different shops raised their price targets — and Bank of America went the other way and cut it to neutral.[^unh-analyst-upgrade-20260615][^unh-bofa-downgrade-20260615] So the sell-side is openly split on the same name in the same fortnight. That’s not a market pricing a verdict. It’s a market pricing a coin flip on whether a federal probe breaks the cash engine or just dents it. When the analysts can’t agree which, the multiple isn’t cheap — it’s unresolved.

Ava: So UnitedHealth’s cheap is a question mark. What’s CarMax’s cheap?

Marcus: Cheaper on the screen than in the business. Price CarMax on earnings and it’s a mid-teens multiple — about 15x forward,[^kmx-fwd-pe-20260615] a normal retailer, not a coiled spring. So the bet was never the multiple. It’s the setup: tariffs added thousands of dollars to new-car prices, used demand is the spillover, and there’s an activist pushing the new CEO to convert it.[^kmx-tariffs-20260615] The test on Wednesday is one number — used unit volume. If that’s accelerating, the multiple re-rates. If it’s flat, it’s just a tired retailer at 15x.

Ava: So one cheap stock where the earnings might be fiction, and one that’s barely cheap once you do the math. Marcus, ever the optimist.

Marcus: I deal in denominators. But the asymmetry is real: UnitedHealth’s downside is a business model the government breaks; CarMax’s downside is a soft quarter. One is binary. The other is just cyclical. Same word — cheap — two completely different bets.

Ava: Mark the calendar. Wednesday tells us which one.

Rapid-fire

Ava: Two more to close, both moving fast.

Ava: Moderna got a different kind of government attention — the bad kind. Health and Human Services terminated a $590 million contract for Moderna’s bird-flu vaccine, and cancelled 22 more mRNA research contracts across the board, under the new RFK Jr. vaccine policy.[^mrna-barda-birdfly-20260610][^mrna-barda-platform-shift-20260610] There’s an FDA advisory meeting Wednesday on an mRNA flu shot.[^mrna-fda-advisory-20260618] This is the same theme as UnitedHealth from the other direction — Washington isn’t just regulating healthcare this year, it’s picking which platforms live. mRNA just got told it’s on the wrong list.

Ava: And Intel — remember Intel? Up 250% this year, and almost nobody noticed.[^intc-ytdperformance-20260615] The catalyst this week: Google committed more than 3 million of its TPU chips to Intel’s foundry for 2028, pulling that order away from Taiwan Semi.[^intc-google-tpu-20260608] Bank of America double-upgraded the stock straight from sell to buy.[^intc-bofaupgrade-20260611] After a decade of being the company the buildout left behind, Intel spent this week being the company the buildout came back to.

Close

Ava: That’s the show. Wall Street’s consensus this week: UnitedHealth is a falling knife, and the AI infrastructure names are crowded. One of those is wrong, and it’s the one nobody wants to touch. Here’s the throughline into Monday: being cheap stopped being safe this week, because the thing setting the price wasn’t the business — it was the government on one side and the buildout’s bill on the other. UnitedHealth at 14x with a prosecutor. CarMax at mid-teens with a tariff at its back. Oracle, NextEra, and Micron spending into the doubt. Cheap got cheaper, expensive kept spending, and the market spent the week deciding it doesn’t trust either one. The hiring data we cited on Micron is from Talnexis — talnexis.com. You can pull up the Cash Flow Memo yourself at telltales.us. The forward week is loaded: CarMax reports Wednesday, FedEx the following Tuesday in its first quarter as a pure-play after spinning off freight,[^earn-fdx] and Micron Wednesday the 24th.[^earn-mu] And Hunt, Jason, and Mike are back Wednesday on episode 2625. We’ll see you next Saturday.

Closing disclaimer

Sources

Applied Clinical Trials Online. (2026, June). HHS cancellation of BARDA mRNA vaccine trial. https://www.appliedclinicaltrialsonline.com/view/hhs-cancellation-barda-mrna-vaccine-trial-design-oversight-funding
Bank of America via TipRanks. (2026, June). UnitedHealth downgraded to Neutral at BofA amid Medicare Advantage uncertainty. https://www.tipranks.com/news/the-fly/unitedhealth-downgraded-to-neutral-at-bofa-amid-ma-uncertainty
Converge Digest. (2026, June 10). Oracle’s AI infrastructure business drives 93% IaaS growth. https://convergedigest.com/oracles-ai-infrastructure-business-drives-93-iaas-growth/
Cryptonomist. (2026, June 4). UnitedHealth stock stalls near $377 as lawsuit risk returns. https://en.cryptonomist.ch/2026/06/04/unitedhealth-stock-stalls-near-377-as-lawsuit-risk-returns/
eciks.org. (2026, June 10). NextEra Energy to acquire Dominion Energy in $67 billion all-stock transaction. https://eciks.org/8282-85162-dominion-energy-nextera-67-billion-merger
eMarketer. (2026, June). Auto tariffs are an opportunity for used car dealers. https://www.emarketer.com/content/auto-tariffs-opportunity-used-car-dealers
Fierce Healthcare. (2026, June). DOJ’s criminal probe into UnitedHealth extends to Optum Rx. https://www.fiercehealthcare.com/payers/wsj-report-doj-interviewing-former-employees-about-medicare-billing-practices-unitedhealth
GuruFocus. (2026, June 10). NextEra Energy (NEE) shares decline amid Dominion Energy acquisition. https://www.gurufocus.com/news/8910473/nextera-energy-nee-shares-decline-amid-dominion-energy-acquisition
HeyGo Trade. (2026, June). Intel up 250% in 2026: Is the AI comeback real or a short squeeze? https://www.heygotrade.com/en/blog/intel-stock-2026-ai-comeback/
IndMoney. (2026, June 10). Oracle Q4 FY2026 earnings: Why ORCL stock fell 10% despite a strong beat. https://www.indmoney.com/blog/us-stocks/oracle-q4-fy-2026-earnings-orcl-stock-drop
Interactive Crypto. (2026, June 9). Micron jumps as HBM4 certification and a Wells Fargo $1,220 target reset the narrative. https://www.interactivecrypto.com/micron-jumps-9-9-as-hbm4-certification-and-a-wells-fargo-1-220-target-reset-the-narrative-jun-20
Maris, B. (2026, June 9). Bill Maris: How Google could crush AI competitors, why small funds win, and AI’s Atari stage [Video]. All-In Podcast, YouTube. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0umrMuUClC4
MEXC Learn. (2026, May 27–June 8). Wall Street upgraded UNH six times in two weeks (JPMorgan $466, Bernstein $492). https://www.mexc.com/learn/article/wall-street-upgraded-unh-six-times-in-two-weeks-can-unitedhealth-stock-hit-492-unh-price-target-2026-2030/1
The Motley Fool. (2026, June 10). Oracle just revealed a massive $638 billion backlog. Here’s why the stock fell anyway. https://www.fool.com/investing/2026/06/10/oracle-just-revealed-a-massive-638-billion-backlog/
PharmAphorum. (2026, June). UnitedHealth CEO Andrew Witty steps down. https://pharmaphorum.com/news/unitedhealth-ceo-andrew-witty-steps-down
Simply Wall St News. (2026, June). Why CarMax (KMX) is up 8.1% after rising optimism around its 2026 earnings report. https://simplywall.st/stocks/us/retail/nyse-kmx/carmax/news/why-carmax-kmx-is-up-81-after-rising-optimism-around-its-202
TheStreet. (2026, June). Intel stock: BofA raises price target to $135 | INTC. https://www.thestreet.com/investing/stocks/intc-intel-stock-price-target-bank-of-america-june-2026
Timothy Sykes News. (2026, June). CarMax (KMX) draws activist interest as traders eye earnings. https://www.timothysykes.com/news/carmax-inc-kmx-news-2026_06_03/
U.S. Food and Drug Administration. (2026, June 18). Vaccines and Related Biological Products Advisory Committee June 18, 2026 meeting announcement. https://www.fda.gov/advisory-committees/advisory-committee-calendar/vaccines-and-related-biological-products-advisory-committee-june-18-2026-meeting-announcement
U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission. (2026). UnitedHealth Group, Form 8-K, Q1 2026. https://www.sec.gov/
Vantage Markets. (2026, June 9). Intel stock up 11%: INTC jumps on Google’s 3M AI chip deal. https://www.vantagemarkets.com/market-analysis/intel-stock-price-analysis-june-9-2026/
Yahoo Finance. (2026, June). NextEra (NEE) anticipates adding up to 30 gigawatts of power for data centers by 2035. https://finance.yahoo.com/news/nextera-nee-anticipates-adding-30-104711159.html

Hiring intelligence

Talnexis. (2026, June 15). Hiring intelligence — Micron (200 new roles in 7 days, #9 hiring-velocity mover). https://www.talnexis.com/

Internal data

Internal data is provided on a best efforts basis.

Forward earnings (FMP)

KMX — 2026-06-17 (Wednesday), Q1 FY27. FMP /stable/earnings?symbol=KMX, pulled 2026-06-15.
FDX — 2026-06-23 (Tuesday), Q4 FY26 (first pure-play print post freight spin-off). FMP /stable/earnings?symbol=FDX, pulled 2026-06-15.
MU — 2026-06-24 (Wednesday), Q3 FY26, consensus EPS $19.96 / revenue $34.72B. FMP /stable/earnings?symbol=MU, pulled 2026-06-15.
MU forward P/E ≈6.9x — FY ending 2027-08-28 consensus EPS $108.83 (21 analysts) vs price $746.79. FMP analyst estimates (annual), pulled 2026-06-15.
KMX forward P/E ≈15x — FY ending 2027-02-28 EPS $2.35 (17.2x) / FY 2028-02-28 EPS $2.85 (14.2x) vs price $40.34. FMP analyst estimates (annual), pulled 2026-06-15.

Data Centers in Space: How SpaceX Justifies $2 Trillion

Mike Nicoletti — Wed, 10 Jun 2026 21:40:05 GMT

Hunt, Jason, and Mike work through an oil market frozen by the US-Iran standoff, then spend the back half stress-testing SpaceX’s ~$2 trillion valuation against Tesla’s — landing on data centers in orbit and a chronic compute shortage as the load-bearing assumptions. Plus Apple’s WWDC miss, the software disruption map, and a strong week of healthcare data.

The Cashflow Memo

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Key Takeaways

Hunt’s working case: if the US-Iran standoff just persists, oil sits near $90 twelve months out despite deep backwardation (mid-$90s spot vs mid-$70s forward); the casualty is natural gas, because roughly two-thirds of dry-gas supply growth is Permian associated gas, so a higher oil price pumps more gas and keeps gas pricing weak.
Exhibit A is the macro tail risk: holding public-debt-to-GNP under 100% requires keeping the deficit flat-to-declining near $1.5T even with higher defense spend — a developed-world problem (Japan is ~180%), not just a US one, and the thing that most threatens the credit markets.
SpaceX’s ~$2T valuation only pencils on space-based data centers: 150kW micro-satellites (one NVL72-rack equivalent, Nvidia silicon, in-sourced solar), a ~1 GW launch cadence targeted by year-end, ~170 Starship launches per gigawatt (a launch every other day) off a 20-30 ship fleet. At ~$20B FCF per deployed gigawatt, ~$100B FCF — a 5% cash yield — looks more reachable for SpaceX than for Tesla at $1.4T, which needs robotaxi plus humanoids to get there.
Compute scarcity is the load-bearing assumption under both bets: xAI’s ~$20B Colossus buildout in Memphis is already leasing capacity to Anthropic and Google at ~$25B of revenue — a near one-year payback that shows how acute the shortage is. The safer, cheaper derivative on chronic compute shortage remains Nvidia.
AI has collapsed the cost to write software but not to support or design it: as the agent becomes the hub, Apple looks exposed (a second straight underwhelming Siri at WWDC, starting to look like IBM or Intel), while horizontal incumbents like Salesforce and ServiceNow can expand share and consumption-priced models gain over seat-based ones. In healthcare, Lilly’s triple-agonist retatrutide showed dramatic weight loss with less muscle loss, plus a gene-therapy LDL result, and Revolution Medicines tripled survival duration in pancreatic cancer by hitting targets long thought undruggable.

Show Notes

[00:00] Intro: The Cash Flow Memo Mike opens the weekly walk through energy, technology, and healthcare. Download the memo at telltales.us.

[00:52] Oil, Iran, and Why Gas Stays Weak With supply off ~2.5-3M bbl/d and the Iran embargo likely to persist, Hunt sees oil near $90 a year out despite heavy backwardation — and natural gas as the casualty, since Permian associated gas grows with oil.

[04:24] Exhibit A: The Deficit and the Credit Markets Keeping public-debt-to-GNP under 100% means holding the deficit near $1.5T even with higher defense spend. A developed-world problem, not just a US one.

[05:32] SpaceX vs Tesla: Which $2T Bet? Google’s ~$80B equity raise and the SpaceX, OpenAI, and Anthropic financings frame the question: is SpaceX at $2T or Tesla at $1.4T the more defensible valuation?

[06:57] Data Centers in Space: The Economics 150kW micro-satellites the size of an Nvidia NVL72 rack, in-sourced solar, ~1 GW launch cadence by year-end — and a deployed cost on par with land, minus the 3-7 year build cycle.

[12:30] 170 Launches a Gigawatt: The Physics The hard part is mass to orbit: ~170 Starship launches per gigawatt, a launch every other day, on an 18-hour turnaround across a 20-30 ship fleet. At ~$20B FCF per GW, $100B FCF becomes conceivable by ~2028.

[15:43] Colossus, Compute Scarcity, and Nvidia xAI’s ~$20B Memphis buildout now leases to Anthropic and Google at ~$25B revenue — a one-year payback that proves how short compute is. The cheaper, safer derivative is Nvidia.

[17:22] Apple’s WWDC Miss and the Agent-as-Hub Threat A second straight underwhelming Siri. If the agent becomes the hub for your data, the device is just a screen — and Apple, staked on privacy, is letting the opportunity pass. Starting to look like IBM or Intel.

[20:32] Enterprise Software: Horizontal Wins, Vertical Fragile AI made writing software trivial, not supporting it. Token budgets fold into the software budget; horizontal incumbents (Salesforce, ServiceNow) expand, vertical and seat-based models get fragile, and consumption pricing wins.

[23:47] Healthcare: Lilly, Gene Therapy, and Pancreatic Cancer Lilly’s triple-agonist retatrutide (less muscle loss) and a gene-therapy LDL result, Mayo’s AI-assisted earlier pancreatic-cancer detection, and Revolution Medicines tripling survival on previously undruggable targets.

[26:03] Wrap-Up Possibly back next week on how SpaceX trades in the aftermarket. Get the Cash Flow Memo at telltales.us.

Cashtags

Weekend Update - W2623

Mike Nicoletti — Sat, 06 Jun 2026 15:01:35 GMT

▶ Explore this week’s Tape — live, sortable, drill-down →

Even the Cash Machines Are Borrowing Now

The story this week was not that the AI build is expensive. Everyone knew that. The story was that the companies best equipped to pay for it out of their own pockets stopped doing so — three of them, in the same five trading days.

Alphabet, which had not sold a share of stock since its IPO, raised about eighty-five billion dollars in equity to fund its data-center build, with Berkshire Hathaway taking ten billion of it directly (per CNBC).¹ Meta, which did not need a dime, was reported to be lining up a raise of its own — and shed almost seven percent on Friday on the rumor alone (per Bloomberg).² Apple, on page one of the same Cash Flow Memo, did the one thing nobody else in the arms race is doing: it rented.

Take the first one, because it is the one with thirty years of history behind it.

A company funds its capital spending out of its own cash flow right up until the build outgrows the cash flow. The day it reaches for outside money is the day the build stopped paying for itself. Alphabet’s trailing free cash flow fell about forty-four percent year over year — the capex ate it — so they sold stock.³ The company that described itself as the asset-light, capital-light compounder for two decades just issued eighty-five billion dollars of equity to buy data centers. Asset-light.

The cashflow read is in Marcus’s column below — short version: at roughly seventy times trailing free cash flow, this is now a capital-intensive company that happens to own a search engine.⁴

But the tell this week was not Alphabet alone. It was the synchronization. Meta still throws off about fifty billion dollars of trailing free cash flow, still growing north of twenty percent, and trades at thirty-two times — the cheapest large-cap cash machine on the board.⁵⁶ When the best-capitalized company in a sector decides it wants a financing cushion anyway, that is not a statement about that company. It is a statement about the size of the build.

We have watched real demand get financed externally before. The late-nineties fiber boom funded a build the internet genuinely needed — and the companies laying the cable raised equity and debt into the same thesis at the same moment. The capacity got used. A decade later. The financing peak and the equity peak landed in the same window, and the build being right did not save the multiple. The lesson was never that the demand was fake. It was that synchronized external financing is what a capital cycle looks like at its most expensive, not its cheapest.

Which is what makes Apple the sharpest line on the page. Apple pays Google roughly a billion dollars a year to run the next Siri on Gemini rather than train a frontier model itself — less than one percent of the hundred-twenty-nine billion dollars in free cash flow it generates annually.⁷⁸ Everyone else is spending a hundred times that and selling stock to do it. Dilute, borrow, or rent: only one of the three costs the shareholder nothing.

So the demand side is now financed. What gets tested next is absorption — whether the capacity fills before the financing cycle turns. The first data point lands Wednesday after the close, when Oracle reports against a backlog north of five hundred fifty billion dollars and trailing free cash flow that is already negative.⁹¹⁰ Broadcom just showed everyone the grading curve: a record AI-chip quarter, up more than a hundred-forty percent (per Broadcom’s fiscal-Q2 release), and the stock fell fifteen percent anyway because Hock Tan declined to raise the story he had already sold.¹¹ ¹² At these multiples, delivering is not enough; you have to deliver and beat the build you already financed. Mark the calendar for Wednesday. The thesis breaks if the backlog keeps growing and the cash behind it never shows up.

Wall Street’s consensus on the AI build: the balance sheets are fortresses and the capex funds itself. Three of the richest companies on earth sold or floated stock this week to tell you it doesn’t.

The Tape — W2623

Universe of 94 cashflow-memo names, snap dates 2026-06-02 → 2026-06-05. Composite is rank-sum percentile of FCF Yield + NTM Revenue Growth (higher = better balance). Banks and finance-book names shown separately.

Telltales Yield — Top 10

From the Cashflow Desk — Marcus Graham

The name sitting at the top of our own board is the one that does not have to finance anything. Uber leads the composite this week on a 7.5% free-cash-flow yield, growing the forward top line about fifteen percent, at thirteen times EV to free cash flow. It converts cash and grows without selling a data center or a share to do it — the asset-light, self-funding profile Alphabet used to own before it raised eighty-five billion dollars of equity this week to pay for the build. The screens still file Uber under gig economy and the hyperscalers under quality compounders. The cash flow says the labels are backwards. What changes the read is the day Uber has to raise outside capital the way the hyperscalers now are; until then, the top of the board is the part of the market still paying for itself.

Telltales Yield — Bottom 10

This Week’s Reporters

Note: Oracle’s 46.3% NTM revenue-growth figure is the raw FMP analyst-estimates consensus and looks anomalous against Oracle’s own ~15% forward guide; we read Oracle through its RPO backlog and trailing free cash flow (negative this quarter on the capex cycle), as in The Take above, not this estimate.

Sector Medians

Debt / FCF Watch (highest leverage on TTM FCF)

Weekly Price Movement

Top 5 (week-over-week price)

Bottom 5 (week-over-week price)

Banks (shown separately — FCF metric not meaningful)

Finance-book — FCF not comparable

Data Gaps

90 of 90 ranked-eligible names ranked. 0 dropped for missing FCF yield or NTM revenue growth; 7 shown separately (banks + finance-book, FCF not comparable).

Source: cashflow-memo master_2026-06-05.csv. NTM growth from FMP analyst-estimates consensus. Composite is a percentile rank, not a recommendation.

The Issue — This Week's Brief

The Issue — Weekend Update W2623

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The Cashflow Memo

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Who Pays for the AI Build?

The week the AI trade stopped being about the chips and became a question about who pays for them.

The Telltales Weekend Update. Ava Cabot and analyst Marcus Graham walk through what happened this week — and what’s coming next — across the universe of companies in the Cash Flow Memo. About 13 minutes. No filler.

Download the memo at telltales.us. Hunt, Jason, and Mike are back Wednesday on episode E2624.

Chapter markers

Time | Segment
0:00 | Disclaimer
0:15 | Cold open
0:45 | Theme — Who pays for the AI build
4:45 | Deep dive — AI infrastructure’s two-act week
8:45 | Rapid-fire + the forward week
11:45 | Close + Consensus Watch

Full transcript

Disclaimer

Ava: The following conversation is intended for informational purposes only. You should always do your own work to determine if an investment is suitable for you.

Cold open

Ava: You’re listening to the Telltales Weekend Update. I’m Ava Cabot.

Marcus: And I’m Marcus Graham — the cashflow desk.

Ava: Here’s the week. For two years, the AI trade was a story about chips — who makes the fastest one, who gets the allocation. This week it turned into a different question, and it’s a harder one. Who actually pays for the build? Broadcom printed a record and got punished for it. Oracle’s about to walk into the same exam on Wednesday. And three of the biggest companies on earth spent the week showing you three completely different ways to fund the thing — dilute, borrow, or rent. On Wednesday’s main show, episode 2623, Hunt, Jason, and Mike framed the AI capex boom as the macro tailwind holding up a $31 trillion economy.[^ep-e2623] We’re going to put the cashflow lens on it. Because the tailwind has an invoice attached, and this week the invoice started coming due.

Theme — Who pays for the AI build

Ava: Start on page one of the memo, because Apple and Alphabet are sitting right next to each other this week giving opposite answers to the same question. Alphabet chose dilution. The asset-light beautiful business, the company that hadn’t sold a share of stock since its IPO, just raised about $85 billion in an equity offering to fund its AI build — with Berkshire Hathaway taking $10 billion of it in a private placement.[^googl-capital-raise-20260601] That’s to cover a capital-expenditure budget of $180–190 billion this year alone.[^googl-capex-2026-20260601] Marcus — what does that raise tell you that the press release won’t?

Marcus: It tells you the cash machine stopped covering its own build. Going into this, the memo had Alphabet’s trailing free cash flow falling 44% year over year — capex is eating it alive.[^memo-googl-fcf-20260605] You don’t raise $85 billion in equity when your own cash flow funds the plan. You raise it when it doesn’t. 69 times trailing free cash flow for a company now diluting shareholders to keep up.[^memo-googl-evfcf-20260605] The beautiful business framing is over. This is a capital-intensive company that happens to own a search engine.

Ava: Meta took door number two. Mark Zuckerberg spent the week reportedly floating an equity raise of his own to fund $125–145 billion of capex — and the stock fell almost 7% on Friday just on the report that it might.[^meta-capital-raise-20260605] Same week, he’s hinting Meta might enter cloud computing to find an offset.[^meta-cloud-computing-20260603] Marcus, Meta’s the one name here that doesn’t actually need the money.

Marcus: Right, and that’s what makes it interesting. Meta still generates $50 billion of trailing free cash flow, and unlike Alphabet, it’s still growing — up about 22%.[^memo-meta-fcf-20260605] At 32 times free cash flow it’s the cheapest name in this whole group.[^memo-meta-evfcf-20260605] So when the best cash machine in the bunch is reportedly willing to dilute anyway, that’s the tell. It’s not that Meta can’t fund the build. It’s that the build is now big enough that even the best balance sheet here wants a cushion. The market saw the same thing. That’s the selloff.

Ava: And then there’s Apple, on the same page, doing the thing nobody else in the arms race is doing. It’s not building an AI brain. It’s renting one. WWDC opens Monday, and the centerpiece reveal is Siri 2.0 — powered by Google’s Gemini.[^aapl-wwdc-20260601] Apple is paying Google roughly $1 billion a year for access to a 1.2-trillion-parameter model rather than train its own.[^aapl-google-deal-20260602] Marcus, a billion a year. Everyone else is spending a hundred times that.

Marcus: And it might be the smartest line item in the whole sector. Apple throws off $129 billion of free cash flow a year, and it’s still growing.[^memo-aapl-fcf-20260605] A billion to rent the frontier is a rounding error against that — less than 1% of the cash Apple generates. At 35 times trailing free cash flow, Apple’s letting everyone else spend hundreds of billions to build the capability, then buying the output wholesale.[^memo-aapl-evfcf-20260605] Dilute, borrow, or rent. This week you got to watch all three, side by side. Only one of them doesn’t cost the shareholder a thing.

Ava: Three doors. One invoice. Hold that thought, because the companies actually selling the shovels had their own reckoning this week.

Deep dive — AI infrastructure’s two-act week

Ava: Page two of the memo, Broadcom and Oracle, back to back — and between them they tell you everything about how the market is grading AI infrastructure right now. Same business, same end-market, one week apart. One company just delivered the print. The other has to deliver it on Wednesday. Here’s the contrast on the table. Broadcom reported Wednesday: AI semiconductor revenue up 143% year over year, to nearly $11 billion in a single quarter.[^avgo-ai-revenue-20260603] A record. CEO Hock Tan stood up and said he has, quote, line of sight to $100 billion in AI chip revenue in 2027.[^avgo-2027-target-20260603] And the stock fell 15%.[^avgo-stock-reaction-20260603] On a record. Marcus — explain that one.

Marcus: The market didn’t sell the print. It sold the discipline. Going into this, the memo had Broadcom at 68 times trailing free cash flow with 57% forward revenue growth baked in.[^memo-avgo-evfcf-20260605] At 68 times, you are not paying for what the company delivered. You’re paying for the raise — for Tan to put a bigger number on the board. He didn’t. He kept the 2027 target flat and refused to bump it. So the stock gave back the premium that was sitting there waiting for the bump. The business is flawless. The expectations were priced one notch higher than flawless. That’s the whole 15%, right there.

Ava: A record print — and the stock still falls. That’s what a 68 multiple does to you.

Ava: So that’s the company that already reported. Now flip to Oracle, which walks into the exact same test Wednesday after the close. The setup: a backlog — remaining performance obligations — of $553 billion, up 325% year over year.[^orcl-rpo-backlog-20260604] Cloud infrastructure revenue up 84%.[^orcl-rpo-backlog-20260604] The stock fell 8% Friday before it even reported, when a strong jobs number pushed rate-cut hopes out.[^orcl-stock-decline-20260605] Marcus, Oracle’s the one name on this page where you can’t even use a multiple.

Marcus: Right, and that’s the most important thing to understand before Wednesday. Oracle’s trailing free cash flow is negative — minus $21 billion.[^memo-orcl-fcf-20260605] There is no enterprise-value-to-free-cash-flow number, because there’s no free cash flow. They’re spending it all on the build. So don’t reach for a multiple — it’ll just be a negative number that means nothing. What prices Oracle is one question: does the backlog convert? $553 billion of contracted intent, growing 46% on the forward top line.[^memo-orcl-ntm-20260605] If that’s real revenue, the negative cash flow today is the cost of the build, exactly like Hunt said Wednesday. If it’s optimistic paper, this is the most expensive backlog in software. Wednesday is the first data point on which one it is.

Ava: So connect the two. Broadcom got marked down for not raising the story. What does that do to Oracle’s setup on Wednesday?

Marcus: It raises the bar. Broadcom just taught the market that delivering isn’t enough at these multiples — you have to deliver and beat the story you already sold. Oracle reports right into that mood. The $553 billion backlog is the story.[^orcl-rpo-backlog-20260604] If the cash behind it doesn’t start showing up Wednesday, Oracle gets the Broadcom treatment — except Oracle doesn’t have positive free cash flow to cushion the fall. Same exam, one week later, harder grader.

Ava: And the one name standing behind both of them — selling the silicon into that whole build — had its own week. Marcus, Nvidia.

Marcus: Nvidia is the supply that proves the demand both of these companies are selling. At the Taipei keynote this week, Jensen Huang said it flat: quote, Vera Rubin is in full production.[^tp-jensen-production-20260601] That’s the next-generation architecture confirmed off the roadmap and into the fab. And he made the claim that, if it holds, is the entire moat: quote, Today, Nvidia’s token cost is the lowest in the world.[^tp-jensen-tokencost-20260601] His framing — not by a little, by orders of magnitude. Against 41 times trailing free cash flow, that pricing-power claim is the whole argument.[^memo-nvda-evfcf-20260605] And here’s the tell the market usually waits for the print to see — per Talnexis hiring data, Nvidia’s AI engineering roles have been accelerating for weeks, and its customer-deployment postings just spiked.[^tlnx-nvda-hiring-20260605] That’s not a chip-research pattern. That’s staffing to go deploy an installed base. Demand you can see in the job board before you see it in the revenue.

Ava: So the scoreboard for the week. Broadcom delivered and still got marked down. Oracle has to prove the backlog is real. And Nvidia is hiring like the demand is already in the building. Imagine that.

Rapid-fire + the forward week

Ava: Three quick ones, and then the forward week. First, Celsius. The energy-drink story just picked up a regulator. Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton opened a formal investigation into Celsius and Alani Nu over alleged deceptive marketing to minors[^celh-txag-20260605] — and that’s a fresh overhang on top of margin pressure the company’s already flagged as it digests the Alani Nu and Rockstar acquisitions.[^celh-margin-pressure-20260604] The stock’s been telling you about the margin worry. Now there’s a legal one too.

Ava: Second, Five Below, and this one’s just a clean beat. Comparable sales up almost 23%. Adjusted earnings beat the Street by more than 30%. And management raised the full-year guide.[^five-q1-eps-20260603] In a week when half of retail is talking about a cautious consumer, Five Below printed the quarter the rest of the sector wishes it had.

Ava: Third, Vertex. A pipeline name doing pipeline things. The FDA accepted Vertex’s application for povetacicept in IgA nephropathy — a kidney disease — with a decision date set for November 30.[^vrtx-povetacicept-20260601] That stacks on top of the cystic-fibrosis franchise and the new non-opioid painkiller. Vertex isn’t a one-drug company anymore, and the back half of this year is a string of catalysts.

Ava: And the forward week. Oracle is the marquee print — Wednesday after the close, and you just heard why it matters. Lennar reports Thursday, and watch the gross margin: it collapsed to about 15% last quarter on the heaviest incentives since 2010, and the question is whether that was the floor.[^len-earnings-20260528] Then, looking out: CarMax reports the following Wednesday, June 17;[^earn-kmx] FedEx reports June 23, its first quarter as a pure-play express network after spinning off its freight business and pulling out about $4 billion in cash.[^fdx-q4-earnings-20260602] And keep an eye on Lantheus — there’s a reported $7 billion takeover interest and an FDA decision both landing this month.[^lnth-pdufa-20260605] Cheapest name in our biotech set, two binary events, one window.

Close + Consensus Watch

Ava: That’s the show. Wall Street’s consensus on the AI-infrastructure week: Broadcom stumbled, Oracle’s the safe re-rate, and the hyperscalers can fund this forever. I’d put all three on the watch list, because all three are about to be tested. Here’s the throughline to take into Monday: this was the week the AI trade stopped being about the chips and became a question about who pays for them. Dilute, borrow, or rent on the demand side. Deliver the backlog or don’t on the supply side. The capex is real, the tailwind is real — and now, finally, so is the bill. One more thing: the hiring data we cited this week is from Talnexis — talnexis.com. You can pull up the Cash Flow Memo yourself at telltales.us. And Hunt, Jason, and Mike are back Wednesday on episode 2624, continuing the healthcare-and-deficit thread. We’ll see you next Saturday.

Disclaimer

Sources

Bloomberg. (2026, June 5). Meta shares fall up to 7% on report of potential stock sale for AI funding. https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2026-06-05/meta-considers-raising-billions-in-share-sale-ft-reports
BusinessWire. (2026, June 1). Vertex announces U.S. FDA acceptance of Biologics License Application for accelerated approval of povetacicept in IgA nephropathy [Press release]. https://www.businesswire.com/news/home/20260601424914/en/Vertex-Announces-US-FDA-Acceptance-of-Biologics-License-Application-for-Accelerated-Approval-of-Povetacicept-in-IgA-Nephropathy
CNBC. (2026, June 1). Alphabet plans to raise $80 billion from stock sales to fund AI build-out. https://www.cnbc.com/2026/06/01/alphabet-to-raise-80-billion-from-stock-sales-to-fund-ai-buildout.html
FedEx Investor Relations. (2026, June 2). FedEx board of directors approves spin-off of FedEx Freight [Press release]. https://investors.fedex.com/news-and-events/investor-news/investor-news-details/2026/FedEx-Board-of-Directors-Approves-Spin-off-of-FedEx-Freight/default.aspx
FinancialContent. (2026, June 5). Why Oracle (ORCL) shares are sliding today. https://markets.financialcontent.com/stocks/article/stockstory-2026-6-5-why-oracle-orcl-shares-are-sliding-today
FX Leaders. (2026, June 4). Oracle (ORCL) stock analysis: $553B backlog, AI revenue surge, and a $700B bet on cloud infrastructure. https://www.fxleaders.com/news/2026/06/04/oracle-orcl-stock-analysis-553b-backlog-ai-revenue-surge-and-a-700b-bet-on-cloud-infrastructure/
GlobeNewswire. (2026, May 7). Lantheus reports first quarter 2026 financial results and provides business update [Press release]. https://www.globenewswire.com/news-release/2026/05/07/3289785/0/en/Lantheus-Reports-First-Quarter-2026-Financial-Results-and-Provides-Business-Update.html
HeyGoTrade. (2026, June 3). Broadcom (AVGO) after the earnings drop: Buy the dip or stay cautious? https://www.heygotrade.com/en/blog/broadcom-avgo-stock-2026/
Huang, J. (2026, June 1). NVIDIA GTC Taipei 2026 keynote [Keynote address]. NVIDIA. YouTube. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wSp6AiNIrsY
Lennar Corporation. (2026, May 28). Lennar Corporation to broadcast its second quarter 2026 earnings call on June 12, 2026 [Press release]. https://newsroom.lennar.com/2026-05-28-Lennar-Corporation-to-Broadcast-Its-Second-Quarter-2026-Earnings-Call-on-June-12,-2026
Money Morning. (2026, June 5). Alphabet just sold $84.75 billion in stock. Here’s why that might be the smartest move of 2026. https://moneymorning.com/2026/06/05/alphabet-googl-84-billion-equity-raise-ai-infrastructure-2026
Office of the Texas Attorney General. (2026). Attorney General Ken Paxton announces investigation of Celsius Energy Drink Company to protect Texas. https://www.texasattorneygeneral.gov/news/releases/attorney-general-ken-paxton-announces-investigation-celsius-energy-drink-company-protect-texas
QuiverQuant. (2026, June 4). Celsius Holdings (CELH) slides as investors digest conference materials highlighting margin pressure and integration execution risk. https://www.quiverquant.com/news/Celsius+Holdings+(CELH)+slides+as+investors+digest+conference+materials+highlighting+margin+pressure+and+integration+execution+risk
Stock Titan. (2026, June 3). Broadcom Q2 2026 revenue up 48%, guides to $29.4B. https://www.stocktitan.net/news/AVGO/broadcom-inc-announces-second-quarter-fiscal-year-2026-financial-if4yrbje8hq6.html
Tech Insider. (2026, June 3). Broadcom AI revenue surges: Custom chip strategy 2026. https://tech-insider.org/broadcom-ai-revenue-custom-chips-2026/
The Motley Fool. (2026, June 1). Apple’s WWDC is June 8. Here’s the 1 announcement that could move the stock. https://www.fool.com/investing/2026/06/01/apples-wwdc-is-june-8-heres-the-1-announcement-tha/
The Motley Fool. (2026, June 2). Apple’s biggest AI test arrives June 8. Here’s what’s really at stake at WWDC. https://www.fool.com/investing/2026/06/02/apple-biggest-ai-test-june-8-whats-stake-wwdc/
The Motley Fool. (2026, June 3). Meta Platforms just hinted at a new business unit that could generate billions. https://www.fool.com/investing/2026/06/03/meta-platforms-just-hinted-at-a-new-business-unit/
Yahoo Finance. (2026, June 3). Five Below (FIVE) Q1 earnings and revenues surpass estimates. https://finance.yahoo.com/markets/stocks/articles/five-below-five-q1-earnings-211002302.html

Hiring intelligence

Hiring-velocity claims for Nvidia are sourced from Talnexis, a hiring-intelligence platform that tracks public job-board postings across tracked tech companies, refreshed daily. Source: Talnexis (https://www.talnexis.com/). Signals cited: HIRING_VELOCITY on AI/ML (12→14→20, three-week trend) and CATEGORY_SPIKE on Solution Engineering (4→14, 3.5x in 7 days), both detected 2026-06-05. See 04. Publishing/shows/weekend-update/W2623/dryrun/talnexis_signals.md.

Forward earnings (FMP)

CarMax (KMX) earnings date — 2026-06-17 (Wednesday) before market open, consensus EPS $0.94, revenue $7.39B. Source: FMP /stable/earnings?symbol=KMX, pulled 2026-06-05. See 04. Publishing/shows/weekend-update/W2623/dryrun/earnings_slate.md.

Internal data

Internal data is provided on a best efforts basis.

Tracked-people quotes

Jensen Huang quotes are drawn verbatim (with keynote timestamps) from the Telltales tracked-people signal corpus:

Vera Rubin is in full production. — Jensen Huang @ 00:40:39
Today, Nvidia’s token cost is the lowest in the world. Not by 10%, by X factors, orders of magnitude. — Jensen Huang @ 00:48:44

Source: NVIDIA GTC Taipei 2026 keynote, 2026-06-01 (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wSp6AiNIrsY). Memo: 01. Raw/secondary/people/Jensen Huang/2026-06-01 - NVIDIA - NVIDIA-GTC-Taipei-2026-Keynote-Full-Replay - signal.md.

The Greatest Insurance Business Ever Built, and Why It's Bankrupting Us

Mike Nicoletti — Wed, 03 Jun 2026 23:12:39 GMT

A wide-angle look at the three forces colliding in the market: oil supply through a contested Strait of Hormuz, the AI capex boom propping up the economy, and a US healthcare system whose broken incentives now intersect with an unsustainable federal deficit. Pull up the Cash Flow Memo at telltales.us and follow along with Exhibits A (US government finances), B (natural gas), and C (oil).

The Cashflow Memo

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Key Takeaways

Hunt models a ~2M bbl/day inventory draw from the Iran disruption but expects no price spike: near-month crude rising to ~$95, 2026 average ~$84, with the $120–140 bear case unlikely because Straits of Hormuz volumes (~20% of global supply) are being rerouted via the Red Sea, Turkey, and Fujairah. He puts ~50% odds on the US–Iran impasse persisting indefinitely, with the Revolutionary Guards now the real arbiters in Tehran.
AI capex is the macro tailwind holding up the economy: hyperscaler spending (Amazon, Microsoft, Google, Meta) is approaching ~$1T in a ~$31T economy, and Google issued equity for the first time since its IPO to fund it. Q1 earnings were strong and Hunt sees no recession despite $90 oil.
The ACA created a zero-risk insurer model where a guaranteed 15–20% margin on cost actively incentivizes payers to pay more, not less (15% of $200 beats 15% of $100). Section 6001’s ban on new physician-owned hospitals (no new entrants since 2010) plus certificate-of-need laws structurally foreclose competition — McAllen vs. El Paso showed 2x cost for worse outcomes years before the ACA.
Cost-conscious payers can break the cartel: Montana’s reference-based pricing at 2x Medicare cut costs with no benefit reductions before lobbying reversed it. Mike’s fix needs all three legs at once — enforced price transparency (the unenforced 2021 rule), expanded low-cost supply (repeal 6001), and a cost-conscious payer. Surgery Center of Oklahoma and ICHRA show market mechanics already working at the margin.
The real forcing function is the deficit: new Fed chair Warsh wants to shrink the Fed’s ~$7T balance sheet toward ~$1–1.5T, which on top of a ~$1.5T deficit means finding buyers for ~$2.5T/year of Treasurys against uncertain demand. With US healthcare at ~18% of GDP vs. <12% elsewhere, Hunt argues an ’08-style debt crisis could force bipartisan Medicare-for-All — and warns against selling quality cash-flow names (MSFT, AMZN, XOM, CVX now better credits than the US government).

Show Notes

[00:00:30] Oil, Iran & the Inventory Draw (Exhibit C) Hunt sizes a ~2M bbl/day inventory draw and explains how Straits of Hormuz volumes are being rerouted through the Red Sea, Turkey, and Fujairah.

[00:04:15] Crude Price Outlook (Exhibit B) Near-month moving toward ~$95, 2026 average ~$84, future strip ~$76 — and why the $120–140 spike scenario is unlikely.

[00:06:03] Who Actually Runs Iran The Revolutionary Guards as the real arbiters, and why Hunt puts ~50% odds on an indefinite US–Iran impasse.

[00:08:14] No Recession, and the AI Capex Engine Strong Q1 earnings, ~$1T of hyperscaler capital spending in a ~$31T economy, and Google’s first equity issuance since its IPO.

[00:09:22] The Deficit Problem (Exhibit A) Why holding Medicare and Medicaid spending flat is the non-negotiable lever for the FY27 budget math.

[00:11:00] Healthcare’s Broken Incentives: McAllen vs. El Paso Two Texas border towns, 2x the Medicare spend, worse outcomes — and why this predates the ACA.

[00:13:17] The Zero-Risk Insurer How a guaranteed 15–20% margin on cost incentivizes payers to pay more, not less.

[00:14:20] Foreclosing Competition: Section 6001 & Certificate of Need No new physician-owned hospitals since 2010, and why you have to ask your competitor for permission to compete.

[00:15:30] Montana’s Reference-Pricing Experiment A $23k vs. $103k knee replacement, pricing set at 2x Medicare, and how lobbying unwound the savings.

[00:17:43] Price Transparency That Nobody Enforces The 2021 rule, two administrations that ignored it, and why you still can’t get a quote.

[00:19:55] Opting Out: Surgery Center of Oklahoma A cash-only, menu-priced model — and why it can’t legally undercut Medicare.

[00:21:00] Hunt’s Solution: Medicare for All A bipartisan Trump–Bernie path to anyone entering Medicare at any age.

[00:22:58] Mike’s Three Fixes & Jason’s ICHRA Transparency, low-cost supply, and a cost-conscious payer — plus the employer-budget model that puts patients back in the driver’s seat.

[00:26:02] Vertical Integration & UnitedHealthcare The monopoly that sets the price, accepts the payment, and provides the care.

[00:27:43] AI in Healthcare: Upcoding vs. Real-Time Auditing From gaming medical codes to the Johns Hopkins finding that 21% of care is unnecessary and 60% is shoppable.

[00:28:54] The Debt Crisis Endgame: Warsh & the Fed Shrinking a ~$7T balance sheet, ~$2.5T of annual Treasury supply, and why post-’08 was deflation, not inflation.

[00:33:17] Closing: Don’t Sell Quality Cash Flow Why Microsoft, Amazon, Exxon, and Chevron are better credits than the US government right now.

Get the Cash Flow Memo at telltales.us, and subscribe for next week’s continuation on healthcare reform and the deficit.

Cashtags

Mike was the guest this time

Mike Nicoletti — Sun, 31 May 2026 19:43:53 GMT

Friends,

Bogumil Baranowski had me on Talking Billions for an hour, and given the company you keep on this feed, I think you’ll like where it went.

He titled it “Sailboats, Telltales, Roads & Motorcycles,” which is about right. We started with how Top Mark Capital actually got started: I was in New York prepping a boat for an offshore race, noticed a group in a back room reading 10-Ks, and the introduction out of that room is the entire origin of Top Mark Capital and the Telltales Podcast. The lesson wasn’t “follow your passion.” It was narrower: opportunities compound through people, and people compound by doing new things together.

Bogumil is one of the best long-form interviewers in the business. He pushes on the framework under an answer instead of running down a list. If you like the conversations we have here, this one’s worth your hour.

Bogumil Baranowski's Substack

Michael Nicoletti: Sailboats & Telltales, Roads & Motorcycles, Value & Quality, Good People & Generous Mentors

Mike Nicoletti is the founder and general partner of Top Mark Capital, a concentrated long-term investor who built his firm from a $110,000 seed during business school, drawing on experiences spanning tech consulting in Stockholm, competitive offshore sailing, and startup ventures…

Listen now

2 months ago · 5 likes · Bogumil Baranowski

Best,

Mike Nicoletti

Weekend Update - W2622

Mike Nicoletti — Sat, 30 May 2026 15:23:53 GMT

The Trillion-Dollar Bet That the Cycle Is Dead

The market just handed a memory company a trillion-dollar valuation at roughly a hundred times trailing free cash flow, on a yield under one percent.¹² Strip the letters AI off that sentence and it is a bet that the most violently cyclical business in technology has quietly stopped being cyclical.

On Wednesday’s main show, Hunt, Jason, and Mike spent an hour on the opposite problem — how you get to a two-trillion-dollar valuation on a company with almost no free cash flow at all. That was the SpaceX S-1.³ This week the market answered the mirror image for Micron. It looked at the cash that actually exists, and it priced that cash as if it can never fall again.

Here is the part the screens are not showing you. As recently as fiscal 2023, Micron lost almost six billion dollars in a single year — and its gross margin went negative, which is the polite way of saying it sold memory for less than it cost to make.⁴ That was not 1998. That was two years ago. The cycle before it: fourteen billion in net income in 2018, gone to a fraction of that by 2020.⁵ Boom, glut, collapse, repeat. The most reliable pattern in semiconductors, and Micron has run it twice in the last eight years.

The mechanism is not mysterious. High memory prices pull in capacity. Capacity becomes supply. Supply kills the price. A hundred times trailing free cash flow is the market betting that mechanism has been switched off — that high-bandwidth memory, the stuff that feeds the AI accelerators, is different enough to outrun the cycle for years instead of quarters. The bull case is real, and worth stating fairly: Micron’s entire 2026 HBM output is already sold out,⁶ management says it can fill only half to two-thirds of what its largest customers are asking for,⁷ and trailing free cash flow has grown more than fivefold off the 2023 trough.⁸ The stock rose nineteen percent the day it crossed a trillion, and nearly ninety percent in a month.⁹ ¹⁰ None of that is fake. The only question is whether it is permanent.

Now put Broadcom next to it, because it reports Wednesday and the contrast is the whole point.¹¹ Broadcom is guiding AI-chip revenue up a hundred and forty percent, to roughly eleven billion dollars in a single quarter¹² — and it goes into that print at about seventy times trailing free cash flow, on more than thirty billion dollars of cash it has already banked.¹³¹⁴ The cashflow read is in Marcus’s column below; short version, one of these names is a bet on a shortage and the other is a bet on a standard. Micron needs the cycle to stay broken. Broadcom gets paid whether the buyer is Google, Meta, or Anthropic, and it needs nothing about memory pricing to be true. Page one of the Cash Flow Memo has both names. The market is paying the fatter multiple for the one carrying all the cycle risk.

What changes the read is not a hiring chart or a single beat. It is the first crack in sold out. Broadcom’s print on Wednesday, June third, is the near-term referee — if a hundred-and-forty-percent AI guide actually holds, the standard is winning and the shortage trade has competition. The Micron test runs longer: watch HBM contract pricing into 2026 and the first time a competitor qualifies into the big accelerator sockets. The thesis breaks the day sold out quietly becomes renegotiated. That is always how a memory cycle turns. Not with a warning. With a renegotiation.

For a long-cycle owner the discipline is simple and unpopular. You are not paid to decide whether AI memory demand is real this year. It is. You are paid to ask what Micron earns across the whole cycle, trough included, and whether a trillion-dollar tag survives the year the glut comes back. In 2023 the answer to that question was a six-billion-dollar loss. The market has decided that year was the last of its kind. The market has decided that before.

Wall Street’s consensus on Micron’s trillion-dollar tag: AI broke the memory cycle. The memory cycle has broken that consensus before — twice since 2018, and the second time the gross margin went negative.

The Tape — W2622

Universe of 94 cashflow-memo names, snap dates 2026-05-26 → 2026-05-30. Composite is rank-sum percentile of FCF Yield + NTM Revenue Growth (higher = better balance). Financials shown separately.

Telltales Yield — Top 10

# | Ticker | Sector | Composite | FCF Yld | NTM Growth | EV/FCF | 1-wk Px
1 | UBER | Technology | 80 | 7.5% | 15.2% | 13.2 | -2.0%
2 | FCX | Basic Materials | 78 | 6.3% | 19.8% | 16.0 | 6.0%
3 | REGN | Healthcare | 77 | 8.8% | 10.6% | 11.3 | -3.8%
4 | LNTH | Healthcare | 73 | 6.6% | 13.2% | 15.1 | -3.6%
5 | CRM | Technology | 72 | 8.5% | 9.6% | 11.8 | 6.1%
6 | NOW | Technology | 68 | 3.8% | 18.5% | 26.1 | 21.8%
7 | ABNB | Consumer Cyclical | 67 | 6.5% | 10.6% | 15.3 | 0.7%
8 | PYPL | Financial Services | 67 | 16.5% | 4.1% | 6.1 | 1.2%
9 | AM | Energy | 67 | 8.5% | 6.0% | 11.8 | -5.5%
10 | LNG | Energy | 66 | 7.9% | 6.7% | 12.6 | -6.6%

From the Cashflow Desk — Marcus Graham

Micron’s trillion-dollar tag and Broadcom’s get talked about as the same AI trade. They are not. Micron sits at 102x trailing FCF — a multiple that only pays off if the memory cycle is dead, in a business that lost $5.8B two fiscal years ago when the last glut hit. Broadcom goes into Wednesday’s print near 68x and needs nothing about memory pricing to cooperate; it gets paid on the custom-silicon standard whether the buyer is Google, Meta, or Anthropic. One name is a bet on a shortage. The other is a bet on a standard, and the standard is the cheaper multiple. The test is Wednesday, June 3: if Broadcom’s AI guide holds, the cycle-proof story suddenly has a cheaper rival. We re-anchor Micron when the next HBM contract-pricing print lands.

Telltales Yield — Bottom 10

# | Ticker | Sector | Composite | FCF Yld | NTM Growth | EV/FCF | 1-wk Px
1 | VG | Energy | 2 | -8.2% | -9.2% | — | -12.9%
2 | LEN | Consumer Cyclical | 18 | 0.1% | 3.4% | 1589.4 | 1.0%
3 | NKE | Consumer Cyclical | 19 | 1.8% | 0.6% | 56.0 | 3.5%
4 | FANG | Energy | 20 | 2.8% | -6.6% | 36.4 | -4.6%
5 | XOM | Energy | 22 | 3.3% | -9.0% | 30.6 | -6.2%
6 | SBUX | Consumer Cyclical | 25 | 2.4% | 2.3% | 40.8 | -3.8%
7 | CVX | Energy | 29 | 4.1% | -13.0% | 24.5 | -4.7%
8 | WMT | Consumer Defensive | 29 | 1.6% | 4.7% | 64.0 | -3.8%
9 | INTC | Technology | 35 | -0.4% | 10.7% | — | -4.3%
10 | COST | Consumer Defensive | 36 | 2.2% | 7.9% | 45.8 | -7.0%

This Week’s Reporters

Ticker | Sector | Reports | FCF Yld | NTM Growth | Composite
AVGO | Technology | 2026-06-03 | 1.5% | 57.1% | 58
FIVE | Consumer Defensive | 2026-06-03 | 3.0% | 9.9% | 48

Sector Medians

Sector | N | Median Composite | Median FCF Yld | Median NTM Growth
Financial Services | 4 | 61 | 3.8% | 11.6%
Healthcare | 10 | 56 | 6.4% | 10.0%
Technology | 15 | 54 | 1.6% | 25.1%
Communication Services | 11 | 54 | 4.1% | 4.5%
Basic Materials | 3 | 50 | 6.3% | 6.5%
Industrials | 8 | 49 | 3.3% | 9.0%
Consumer Defensive | 5 | 48 | 3.0% | 7.9%
Consumer Cyclical | 12 | 45 | 3.3% | 4.8%
Energy | 21 | 44 | 5.9% | 0.7%
Utilities | 1 | 42 | 2.4% | 9.5%

Debt / FCF Watch (highest leverage on TTM FCF)

Ticker | Sector | Net Debt / FCF | FCF Yld | Composite
TRGP | Energy | 20.8 | 1.2% | 44
NEE | Utilities | 16.2 | 2.4% | 42
MTDR | Energy | 12.8 | 2.7% | 51
CHTR | Communication Services | 10.6 | 8.0% | 50
ET | Energy | 10.0 | 5.4% | 44
DE | Industrials | 9.4 | 4.4% | 56
EPD | Energy | 9.4 | 3.3% | 43
FDX | Industrials | 8.8 | 3.6% | 46

Weekly Price Movement

Top 5 (week-over-week price) | Ticker | Sector | Price | 1-wk % | |——–|——–|——:|——-:| | SNOW | Technology | $255.55 | 48.4% | | MU | Technology | $971.00 | 29.3% | | NOW | Technology | $124.37 | 21.8% | | ORCL | Technology | $225.78 | 17.5% | | PLTR | Technology | $156.54 | 14.4% |

Bottom 5 (week-over-week price) | Ticker | Sector | Price | 1-wk % | |——–|——–|——:|——-:| | VG | Energy | $12.04 | -12.9% | | OKE | Energy | $83.94 | -10.7% | | KMI | Energy | $31.08 | -8.0% | | TRGP | Energy | $255.07 | -7.8% | | CF | Basic Materials | $112.35 | -7.7% |

Financials (shown separately — FCF metric not meaningful)

Ticker | Price | 52-wk Position | Div Yld
JPM | $299.31 | 51% | 2.1%
MS | $208.00 | 100% | 2.0%
GS | $1025.56 | 100% | 1.9%
IBKR | $86.97 | 96% | 0.1%

Data Gaps

90 of 90 non-Financial names ranked. 0 dropped for missing FCF yield or NTM revenue growth.

Source: cashflow-memo master_2026-05-30.csv. NTM growth from FMP analyst-estimates consensus. Composite is a percentile rank, not a recommendation.

▶ Explore the interactive Tape →

The Cashflow Memo

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Five Prices, One Question

The week the market argued what AI revenue is worth, and gave five different answers.

Download the memo at telltales.us. Hunt, Jason, and Mike are back Wednesday on episode 2623.

Chapter markers

Time | Segment
0:00 | Disclaimer
0:15 | Cold open
0:45 | Theme — What is AI worth? (Snowflake, Salesforce, Palantir)
4:45 | Deep dive — Micron & Broadcom
8:45 | Rapid-fire — Lilly, Kratos, and the forward week
11:45 | Close & Consensus Watch
12:45 | Disclaimer

Full transcript

Disclaimer

Ava: The following conversation is intended for informational purposes only. You should always do your own work to determine if an investment is suitable for you.

Cold open

Ava: You’re listening to the Telltales Weekend Update. I’m Ava Cabot.

Marcus: And I’m Marcus Graham — the cashflow desk.

Ava: Quick note: the show is produced entirely with AI tools, and both voices you’re hearing are AI-generated. Send feedback through the Substack. On Wednesday’s main show, Hunt, Jason, and Mike spent an hour on one question — how do you get to a $2 trillion valuation on a company with almost no free cash flow? That was the SpaceX S-1.[^ep-e2622] This week the market asked the opposite question, and asked it five times. Not how you justify a valuation with no cash — but what the AI cash flow that actually exists is worth. And across five names, it came back with five completely different answers. That’s the show.

Theme — What is AI worth?

Ava: On page 2 of the memo this week, the whole enterprise-software book tells one story — and then contradicts itself. This is the cleanest version of the only fight that mattered all week: AI revenue is real, it’s growing, and the market cannot agree what it’s worth. Watch it price three layers of the same stack three completely different ways.

Ava: Start with the data layer. Snowflake had the best trading day in its history this week — up 36% in a single session[^news-snow-surge] — on a Q1 beat[^news-snow-q1] and a $6 billion, five-year commitment from AWS.[^news-snow-aws] Now the application layer. Salesforce beat the same week, and told you Agentforce is already a $1.2 billion business growing more than 200%[^news-crm-arr] — and the stock is down 33% on the year.[^news-crm-stock] Same enterprise-AI dollar. One name up a third in a session, the other down a third on the year. Marcus — one of those prices is wrong.

Marcus: The market is buying the picks-and-shovels and pricing the application like it’s already roadkill. Going into this print the memo had Salesforce at 12 times trailing free cash flow on an 8% free-cash yield, Q4 10-K confirmed[^memo-crm-evfcf][^memo-crm-yield] — we re-anchor when the Q1 10-Q files. 12 times, on a company that’s still growing and already running a real AI-agent business. That’s the price of a melting ice cube. Snowflake went into its own print at 45 times[^memo-snow-evfcf], and the market just paid up for more. The whole spread is one bet — agents eat the workflow vendor and feed the data platform — and you’re paying the fattest multiple for the side that might lose.

Ava: A melting ice cube growing 200%. Sure. And here’s the tell the stock price is ignoring — per Talnexis hiring data, Salesforce’s AI and machine-learning job postings jumped more than five-fold in a single week.[^tlnx-crm-aiml] Companies that believe they’re being disrupted don’t staff the disruption. And then there’s the third layer — over on page 5, with the chips and the defense names.

Ava: Palantir is being priced as something you simply can’t avoid buying. The stock jumped 9% this week[^news-pltr-surge] — not on earnings, on procurement. The Pentagon made its Maven system a formal program of record[^news-pltr-maven], and the Army folded 75 separate contracts into a single $10 billion enterprise agreement.[^news-pltr-army] When the buyer standardizes on you, you stop being a vendor. You become infrastructure. Marcus — what does infrastructure cost?

Marcus: It’s the most expensive name in the entire memo, and it’s expensive on purpose. 130 times trailing free cash flow[^memo-pltr-evfcf] — but a program of record isn’t a contract, it’s a multi-year funding line, and free cash flow already grew almost 200% over the last year.[^memo-pltr-fcf] That multiple isn’t pricing today’s cash. It’s pricing a decade of government AI spend compounding. The test is whether commercial growth holds up next to the government book. If it stalls, 130 times is a long way down.

Ava: So: rewarded, buried, and untouchable. Three layers, three verdicts, one week.

Deep dive — Micron & Broadcom

Ava: Here’s the same fight, one layer down, in its purest form. Micron and Broadcom are the two ways to own the silicon underneath the entire AI build — the memory, and the custom chips. Same supercycle. The market just priced them like they live in different decades.

Ava: Micron crossed $1 trillion in market value this week for the first time ever[^news-mu-trillion] — up 19% the day it happened, 88% in a month[^news-mu-momentum] — because its entire 2026 high-bandwidth-memory output is already sold out[^news-mu-hbm], and management says it can fill maybe half to two-thirds of what its biggest customers are asking for.[^news-mu-demand] Broadcom reports Wednesday[^earn-avgo], guiding AI-chip revenue up 140% year-over-year — to almost $11 billion in a single quarter.[^news-avgo-ai] Two anchors of the same build. Marcus — which one is mispriced?

Marcus: The surprising one is Micron, because a memory company is not supposed to trade like this. Memory is the most violently cyclical business in technology — boom, glut, collapse, repeat. And the memo has it at 102 times trailing free cash flow[^memo-mu-evfcf] at a yield under 1%.[^memo-mu-yield] On paper, that’s absurd. Except free cash flow grew more than fivefold off the last trough[^memo-mu-fcf], and the bull thesis is that this time the cycle doesn’t come back — that AI memory demand outruns supply for years, not quarters. 102 times is the market betting the cycle is dead. If memory is still cyclical, this is the top.

Marcus: Broadcom is the opposite trade — same supercycle, half the multiple. Going into Wednesday the memo has it at 68 times trailing free cash flow[^memo-avgo-evfcf], on $32 billion of cash it’s already banked[^memo-avgo-fcf] — not a memory company’s hope, actual trailing cash. And Broadcom doesn’t need the cycle to break. It designs the custom chips and the networking that wire a million accelerators into one machine[^news-avgo-network], and it gets paid whether the buyer is Google, Meta, or Anthropic.[^news-avgo-anthropic] Micron is a bet on a shortage. Broadcom is a bet on a standard.

Marcus: So here’s what the comparison actually says. One supercycle, and the market trusts one of these names with twice the multiple of the other. Wednesday’s print is the first real referee — if Broadcom’s AI guide holds, the safer way to own this build is the custom-silicon standard, and Micron’s trillion-dollar tag is the one carrying all the cycle risk.

Ava: Two ways to own the same boom, priced like a coin flip. Wednesday we find out which side the house is on.

Rapid-fire — Lilly, Kratos, and the forward week

Ava: Away from the AI-pricing fight, two catalysts moved real money this week — and a few names report before you’re back here next Saturday.

Ava: Eli Lilly had the kind of week that resets a franchise — twice. Phase 3 data on retatrutide, its triple-hormone obesity drug, came in at 28% average weight loss over 80 weeks[^news-lly-reta] — that’s bariatric-surgery territory, from an injection. And separately, the one-time gene-editing therapy it picked up in the Verve deal cut bad cholesterol by up to 62% with a single infusion.[^news-lly-verve] Two franchises, two different decades of revenue, one week. Lilly presents the full data at the diabetes meeting in New Orleans, June 5-8[^news-lly-ada] — and that’s a clean segue, because Wednesday’s main show is the healthcare deep dive Hunt, Jason, and Mike have been promising.

Ava: Kratos jumped almost 14% in a day[^news-ktos-surge] on a report the Trump administration may take direct financial stakes in U.S. drone manufacturers — the government as an equity investor in its own supply chain. Same week, Kratos and GE Aerospace won a joint Air Force contract to develop the engine for collaborative combat aircraft.[^news-ktos-ge] It’s the Palantir thread again: the Pentagon isn’t just buying defense technology, it’s trying to own the means of producing it.

Ava: A few more before Monday. Meta started charging for the thing it always gave away — paid Instagram, Facebook, and WhatsApp tiers went live this week at $3-4 a month.[^news-meta-subs] The company that built an empire on free is now testing whether its users will pay for it. In energy, Hunt made the oil call on Wednesday, so I’ll leave the Strait of Hormuz to him — the company news this week was a handoff at the top of Occidental, where Vicki Hollub steps down and Richard Jackson takes over June 1.[^news-oxy-ceo] And the forward calendar: Broadcom and Five Below both report Wednesday[^earn-five] — Five Below the cleaner tariff read, sourcing well over half its goods from China[^news-five-china] — with Oracle the Wednesday after.[^earn-orcl]

Close & Consensus Watch

Ava: That’s the Weekend Update. Five names, five different prices on the same idea — that AI revenue is real, and growing. Snowflake priced for acceleration. Salesforce priced for death. Palantir priced as a utility. Micron priced like the cycle is finally over. Broadcom priced like the only grown-up in the room. They cannot all be right. Wall Street’s consensus on enterprise AI this week: Snowflake’s the winner, Salesforce is roadkill. Same quarter, both beat — and one of those calls is wrong. Broadcom’s print Wednesday is the first real referee. Hiring data this week from Talnexis — talnexis.com. All of it runs off the Cash Flow Memo, the universe we track every week. Grab it at telltales.us. Hunt, Jason, and Mike are back Wednesday on episode 2623 — the healthcare deep dive they’ve been teasing for two weeks. We’ll see you Saturday.

Disclaimer

Sources

A single dose of Lilly’s PCSK9 base editor VERVE-102 reduced PCSK9 by up to 88% and LDL-C by up to 62% with durable effects. (2026, May 27). PR Newswire. https://www.prnewswire.com/news-releases/a-single-dose-of-lillys-pcsk9-base-editor-verve-102-reduced-pcsk9-by-up-to-88-and-ldl-c-by-up-to-62-with-durable-effects-supporting-its-potential-as-a-one-time-treatment-for-hypercholesterolemia-302780172.html (Peer-reviewed: New England Journal of Medicine, https://www.nejm.org/doi/full/10.1056/NEJMoa2601283)
Broadcom (AVGO) set for strong Q2 earnings driven by AI growth. (2026, May 29). GuruFocus. https://www.gurufocus.com/news/8891842/broadcom-avgo-set-for-strong-q2-earnings-driven-by-ai-growth
CRM drops 33% in 2026 despite earnings beat as AI fears overshadow $1.2B Agentforce growth. (2026, May 28). FX Leaders. https://www.fxleaders.com/news/2026/05/28/crm-drops-33-in-2026-despite-earnings-beat-as-ai-fears-overshadow-1-2b-agentforce-growth/
The custom AI ASIC state of play (May 2026): Broadcom deals, Google TPUs, Meta MTIA & beyond. (2026, May). Tom’s Hardware. https://www.tomshardware.com/tech-industry/semiconductors/custom-ai-asics-examined-from-broadcom-to-mtia
Debt financing deal for Anthropic PBC involves Broadcom and Alphabet. (2026, May 28). GuruFocus. https://www.gurufocus.com/news/8890022/debt-financing-deal-for-anthropic-pbc-involves-broadcom-and-alphabet
Does Five Below’s tariff response strategy strengthen its value brand or signal margin strain? (2025, December 25). Sahm Capital. https://www.sahmcapital.com/news/content/does-five-below-fives-tariff-response-strategy-strengthen-its-value-brand-or-signal-margin-strain-2025-12-25
Eli Lilly (LLY) showcases new findings at ADA’s 86th Scientific Sessions. (2026, May 28). GuruFocus. https://www.gurufocus.com/news/8889220/eli-lilly-lly-showcases-new-findings-at-adas-86th-scientific-sessions
Kratos contract wins deepen role in hypersonics propulsion and space systems. (2026, May 29). Yahoo Finance. https://finance.yahoo.com/news/kratos-contract-wins-deepen-role-120929437.html
Lilly’s triple agonist, retatrutide, delivered powerful weight loss in pivotal Phase 3 obesity trial. (2026, May 21). PR Newswire. https://www.prnewswire.com/news-releases/lillys-triple-agonist-retatrutide-delivered-powerful-weight-loss-in-pivotal-phase-3-obesity-trial-302778859.html
Meta officially launches Instagram, Facebook, and WhatsApp subscriptions, with more to come — including AI plans. (2026, May 27). TechCrunch. https://techcrunch.com/2026/05/27/meta-officially-launches-instagram-facebook-and-whatsapp-subscriptions-with-more-to-come-including-ai-plans/
Micron hits $1 trillion market cap for the first time as stock surges 19%. (2026, May 26). CNBC. https://www.cnbc.com/2026/05/26/micron-stock-trillion-market-cap.html
Micron technology: AI-powered semiconductor demand and the capital expenditure question (management can fulfill 50% to two-thirds of customer demand). (2026, May). MarketMinute / FinancialContent. https://markets.financialcontent.com/stocks/article/marketminute-2026-3-20-micron-technology-guidance-miss-ai-powered-semiconductor-demand-and-the-capital-expenditure-crisis
Micron’s entire 2026 HBM output sold out. (2026, May). HeyGoTrade. https://www.heygotrade.com/en/blog/mu-stock-analysis/
MU stock outlook May 30 2026: Micron at $1 trillion — AI demand & next-week preview (shares +88% over the past month). (2026, May 30). FX Leaders. https://www.fxleaders.com/news/2026/05/30/mu-stock-outlook-may-30-2026-micron-at-1-trillion-ai-demand-next-week-preview/
Occidental Petroleum. (2026, May 5). Occidental announces CEO succession [Press release]. https://www.oxy.com/news/news-releases/occidental-announces-ceo-succession/
Snowflake. (2026, May 27). Snowflake expands AWS collaboration with $6B commitment to accelerate enterprise agentic AI adoption [Press release]. https://www.snowflake.com/en/news/press-releases/snowflake-expands-aws-collaboration-with-6b-commitment-to-accelerate-enterprise-agentic-ai-adoption/
Snowflake Q1 fiscal 2027 earnings beat, $6 billion AWS deal (product revenue $1.33B, up 34% YoY; EPS $0.39 vs. $0.32 consensus). (2026, May 27). Yahoo Finance. https://finance.yahoo.com/markets/stocks/articles/snowflake-q1-fiscal-2027-earnings-120043255.html
Snowflake surges 36% for best day ever on AI frenzy, fueling software rally. (2026, May 28). CNBC. https://www.cnbc.com/2026/05/28/snowflake-snow-software-stock-rally.html
Talnexis. (2026, May 24). Salesforce — AI/ML hiring category spike (28 roles in 7 days vs. 5 prior, 5.6x) [Hiring intelligence]. https://www.talnexis.com/
United States Army. (2025, July 31). U.S. Army awards enterprise service agreement to enhance military readiness and drive operational efficiency (75 contracts consolidated; $10B cap over up to 10 years) [Press release]. https://www.army.mil/article/287506/u_s_army_awards_enterprise_service_agreement_to_enhance_military_readiness-and-drive-operational-efficiency
Why Kratos Defense stock popped today (up 13.8% on May 28 following WSJ report the Trump administration may invest directly in U.S. drone manufacturers). (2026, May 28). The Motley Fool. https://www.fool.com/investing/2026/05/28/why-kratos-defense-stock-popped-today/
Why Palantir stock is soaring today (up ~9% on potential U.S. drone-manufacturer funding and software-sector momentum). (2026, May 28). The Motley Fool. https://www.fool.com/investing/2026/05/28/why-palantir-stock-is-soaring-today/
Why Palantir’s new program of record with the Pentagon could be a game changer (Maven Smart System designated a formal program of record, March 2026). (2026, March 31). The Motley Fool. https://www.fool.com/investing/2026/03/31/why-palantir-s-new-program-of-record-with-the-penta/

Internal data

Internal data is provided on a best efforts basis.

Forward earnings (FMP)

AVGO — Broadcom, 2026-06-03 (Wednesday). Consensus EPS $2.40, revenue ~$22.12B. FMP /stable/earnings?symbol=AVGO, pulled 2026-05-30.
FIVE — Five Below, 2026-06-03 (Wednesday). Consensus EPS $1.76, revenue ~$1.23B. FMP /stable/earnings?symbol=FIVE, pulled 2026-05-30.
ORCL — Oracle, 2026-06-10 (Wednesday). Consensus EPS $1.96, revenue ~$19.10B. FMP /stable/earnings?symbol=ORCL, pulled 2026-05-30.

How Do You Get to $2 Trillion?

Mike Nicoletti — Wed, 27 May 2026 22:37:05 GMT

Hunt, Jason, and Mike break down the freshly filed SpaceX S-1 and ask the only question that matters: how do you justify a $2 trillion valuation on a company with almost no free cash flow? They work through the AI stack, the Starlink connectivity business, and the launch economics that quietly underwrite all of it.

The Cashflow Memo

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Key Takeaways

SpaceX filed its S-1 targeting a ~$2T valuation against negligible free cash flow; Hunt frames it next to Tesla (~$1.5T on ~$6B FCF) as proof you can pile on valuation with no EBITDA or FCF, set against NVIDIA’s new record ~$163B FCF run-rate and Apple’s ~$120B.
The promotional $22T TAM rests mostly on the least-proven leg — AI (Macrohard agentic workloads, applications not yet invented), a Tesla/SpaceX JV pairing Tesla’s world model with xAI’s language models, plus a ~$55B Terafab chip-production plan.
The Anthropic lease puts a mark on the data centers: xAI leasing Colossus-1 to Anthropic at ~$1.5B/month against a <$15B build cost implies a roughly one-year payback, validating xAI as the fastest data-center builder (Colossus phases stood up in 121 / 91 / ~60 days).
Launch is the real crown jewel, not Starlink: 122 SpaceX launches vs. 43 customer launches in 2025; re-pricing Starlink at market rate lifts space revenue from $4.1B to ~$11B straight to cash. Customer-launch gross margin is 65-75% and rising as cost/kg falls from Falcon’s ~$850 toward Starship’s ~$100 (NASA: ~$19,000); Starship R&D is $4B this year, up from $3B.
Space-based data centers are an extension of Starlink, not a monolith: each Starlink sat is ~25kW of servers, AI racks run ~125kW in sun-synchronous orbit, launched at daily cadence — a distributed inference network. The choke-point thesis: frontier labs (Anthropic/OpenAI/Gemini) may route inference through Starlink for performance, handing SpaceX negotiating leverage. Starlink itself did $11.4B revenue in 2025 at 39% operating / 63% EBITDA margin across 10.3M subs.

Show Notes

[00:02] Open & Disclaimer Welcome and the standard informational disclaimer.

[00:30] Exhibits A, B & C: Energy and the Government’s Books Hunt on oil and gas pricing through the Iran disruption, weak Waha gas curtailing Permian supply, and a fiscal ’27 federal deficit that stays stuck near $1.5T.

[05:51] Macro Grab Bag: Grid Curtailment, Taiwan, and Reshoring DOE clears PJM to curtail data-center power in a grid stress event; the hosts reject Chamath’s nobody cares about Taiwan in 18 months call; Gavin Baker’s point that the Iran war helps US reshoring by raising energy costs more abroad than at home.

[09:55] NVIDIA & Apple: Free Cash Flow Records NVIDIA at a ~$163B FCF run-rate (new all-time record, eclipsing old Exxon peak), Apple at ~$120B, against $5.6T and ~$4.5T market caps.

[11:34] The SpaceX Question: $2T With No Cash Flow Framing the S-1 alongside Tesla — huge valuations attached to businesses not yet generating EBITDA, income, or free cash flow.

[12:51] The AI Stack: xAI, Colossus, the Anthropic Lease, Cursor & Macrohard The $22T TAM and its least-proven leg; xAI’s record build speed; Anthropic leasing Colossus-1 at ~$1.5B/month; the Cursor acqui-hire; Macrohard agentic workloads as a Tesla/SpaceX JV; the $55B Terafab plan.

[19:05] Starlink: The Supposed Crown Jewel $11.4B 2025 revenue, 39% operating / 63% EBITDA margin, 10.3M subscribers — and why the hosts think the conventional crown jewel label is misplaced.

[19:43] Launch Economics: The Real Crown Jewel 122 SpaceX vs. 43 customer launches; backing Starlink out at market rate to reveal true space economics; 65-75% and rising customer-launch margins; cost/kg from Falcon ~$850 toward Starship ~$100 vs. NASA’s ~$19,000.

[22:52] Data Centers in Orbit Why a space data center is a distributed network of ~125kW AI racks in sun-synchronous orbit, not a monolith; the physics of power and heat; latency math vs. terrestrial fiber.

[25:54] Q&A: Would You Switch? The Choke-Point Thesis, T-Mobile & Space Junk Whether you’d prefer Starlink inference in 24 months; routing frontier-model inference through Starlink as a negotiating choke point; Starlink V3 + T-Mobile direct-to-cell; Kessler-cascade space-junk risk.

[32:18] Next Week Healthcare deep dive, then a future episode on Musk’s TSMC-replacement / Terafab vision and space junk.

Subscribe and grab the Cashflow Memo at telltales.us.

Cashtags

Weekend Update - W2621

Mike Nicoletti — Sat, 23 May 2026 16:51:13 GMT

The Cashflow Memo

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Capital Structure Week

Nvidia confirmed the demand picture. Three companies restructured this week to monetize it.

The Telltales Weekend Update. Ava Cabot and analyst Marcus Graham walk through what happened this week — and what’s coming next — across the 94 companies in the Cash Flow Memo. About 13 minutes. No filler.

Download the memo at telltales.us. Hunt, Jason, and Mike are back Wednesday on episode E2622.

Chapter markers

0:00 | Opening disclaimer
0:15 | Cold open + the week’s throughline
0:45 | Theme — Capital structure week (NextEra, Lantheus, FedEx)
4:45 | Deep dive — Nvidia Q1 FY27
8:45 | Rapid-fire — CRM/SNOW pre-prints, Deere, BioNTech, Target/Walmart, Verizon/T-Mobile, Regeneron
11:45 | Close + Consensus Watch + forward week
12:30 | Closing disclaimer

Full transcript

Opening disclaimer

Ava: The following conversation is intended for informational purposes only. You should always do your own work to determine if an investment is suitable for you.

Cold open

Ava: You’re listening to the Telltales Weekend Update. I’m Ava Cabot.

Marcus: And I’m Marcus Graham — the cashflow desk.

Ava: Quick note: the show is produced entirely with AI tools, and both voices you’re hearing are AI-generated. Send feedback through the Substack. And this is still a pilot — tell us what’s landing and what isn’t.

Ava: Here’s the week. Nvidia confirmed the AI demand picture on Tuesday. And three companies in the memo restructured this week to monetize it. NextEra is buying a $67 billion utility for the power. Lantheus is in sale talks at roughly $7 billion for the radiopharma platform. And FedEx is spinning Freight on June 1. On Wednesday’s show, Hunt, Jason, and Mike walked through Google’s real AI risk — not ChatGPT, but agentic search and Gemini Spark[^ep-e2621]. Today’s show is what the rest of the universe did about it.

Theme — Capital structure week

Ava: Three restructurings in five days, three different time horizons, one read. Page 18, page 15, page 17 of the memo — all printing the same idea. The AI demand picture is now confirmed enough that companies are willing to redraw their balance sheets around it.

Ava: NextEra. $67 billion all-stock bid for Dominion Energy[^news-nee-dominion-20260523]. Combined entity becomes the world’s largest regulated utility, and management is explicit about what it’s for — they’re contracted to build 30+ data center campuses, with 15 to 30 gigawatts of generation by 2035[^news-nee-data-center-campuses-20260523]. Meta already has a 2.5 gigawatt solar-and-storage deal signed[^news-nee-meta-partnership-20260523]. Dominion stock up 9% on the announcement. NextEra down 4%[^news-nee-dominion-20260523].

Ava: Lantheus. In talks to sell to Curium at roughly $7 billion — broke Thursday[^news-lnth-curium-20260523]. This is the radiopharma roll-up everyone in oncology imaging has been waiting for. Q1 beat, PYLARIFY TruVu cleared FDA in March with a 50% batch-size lift, and the LNTH-2501 PDUFA lands June 29[^news-lnth-q1-20260523][^news-lnth-pylarify-20260523][^news-lnth-pdufa-20260523].

Ava: FedEx. Freight spins June 1 as FDXF[^news-fdx-spinoff-20260523]. Dual-market trading starts Tuesday. FedEx retains a 19.9% stake; the rest goes to holders, tax-free for U.S. federal purposes[^news-fdx-dual-market-20260523][^news-fdx-tax-20260523]. CEO Raj Subramaniam separately dismissed the Amazon-logistics-threat narrative this week[^news-fdx-amazon-20260523]. Marcus — the cashflow take. Start with the one that’s actually changing right now.

Marcus: NextEra is the one that matters this week. The memo had them at 28x trailing free cash flow at a 5% yield going in, Q1 10-Q confirmed[^memo-nee-evfcf-20260522]. That’s a clean number for a regulated utility. But the load-bearing line was already debt-to-FCF at 11x trailing[^memo-nee-debtfcf-20260522]. Now they’re eating Dominion’s leverage in an all-stock deal. The trade is: investors get the regulated-utility tail on AI infrastructure that hyperscaler multiples don’t price, and in exchange they take on a balance sheet that will look heavier before it earns through. What to watch on the next print is whether the contracted gigawatt backlog converts fast enough to absorb the debt the deal piles on.

Ava: Translation: you bought the utility because the data centers needed the power, not the chips. Lantheus?

Marcus: Lantheus is the cleanest balance sheet of the three. The memo had them at 35x trailing free cash flow at a roughly 3% yield, debt-to-FCF basically zero[^memo-lnth-evfcf-20260522][^memo-lnth-debtfcf-20260522]. $7 billion is a reasonable mark on a company with a Q1 beat, a fresh FDA approval, and a PDUFA five weeks out. The radiopharma platform is what Curium is buying — the imaging stack plus the therapeutic pipeline. Not financial engineering. Strategic consolidation in a category where the FDA pipeline is the asset.

Ava: And FedEx is the third one — different structure entirely.

Marcus: FedEx is the most interesting capital structure of the three. The memo had FDX at 22x trailing free cash flow at a roughly 6% yield, debt-to-FCF at 7.5x[^memo-fdx-evfcf-20260522][^memo-fdx-debtfcf-20260522]. The Freight spin lets the parent re-rate around the express business; the retained stake gives the holdco a forward monetization option. That’s not a tax dodge — that’s management taking the discount the market puts on the bundle and letting it trade separately.

Ava: Three balance-sheet decisions, made the same week Nvidia gave you the demand picture they’re all pricing against. Mark that.

Deep dive — Nvidia

Ava: Nvidia’s Q1 fiscal 2027 print, after the close Tuesday. The bull case got everything it asked for. The bear case got nothing it asked for.

Ava: Revenue $82 billion, up 85% year-over-year and 20% sequentially[^news-nvda-q1-rev-20260523]. Data Center alone was $75 billion — nearly double the prior-year quarter[^news-nvda-data-center-20260523]. Gross margin held at 75%, essentially flat to Q4[^news-nvda-gm-20260523]. Diluted GAAP EPS $1.87, up 140%[^news-nvda-eps-20260523].

Ava: Then they guided. Q2 revenue $91 billion, plus-or-minus 2%[^news-nvda-q2-guide-20260523]. Margin guide held at 75%[^news-nvda-margin-guide-20260523]. Blackwell 300 and the B200 line sold out through mid-2026 per management[^news-nvda-blackwell-demand-20260523]. Rubin platform confirmed for Q3 launch this year, Rubin Ultra in H2 2027[^news-nvda-rubin-20260523].

Ava: And then the capital return. They raised the dividend 25-fold — from $0.01 to $0.25 per share — and authorized an additional $80 billion of buybacks[^news-nvda-capital-allocation-20260523]. Marcus, the cashflow take.

Marcus: Nvidia just gave you the next twelve months of justification in one forward number. The memo had them at 50x trailing free cash flow at about a 2% yield going in, Q4 FY26 10-K confirmed[^memo-nvda-evfcf-20260522]. We re-anchor when the Q1 10-Q files. The $91 billion Q2 guide is what changes the read[^news-nvda-q2-guide-20260523] — that’s a single quarter of revenue close to the company’s entire trailing-twelve free cash flow base[^memo-nvda-fcf-20260522]. The multiple was never the problem here. The problem was always whether the Q2 guide would hold the rate of change. It did.

Ava: One sentence on why the dividend matters.

Marcus: It signals that Jensen Huang now believes the cash generation is structural, not cyclical. You don’t 25x the dividend on a company you think is at the top. The $80 billion buyback authorization is the second signal — they’re going to be in the open market accumulating their own equity while the next product cycle ramps. The question for the next print isn’t whether the demand is real. The question is whether anything in the Blackwell-to-Rubin transition slips, because at this multiple, any timing miss is the entire risk.

Ava: And the consensus narrative on the print?

Marcus: Wall Street had a version of the law of large numbers eats Nvidia by 2027. The Q2 $91 billion guide just told you the law of large numbers gets eaten first. Bear modelers said this rate of change couldn’t continue at this base. They were wrong, and they’re going to be wrong again next quarter unless something physical breaks in the supply chain.

Ava: So the bear case now has to argue physics, not math. Two prints from now, mark the calendar.

Rapid-fire

Ava: Five forward-week catalysts and one governance shock to close. Buckle up.

Ava: Page 2 of the memo — Salesforce and Snowflake both report after the close Tuesday[^earn-crm][^earn-snow]. Consensus on Salesforce: $3.12 EPS, $11 billion revenue[^earn-crm]. Consensus on Snowflake: $0.32, $1.3 billion[^earn-snow]. The Salesforce setup has CEO Marc Benioff committing $300 million of Anthropic token spend for the year, with AI coding agents delivering 30% engineering productivity gains and no incremental engineering hires[^news-crm-benioff-anthropic-20260523]. And per Talnexis hiring data, Salesforce’s AI/ML postings spiked 5.6x in the last 7 days — 28 new roles versus 5 the week prior — heading straight into the print[^tlnx-crm-aiml-20260523]. Memo had Salesforce at 28x trailing free cash flow going in, Q4 10-K confirmed[^memo-crm-evfcf-20260522]. Re-anchor Wednesday morning.

Ava: Snowflake is the harder one. Memo can’t anchor on a multiple — trailing free cash flow runs negative, capex still scaling against the AI workload ramp[^memo-snow-fcf-20260522]. What prices Snowflake right now is Cortex AI adoption — 9,100 customer accounts, 200%+ YoY AI-workload growth, NRR holding at 125%, RPO accelerating 42% year-over-year[^news-snow-cortex-20260523][^news-snow-nrr-20260523]. And the Talnexis hiring tracker shows Snowflake’s Partnerships postings up 5.5x in 7 days — 11 new partnerships roles versus 2 the week prior[^tlnx-snow-partnerships-20260523]. The pre-print read: the ecosystem-monetization push is hiring like it’s a real business.

Ava: Deere reported Wednesday. EPS $6.55 against $5.74 consensus, a 14% beat[^news-de-q2-earnings-20260521]. But the composition is the story. Construction and Forestry revenue up 29%, op profit up 48%[^news-de-construction-20260521]. Production and Precision Ag revenue down 14%, op profit down 39%[^news-de-ag-decline-20260521]. And $272 million of the beat came from a Supreme Court IEEPA tariff recovery[^news-de-tariff-20260521]. Strip that out, the print is in-line at best. Construction is booming, farmers are buying nothing, and the tariff lawyers paid the difference.

Ava: BioNTech. Q1 loss of €531.9 million — and the company is buying back €1 billion of stock into it[^news-bntx-q1-loss-20260523]. What they’re spending on is BNT327, their lead bispecific antibody. Phase 2 small-cell lung cancer just printed 16.8 months median overall survival[^news-bntx-bnt327-survival-20260523]. Phase 3 push is on, with combination trials running across non-small-cell lung, triple-negative breast, and pancreatic[^news-bntx-bnt327-combos-20260523]. The loss is real. The platform bet is what’s getting funded.

Ava: Page 8 — Target and Walmart, same week, opposite reads. Target beat on Q1 comps up 5.6% — their first positive comp in five quarters — and raised the full-year guide[^news-tgt-q1-20260523][^news-tgt-guidance-20260523]. Walmart printed strong e-commerce growth — 26% globally, marketplace up nearly 50% — and the stock fell 7% on a cautious full-year guide[^news-wmt-ecom-20260523][^news-wmt-earnings-20260523]. Same consumer. Same week. Two different reads on what Walmart’s franchise actually sees ahead of it.

Ava: Page 6 — both wireless carrier CEO chairs moved this week. Dan Schulman in at Verizon, Hans Vestberg to Special Advisor through October[^news-vz-ceo-20260523]. Srini Gopalan in at T-Mobile in six weeks, Mike Sievert to vice chairman[^news-tmus-ceo-20260523]. And the same week — Verizon, AT&T, and T-Mobile announced a three-way joint venture on direct-to-device satellite to compete with Starlink, while T-Mobile separately launched SuperBroadband with Starlink at $250 a month[^news-tmus-jv-20260523][^news-tmus-starlink-20260523]. Read into the timing what you will.

Ava: And Regeneron — fianlimab-plus-Libtayo missed primary endpoint in the 1,546-patient melanoma Phase 3, lost head-to-head to Keytruda, stock down 10.5% on the news[^news-regn-melanoma-20260523]. The Eylea HD extended-dosing approval and Dupixent’s 33% Q1 growth are still there[^news-regn-eylea-20260523][^news-regn-dupixent-20260523]. But the oncology pipeline just took a real hit.

Close

Ava: That’s the show. Wall Street’s consensus on the week: Nvidia was priced for perfection going in, and the print was the test. They were half right. It was priced for perfection. It also delivered perfection. The next test is whether Salesforce and Snowflake confirm the Agentforce and Cortex traction Tuesday afternoon.

Ava: Hiring data this week from Talnexis — talnexis.com.

Ava: Forward week — Salesforce and Snowflake Tuesday after the close, Costco Wednesday, Broadcom and Five Below on June 3. Hunt, Jason, and Mike are back Wednesday on episode 2622 — Hunt teased a surprise topic in place of the usual healthcare slot[^ep-e2621]. Get the Cash Flow Memo at telltales.us.

Closing disclaimer

Sources

BioNTech Investor Relations. (2026, May). BioNTech clinical data at ELCC 2026 highlight potential of differentiated late-stage portfolio in lung cancer [Press release]. https://investors.biontech.de/news-releases/news-release-details/biontech-clinical-data-elcc-2026-highlight-potential
Fierce Biotech. (2026, May). BioNTech shows off lung cancer survival data behind phase 3 push for red-hot bispecific. https://www.fiercebiotech.com/biotech/biontech-shows-lung-cancer-survival-data-behind-phase-3-push-red-hot-bispecific
Canary Media. (2026, May 18). NextEra Energy wants to buy its way into Data Center Alley. https://www.canarymedia.com/articles/utilities/nextera-energy-wants-to-buy-its-way-into-data-center-alley
Carbon Credits. (2026, May). Meta and NextEra partner for a big solar and storage energy deal. https://carboncredits.com/meta-and-nextera-partner-for-a-big-solar-and-storage-energy-deal/
CNBC. (2026, May 12). FedEx CEO brushes off Amazon’s new logistics service that recently sent shares tumbling. https://www.cnbc.com/2026/05/12/fed-ex-ceo-jim-cramer-amazon-logistics.html
CNBC. (2026, May 18). NextEra Energy (NEE) to buy Dominion Energy (D). https://www.cnbc.com/2026/05/18/nextera-nee-dominion-energy-d-data-center-ai.html
CNBC. (2026, May 18). Regeneron drops after skin cancer treatment misses late-stage trial goal. https://www.cnbc.com/2026/05/18/regeneron-drops-after-skin-cancer-treatment-misses-late-stage-trial-goal.html
CNBC. (2026, May 20). Nvidia (NVDA) earnings report Q1 2027. https://www.cnbc.com/2026/05/20/nvidia-nvda-earnings-report-q1-2027.html
CNBC. (2026, May 21). Walmart issues worse-than-expected outlook as high gas prices hit shoppers, shares drop 7%. https://www.cnbc.com/2026/05/21/walmart-wmt-earnings-q1-2027.html
Eyewire+. (2026). Regeneron secures FDA approval to extend Eylea HD dosing intervals to up to 20 weeks. https://eyewire.news/news/regeneron-secures-fda-approval-to-extend-eylea-hd-dosing-intervals-to-up-to-20-weeks
FedEx Investor News. (2026, May 13). FedEx board of directors approves spin-off of FedEx Freight [Press release]. https://investors.fedex.com/news-and-events/investor-news/investor-news-details/2026/FedEx-Board-of-Directors-Approves-Spin-off-of-FedEx-Freight/default.aspx
Financial Content. (2025, December 29). Nvidia’s Blackwell dynasty: B200 and GB200 sold out through mid-2026 as backlog hits 3.6 million units. https://markets.financialcontent.com/wral/article/tokenring-2025-12-29-nvidias-blackwell-dynasty-b200-and-gb200-sold-out-through-mid-2026-as-backlog-hits-3-6-million-units
GeekWire. (2026, May 23). T-Mobile enlists Starlink satellites for new SuperBroadband business internet service. https://www.geekwire.com/2026/t-mobile-enlists-starlink-satellites-for-new-superbroadband-business-internet-service/
Investing.com. (2026, April 29). Regeneron beats first quarter estimates on Dupixent strength. https://www.investing.com/news/earnings/regeneron-beats-first-quarter-estimates-on-dupixent-strength-4644258
Lantheus Holdings. (2026, March 6). Lantheus announces FDA approval of PYLARIFY TruVu™ (piflufolastat F 18) Injection [Press release]. https://investor.lantheus.com/news-releases/news-release-details/lantheus-announces-fda-approval-pylarify-truvutm-piflufolastat-f
Lantheus Holdings. (2026, May 7). Form 10-Q FY2026 [SEC filing]. https://www.sec.gov/Archives/edgar/data/0001521036/000119312526210373/lnth-20260331.htm
Lopez, M. (2026, May 22). Lantheus (LNTH) weighs potential $7 billion sale following offer from Curium. Bloomberg. https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2026-05-22/lantheus-is-said-to-weigh-sale-following-offer-from-curium
MarketBeat. (2026, May 20). NVIDIA Corp. Q1 FY2027 earnings report. https://www.marketbeat.com/earnings/reports/2026-5-20-nvidia-co-stock/
MarketBeat. (2026, May 21). Deere & Company Q2 2026 earnings report. https://www.marketbeat.com/earnings/reports/2026-5-21-deere-company-stock/
Morningstar. (2026, May 12). FedEx board of directors approves spin-off of FedEx Freight. https://www.morningstar.com/news/business-wire/20260512056825/fedex-board-of-directors-approves-spin-off-of-fedex-freight
NVIDIA Newsroom. (n.d.). Rubin platform AI supercomputer [Press release]. https://nvidianews.nvidia.com/news/rubin-platform-ai-supercomputer
Quartz. (2026, May 20). Target Q1 2026 earnings beat: Sales surge, outlook raised. https://qz.com/target-earnings-sales-growth-full-year-outlook-052026
Quiver Quantitative. (2026, May 7). Lantheus Holdings ($LNTH) releases Q1 2026 earnings. https://www.quiverquant.com/news/LANTHEUS+HOLDINGS+%28%24LNTH%29+Releases+Q1+2026+Earnings
Salesforce. (n.d.). Marc Benioff says Salesforce will spend $300M on Anthropic in 2026. Yahoo Finance. https://finance.yahoo.com/sectors/technology/articles/marc-benioff-says-salesforce-spend-133651072.html
Simply Wall St. (2026, May 23). Assessing BioNTech (BNTX) valuation after prolonged share price weakness and loss-making results. https://simplywall.st/stocks/us/pharmaceuticals-biotech/nasdaq-bntx/biontech/news/assessing-biontech-bntx-valuation-after-prolonged-share-pric
Snowflake. (n.d.). Snowflake Inc. Q4 FY2026 earnings 8-K [SEC filing]. https://www.sec.gov/Archives/edgar/data/0001640147/000162828026011631/fy2026q4earnings.htm
StockInvest.us. (n.d.). Snowflake earnings report: Key numbers & transcript summary. https://stockinvest.us/earnings-report/SNOW
Target Corporate. (2026, May 20). Target Q1 2026 earnings highlights [Press release]. https://corporate.target.com/news-features/article/2026/05/q1-2026-earnings
Telecoms.com. (2026, May 23). Gopalan to replace Sievert as T-Mobile US CEO in six weeks. https://www.telecoms.com/operator-ecosystem/gopalan-to-replace-sievert-as-t-mobile-us-ceo-in-six-weeks/
Teslarati. (2026, May 23). SpaceX just forced Verizon, AT&T and T-Mobile to team up for the first time in history. https://www.teslarati.com/spacex-starlink-vs-verizon-att-tmobile-d2d-direct-device/
Verizon. (n.d.). Verizon announces CEO transition [Press release]. https://www.verizon.com/about/news/verizon-announces-ceo-transition
Walmart Inc. (2026, May 21). Form 8-K — earnings release FY27 Q1 [SEC filing]. https://www.sec.gov/Archives/edgar/data/0000104169/000010416926000095/earningspresentationfy27.htm
Yahoo Finance. (2026, May 21). Deere & Co (DE) Q2 2026 earnings call highlights: Strong sales growth amidst challenges. https://finance.yahoo.com/markets/stocks/articles/deere-co-q2-2026-earnings-230050659.html
24/7 Wall St. (2026, May 21). Deere (DE) Q2 2026 earnings call transcript. https://247wallst.com/companies/de/earnings/

Internal data

Internal data is provided on a best efforts basis.

Hiring intelligence data

Hiring data this week from Talnexis — talnexis.com. Talnexis tracks 98 top tech companies and refreshes hiring intelligence daily from public job boards.

CRM — Salesforce: AI_HIRING_SURGE on AI/ML postings (28 roles in 7d vs 5 prior, 5.6x). Detected 2026-05-23. Source: https://www.talnexis.com/
SNOW — Snowflake: CATEGORY_SPIKE on Partnerships postings (11 roles in 7d vs 2 prior, 5.5x). Detected 2026-05-23. Source: https://www.talnexis.com/

Earnings calendar

Source: FMP /api/v3/earning_calendar, pulled 2026-05-23. Filtered to the 94-ticker Cashflow Memo universe.

CRM — Salesforce: 2026-05-27 AMC. Consensus EPS $3.12, revenue $11.05B
SNOW — Snowflake: 2026-05-27 AMC. Consensus EPS $0.32, revenue $1.32B
COST — Costco: 2026-05-28. Consensus EPS $4.98, revenue $69.61B
AVGO — Broadcom: 2026-06-03. Consensus EPS $2.40, revenue $22.04B
FIVE — Five Below: 2026-06-03. Consensus EPS $1.71, revenue $1.21B

Google's Real AI Risk Isn't Just ChatGPT

Mike Nicoletti — Wed, 20 May 2026 23:22:19 GMT

Hunt Lawrence, Mike Nicoletti, and Jason Wallace unpack why the Hormuz panic doesn’t hold, where Google’s real AI risk actually lives, and how the PBM business model is unwinding in real time. Get the Cash Flow Memo at telltales.us.

The Cashflow Memo

5 18 26 20 Pager

568KB ∙ PDF file

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Key Takeaways

Hunt’s oil base case holds at $90 (Brent $108 / WTI $104 today) against consensus $150 calls: Saudi Aramco already posted higher March cash flow routing crude to the Red Sea, ADNOC is twinning the Oman→Fujairah line, Iraq/Kuwait are moving barrels by truck-and-pipe through Syria, and Iran loses leverage over time even without a nuclear deal.
Exhibit A is straining on interest expense (10Y at 4.5% vs. the 3.5% baseline assumption); Mike’s debt/GDP-stabilization-near-100% bet leans on Claude-class AI compressing Medicare/Medicaid spend into flat-to-declining, with defense and interest as the other binding lines.
Google ran from $162 to $400 in 52 weeks: AI Overviews defused the visible ChatGPT threat, but the real risk is agentic search rewiring monetization (Exa just raised $225M at $2B+ from a16z), and Jason posits a chunk of Google’s incremental search revenue is OpenAI paying for web-index grounding.
Gemini Spark (I/O) is Google playing innovator’s-dilemma offense, a 24/7 personal agent running across Gmail/Calendar/Drive that no entrant can replicate without Google’s existing data perimeter; the Google + Meta + Amazon ad-network moat remains durable enough that OpenAI is retreating to Anthropic-style subscription revenue.
PBM pricing power is unwinding in real time: Trump Rx relaunched with Cost Plus Drug + Amazon Fulfillment backends (drugs at ~25% of copay), UNH/OptumRx moving to a transparent flat-fee model and dropping prior auth on 30% of minor procedures, CVS adding biosimilars, and Lilly’s DTC channel proving out, all setting up a healthcare-investment deep dive in two weeks.

Show Notes

[00:00] Welcome to Telltales Mike opens the show and points listeners to this week’s Cash Flow Memo at telltales.us.

[00:18] Disclaimer Standard disclosure.

[00:31] Exhibits A, B, C — Oil, Hormuz, and the Federal Deficit Hunt walks through how Saudi Aramco, ADNOC, Iraq, and Kuwait are routing barrels around Hormuz via Red Sea ports, the Fujairah pipeline, and Syrian truck-and-pipe corridors. Why consensus $150 oil is wrong and Hunt’s $90 base case holds. Closes on interest expense and Medicare/Medicaid as the binding lines on Exhibit A.

[06:52] More than Moats: Google Hunt frames Alphabet as the latest More than Moats target after Lilly, Nvidia, Goldman, and Microsoft. Mike and Jason work through the antitrust outcome (Chrome retained, web-index data opened to competitors), AI Overviews defending low-intent queries, and the real risk: agentic search and Exa’s $225M raise.

[13:04] Google I/O and Gemini Spark Jason walks through I/O announcements including the new content-credentialing system and Gemini Spark, Google’s always-on personal agent running across Gmail, Calendar, and Drive. Why no entrant can replicate this without Google’s existing data perimeter.

[15:34] The Advertising Moat Hunt frames Google + Meta + Amazon as a durable ad-network oligopoly. Why OpenAI’s billion-user advertising thesis is failing and the pivot back to Anthropic-style subscription revenue.

[19:53] Healthcare: PBMs, Trump Rx, and Lilly DTC Jason walks through Bill Cassidy’s primary loss, Trump Rx’s relaunch on Cost Plus Drug and Amazon Fulfillment rails, CVS adding biosimilars, OptumRx moving to a transparent flat-fee PBM model, UnitedHealth dropping prior auth on 30% of minor procedures, and Eli Lilly’s working DTC channel.

[23:50] Fixing the Premium Side Hunt asks how to bring the same rationalization to monthly health insurance premiums. Mike on diagnostic-monitoring opt-in plans with discounted premiums; Hunt on quarterly rebate structures that reward healthier behavior. Why emergency care is the structural hard problem.

[29:33] Healthcare Investment Ideas — Two-Week Prep Hunt commits the team to identifying three or four entities running rational healthcare models that could be good investments. Surprise topic next Wednesday; healthcare deep dive in two weeks.

[30:38] Sign-Off Stay healthy, back next Wednesday.

Subscribe wherever you listen, and grab the Cash Flow Memo at telltales.us.

Cashtags

Weekend Update - W2620

Mike Nicoletti — Sat, 16 May 2026 17:34:22 GMT

The Cashflow Memo

5 11 26 20 Pager

565KB ∙ PDF file

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Earnings Week Is a Split Screen — Nvidia, the Big-Box Gauntlet, and the Retail Read-Across

The AI trade and the tariff trade get tested on the same three days. By Friday, the market knows which side delivered.

Download the memo at telltales.us. Hunt, Jason, and Mike are back Wednesday on episode E2621.

Chapter markers

Time | Segment
0:00 | Opening disclaimer
0:15 | Cold open & this week’s split screen
0:45 | Theme — The Big-Box Gauntlet (HD, LOW, TGT, WMT)
4:45 | Deep dive — Nvidia going into Q1 FY27
8:45 | Rapid-fire — EQT, UnitedHealth, Microsoft
11:45 | Close & Consensus Watch
12:30 | Closing disclaimer

Full transcript

Opening disclaimer

Ava: The following conversation is intended for informational purposes only. You should always do your own work to determine if an investment is suitable for you.

Cold open

Ava: You’re listening to the Telltales Weekend Update. I’m Ava Cabot.

Marcus: And I’m Marcus Graham — the cashflow desk.

Ava: Quick note: the show is produced entirely with AI tools, and both voices you’re hearing are AI-generated. Send feedback through the Substack. We’re still in the early run of the show — listener feedback is shaping what we do.

Ava: This week is a split screen. Nvidia prints Wednesday after the close. The big-box retailers print Tuesday through Thursday — Home Depot, Lowe’s, Target, Walmart. The AI trade and the tariff trade get tested on the same three days. By Friday, the market knows which side delivered.

Ava: On Wednesday’s main show, Hunt, Jason, and Mike walked through Meta as the most profitable AI application ever built — the answer to whether AI capex actually compounds back into the income statement[^ep-e2620]. This week the test moves to the picks-and-shovels side. Nvidia. And the read-across to whether the tariff regime is showing up at the cash register.

Theme — The Big-Box Gauntlet

Ava: On page 8 of the memo this week — Home Depot Tuesday morning[^earn-hd], Lowe’s and Target Wednesday before the open[^earn-low][^earn-tgt], Walmart Thursday[^earn-wmt]. Four big-box prints, three days, one customer.

Ava: The customer is the same — middle America, mortgage-burdened, tariff-exposed. The wound isn’t.

Ava: Home Depot is the only one of the four where the stock has already done the work. 25% off the 52-week high going into the print[^hd-performance-20260513]. Reports Tuesday at 9:00 AM ET, $3.42 consensus on $41.6B[^hd-earnings-20260505]. Truist cut its price target from $424 to $394 three days ago[^hd-truist-20260512]. And management already told everyone they will source no more than 10% of products from any single foreign country — that’s the tariff hedge, on the record, before the print[^hd-tariffs-20260512].

Ava: Lowe’s is the rare print where two top-tier analysts disagree on the same number. Reports Wednesday before the open. $2.96 EPS on $23B[^earn-low]. Citi upgraded to Buy on May 12, $285 target — they cited four straight quarters of positive comps[^low-citi-upgrade-20260512]. BofA downgraded to Neutral on May 5, $260 target — they cited housing turnover at multi-decade lows[^low-bofa-downgrade-20260505]. Same company. Same week. Two completely different setups.

Ava: Target is the only one of the four printing into a customer base that left. Reports Wednesday before the open — same morning as Lowe’s. Consensus $1.41 on $24.5B[^tgt-earnings-20260515]. Foot traffic at Target stores is down year-over-year for 25 of the last 27 weeks since the January DEI announcement[^tgt-dei-20260515]. The boycott officially ended in March — with no new diversity commitments. And Ulta Beauty is walking out of the partnership in August after five years[^tgt-ulta-20260515].

Ava: Walmart is the only one of the four restructuring while expanding. New CEO John Furner cut 1,000 corporate roles this week[^wmt-restructuring-20260513]. Prints Thursday. $0.65 on $175B. The ad business is up 50% year-over-year and the U.S. e-commerce business posted its first profitable quarter globally[^wmt-ad-growth-20260323][^wmt-ecom-profit-20260215]. The memo can’t anchor Walmart — trailing-twelve free cash flow is negative because of capex[^memo-wmt-fcf-20260515]. Marcus stays off the name.

Ava: Marcus, two of these are pricing differently than they look. The cashflow take.

Marcus: Target is the wounded one in the gauntlet, and the memo isn’t pricing it as wounded yet. 24x trailing free cash flow on $3B of TTM FCF, 10-K confirmed[^memo-tgt-evfcf-20260515][^memo-tgt-fcf-20260515]. The market is pricing Target like the foot-traffic hole closes on its own — 25 of the last 27 weeks say it doesn’t[^tgt-dei-20260515]. The gross-margin guide Wednesday morning is what tells you which side is closer to right.

Marcus: Home Depot is the cleanest test of the four. 24x trailing free cash flow on $16B of TTM FCF, 10-K confirmed[^memo-hd-evfcf-20260515][^memo-hd-fcf-20260515]. That’s not punitive for the share-leader of home improvement. The stock is 25% off the high — most of that move is housing turnover, not Home Depot losing share[^hd-performance-20260513]. The test Tuesday morning is whether the pro-contractor segment is actually offsetting DIY weakness[^hd-contractor-20260224], or whether management has been packaging hope as a thesis.

Ava: Two prints, two questions. Whether the foot traffic comes back at Target. Whether the pro contractor is real at Home Depot. Lowe’s settles a disagreement between two analysts. And Walmart has to convince anyone watching that cutting jobs is part of the growth story, not in spite of it.

Deep dive — Nvidia

Ava: Nvidia. Wednesday after the close. This is the most consequential print of the year.

Ava: Consensus is $1.74 EPS on $78B in revenue, plus or minus 2%[^nvda-fy27-guidance-202605][^nvda-earnings-consensus-202605][^earn-nvda]. Blackwell B200 and GB200 are sold out through mid-2026 on a backlog described as, quote, insane — 3.6 million units[^nvda-blackwell-backlog-202605]. Hyperscaler capex for 2026 is guided at $725B, up 77% year over year[^nvda-hyperscaler-capex-202605]. Nvidia takes roughly 90% of the AI accelerator dollar inside that.

Ava: Now the China complication. On March 5, Nvidia halted all H200 production for China — about 400,000 units of orders that don’t get filled, roughly $30B of walked-away revenue[^nvda-h200-halt-202605]. Then this week, Jensen Huang rode Air Force One to Beijing. For context — Trump brought 17 CEOs to China; only two got Air Force One seats. Musk and Huang[^nvda-huang-trump-202605]. Huang secured U.S. export approval for H200 sales to 10 Chinese firms — Alibaba, Tencent, ByteDance, JD.com — opening an estimated $50B annual market[^nvda-china-h200-202605]. And then Beijing told its tech companies to pause orders while the government decides on import approval[^nvda-china-h200-pause-202605].

Ava: And one more. The Rubin platform was announced at CES — 5x Blackwell on inference, 3.5x Blackwell on training, 10x reduction in inference token cost[^nvda-rubin-202605][^nvda-rubin-economics-202605]. Production ramps the back half of this year. AWS, Google Cloud, Microsoft, and Oracle are first in line.

Ava: Marcus, the cashflow take.

Marcus: Nvidia going into Wednesday night is the only mega-cap in the AI stack where the multiple looks reasonable against the cash. 50x trailing free cash flow on $103B of TTM FCF, fiscal year 2026 10-K confirmed[^memo-nvda-evfcf-20260515][^memo-nvda-fcf-20260515]. Free cash flow grew about 80% year over year[^memo-nvda-fcfgrowth-20260515]. That’s the reasonable end of expensive in the AI stack — and reasonable means the math has to keep compounding. The test Wednesday isn’t the print. It’s whether the Q2 guide carries Rubin pricing.

Ava: The China story — net positive or net negative for the next twelve months?

Marcus: Net positive. And that’s the contrarian read. The H200 halt walked away from roughly $30B in China revenue, which everyone scored as a loss. But Nvidia carries a $95B supply commitment with TSMC[^nvda-tsmc-supply-202605]. That capacity doesn’t sit idle — it reallocates to Vera Rubin. So the trade is: walk away from H200 China at H200 margins, redirect TSMC capacity to the highest-priced product in the lineup. That’s the better margin trade. The export approval and the China pause net to noise — Nvidia keeps the option, the 10 Chinese firms stay in the queue. The downside case is the policy whiplash recurs and the option goes to zero. Probability-weighted, I take the trade.

Ava: And what changes the read after Wednesday?

Marcus: The demand side is set. Hyperscaler capex guided up 77% this year[^nvda-hyperscaler-capex-202605], Nvidia at the center of the dollar. The variable is Rubin pricing on the Q2 call. The new platform is 5x Blackwell on inference[^nvda-rubin-202605]. If management talks Rubin pricing on Wednesday, the multiple has room. If they don’t, this is as good as the cycle gets — and the next derate comes in the back half. The print is consensus minus surprise. The guide is the trade.

Ava: So the question Wednesday night isn’t whether Nvidia beats. It’s whether Rubin shows up in the language.

Rapid-fire

Ava: Three quick ones, a forward week sweep, and we’re out.

Ava: EQT just printed the best quarter in its history. Q1 free cash flow of $1.8B exceeded the company’s full-year 2022 free cash flow[^eqt-fcf-20260513]. Net debt fell below $5.7B[^eqt-debt-20260513]. Fitch upgraded EQT to investment grade BBB and Citi upgraded to Buy on May 13[^eqt-earnings-20260513][^eqt-citi-20260513]. The company is openly marketing itself as the preferred power partner for Appalachian AI data centers through the 2030s[^eqt-datacenters-202604]. The memo has EQT at 14x trailing free cash flow at an 8% yield[^memo-eqt-evfcf-20260515][^memo-eqt-fcfyield-20260515]. Natural gas isn’t a commodity story this year. It’s an AI infrastructure story. EQT is the cleanest expression of it.

Ava: UnitedHealth is the year’s biggest comeback so far. Stock hit a 52-week high of $404 on Tuesday. 47% off the March lows[^unh-stock-recovery-20260513]. Q1 EPS of $7.23 beat consensus by $0.47[^unh-q1-earnings-20260421]. The CFO committed $1.5B to AI this year and claimed 2:1 returns inside 12 months[^unh-ai-investment-20260512]. The memo has UnitedHealth at 5x trailing free cash flow at an 18.5% yield[^memo-unh-evfcf-20260515][^memo-unh-fcfyield-20260515]. That yield is what’s pricing the DOJ Medicare billing investigation that’s still open[^unh-doj-investigation-20260512]. The recovery is real. The shadow is also real.

Ava: Microsoft just got a new bull. Bill Ackman’s Pershing Square disclosed a $2.1B position this week — accumulated since February — calling Microsoft, quote, a highly compelling valuation[^msft-ackman-disclosure-20260515]. The memo has Microsoft at 135x trailing free cash flow[^memo-msft-evfcf-20260515]. Marcus has been calling that not compelling. One of them is wrong — it’s a fair fight. The pressure point is free cash flow margin, which compressed from 29% to 19% year over year because of AI capex[^msft-fcf-margin-20260414]. Either Azure scales the dollar back into the margin, or Ackman is buying the most expensive software stock of the cycle.

Ava: Forward week. Costco prints May 28[^earn-cost], Salesforce May 27[^earn-crm], Deere Thursday alongside Walmart[^earn-de]. We pick those up next Saturday.

Close

Ava: That’s the show. The split-screen week starts Tuesday morning. By the time Marcus and I are back next Saturday, the market will have decided which side delivered.

Ava: Wall Street’s consensus on the week — Nvidia beats and retail misses. The risk is that one of those is fully in the tape.

Ava: Hunt, Jason, and Mike are back Wednesday on episode 2621 with the Nvidia post-mortem, the retail read-across, and a deep dive on Google.

Ava: Subscribe and download this week’s Cash Flow Memo at telltales.us. 86 companies across 20 pages. The same memo we anchor every beat on. See you next Saturday.

Closing disclaimer

Sources

Ad-Hoc News. (2026, May 13). EQT Corp stock (US26884L1098): Citi upgrades to Buy after strong Q1. https://www.ad-hoc-news.de/boerse/news/ueberblick/eqt-corp-stock-us26884l1098-citi-upgrades-to-buy-after-strong-q1/69322288
Alphastreet. (2026, May 15). Target Q1 2026 earnings preview — May 20, Street expects $1.41 EPS. https://news.alphastreet.com/target-q1-2026-earnings-preview-may-20-street-expects-1-41-eps/
CFO Dive. (2026, May 12). Home Depot warns of tariff impact, modest price hikes. https://www.cfodive.com/news/home-depot-warns-tariff-impact-modest-price-hikes/758202/
CNBC. (2026, May 13). HD: Home Depot Inc — stock price, quote and news. https://www.cnbc.com/quotes/HD
CNBC. (2026, May 13). Walmart cuts 1,000 roles to simplify operations, Reuters reports. https://www.cnbc.com/2026/05/13/walmart-cuts-1000-roles-to-simplify-operations-reports.html
CNBC. (2026, April 21). UnitedHealth Group reports Q1 2026 earnings. https://www.cnbc.com/2026/04/21/unitedhealth-group-unh-earnings-q1-2026.html
Financial Content Markets. (2026, May). Nvidia’s Blackwell dynasty: B200 and GB200 sold out through mid-2026 as backlog hits 3.6 million units. https://markets.financialcontent.com/wral/article/tokenring-2025-12-29-nvidias-blackwell-dynasty-b200-and-gb200-sold-out-through-mid-2026-as-backlog-hits-3-6-million-units
Fortune. (2026, May 15). Bill Ackman’s Pershing Square takes Microsoft stake on OpenAI, Azure spending. https://fortune.com/2026/05/15/bill-ackman-microsoft-stock-openai-azure-spending/
GuruFocus. (2026, May 13). UnitedHealth Group (UNH) hits new high as strong earnings propel stock surge. https://www.gurufocus.com/news/8856079/unitedhealth-group-unh-hits-new-high-as-strong-earnings-propel-stock-surge
Insider Monkey. (2026, May 12). Citi recommends buying Lowe’s (LOW) as a cyclical share gainer. https://www.insidermonkey.com/blog/citi-recommends-buying-lowes-low-as-a-cyclical-share-gainer-1760400/
Investing.com. (2026, May 13). Earnings call transcript: EQT Corporation Q1 2026 delivers strong results, stock rises. https://www.investing.com/news/transcripts/earnings-call-transcript-eqt-corporation-q1-2026-delivers-strong-results-stock-rises-93CH-4629992
Marcellus Drilling News. (2026, April). EQT targets AI data center power demand in Southwest PA. https://marcellusdrilling.com/2026/04/eqt-targets-ai-data-center-power-demand-in-southwest-pa/
MarketScreener. (2026, May 12). Bank of America Securities 2026 Global Healthcare Conference — UnitedHealth presentation. https://www.marketscreener.com/news/bank-of-america-securities-2026-global-healthcare-conference-a-presentation-05-12-2026-00-00-00-ce7f5bdfda88f525
Medical Economics. (2026, May 12). UnitedHealth Group under DOJ investigation over Medicare billing practices. https://www.medicaleconomics.com/view/unitedhealth-group-under-doj-investigation-over-medicare-billing-practices
Morningstar. (2026, May). Ahead of earnings, is Nvidia stock a Buy, a Sell, or Fairly Valued?. https://www.morningstar.com/stocks/ahead-earnings-is-nvidia-stock-buy-sell-or-fairly-valued-3
NVIDIA Newsroom. (2026, May 14). NVIDIA launches next-generation Rubin AI compute platform at CES 2026 [Press release]. https://nvidianews.nvidia.com/news/rubin-platform-ai-supercomputer
NVIDIA Newsroom. (2026, May). NVIDIA unveils Rubin CPX: A new class of GPU designed for massive-context inference [Press release]. https://nvidianews.nvidia.com/news/nvidia-unveils-rubin-cpx-a-new-class-of-gpu-designed-for-massive-context-inference
Quartz. (2026, May). China reportedly moves to pause Nvidia H200 orders. https://qz.com/nvidia-china-h200-chip-sales-us-trump-policy
24/7 Wall St. (2026, May 5). Lowe’s just got yanked from the BofA Buy List: Is the home improvement trade stalling?. https://247wallst.com/investing/2026/05/05/lowes-just-got-yanked-from-the-bofa-buy-list-is-the-home-improvement-trade-stalling/
24/7 Wall St. (2026, May 14). Did Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang just unlock the $50 billion China market?. https://247wallst.com/investing/2026/05/14/did-nvidia-ceo-jensen-huang-just-unlock-the-50-billion-china-market/
24/7 Wall St. (2026, May 14). Trump brought 17 CEOs to China. Only two got seats on Air Force One: Elon Musk and Jensen Huang. https://247wallst.com/investing/2026/05/14/trump-brought-17-ceos-to-china-only-two-got-seats-on-air-force-one-elon-musk-and-jensen-huang/
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Walmart Corporate. (2026, March 23). Walmart and VIZIO scale content to commerce at NewFronts. https://corporate.walmart.com/news/2026/03/23/walmart-and-vizio-scale-content-to-commerce-at-newfronts
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Yahoo Finance. (2026, May 9). Microsoft free cash flow margin compression signals AI spending pressure. https://finance.yahoo.com/quote/MSFT/news/
Yahoo Finance. (2026, May 13). EQT (EQT) releases financial and operational results for Q1 2026. https://finance.yahoo.com/markets/stocks/articles/eqt-eqt-releases-financial-operational-113332756.html
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Yahoo Finance. (2026, May 15). DEI boycott played a role in Target’s Q1 sales slump as foot traffic declined. https://finance.yahoo.com/news/dei-boycott-played-a-role-in-targets-q1-sales-slump-as-foot-traffic-declined-183135827.html

Internal data

Internal data is provided on a best efforts basis.

Forward earnings dates (FMP)

HD — 2026-05-19 (9:00 AM ET). Consensus EPS $3.42, revenue $41.61B. Source: FMP /stable/earnings?symbol=HD.
LOW — 2026-05-20 BMO. Consensus EPS $2.96, revenue $22.98B. Source: FMP /stable/earnings?symbol=LOW.
TGT — 2026-05-20 BMO. Consensus EPS $1.41, revenue $24.66B. Source: FMP /stable/earnings?symbol=TGT.
NVDA — 2026-05-20 AMC. Consensus EPS $1.76, revenue $78.42B. Source: FMP /stable/earnings?symbol=NVDA.
WMT — 2026-05-21. Consensus EPS $0.65, revenue $174.72B. Source: FMP /stable/earnings?symbol=WMT.
DE — 2026-05-21. Consensus EPS $5.70, revenue $11.55B. Source: FMP /stable/earnings?symbol=DE.
CRM — 2026-05-27. Consensus EPS $3.12, revenue $11.05B. Source: FMP /stable/earnings?symbol=CRM.
COST — 2026-05-28. Consensus EPS $4.91, revenue $69.58B. Source: FMP /stable/earnings?symbol=COST.

All dates pulled 2026-05-15 from the FMP earnings calendar; see earnings_slate.md.