These 7 Companies Will Dominate The Future

Today on the Joseph Carlson Show, we'll be looking at seven companies that are worth considering to buy today. And I only own two of these. So, five of these are companies outside of my portfolio that I've been researching and I believe there's very strong investment cases for all of them. There's many stocks that are rocketing up, some of them that are being sold off and left behind. And these seven create opportunity. And we have GameStop getting their offer rejected by the eBay team. The rejection letter was a little bit funny, so we'll be looking at that. And of course, we have the fail of the week, which in this case is Texas and the attorney general of Texas suing Netflix for spying on kids. That sounds pretty bad. Netflix is spying on kids now and also addicting users. That's right. Netflix is using dark patterns and sophisticated techniques to addict its users, and Texas is suing them. We'll be going over that story in the fail of the week. Now, to start things off, as I'm looking at new companies to potentially add to my portfolio, I'm not looking for companies that are timely buys or that are just market momentum. If I were, the majority of these companies that we'll be looking at would simply be semiconductor related companies, data center related, memory related companies like Micron Technologies or SanDisk, ones where the charts are just going up and to the right every day. And while those can be good and there's nothing wrong with buying into momentum. In many cases, you can make money doing that. What I try to do is buy companies that I believe will be much much bigger in the next 10 and 20 years. Companies that have a high degree of long-term growth and predictability, not ones that I think will just do well over the next couple of months. So, this is more of a long-term perspective looking at quality compounding machines that will grow over a long period of time. the type of companies that I'm looking for. In fact, I would say the ultimate example of it is Google. Google's not a perfect company. It's not perfect, but it's pretty darn close. Google is winning on all fronts, and it represents what I think is the quintessential example of a compounding machine. In fact, Google's so good that when I do analysis, I can't find any company better today. I just can't. And you can do a thought exercise. try to find a company that's winning on more fronts at the same time in more meaningful categories than Google. In my opinion, none exist. For example, Google stock is now up to nearly $400 per share. It's been one of the best performing stocks in the S&P 500 since its inception, but over the past 5 years alone, it's up 240%. I own about a4 million worth of Google with 136,000 of that being gains. It has been an incredible performer. But this hasn't been by singular random chance. It hasn't been by luck. It's been by a lot of things going right for Google. For example, Google is winning in the robo taxi race. In 2023, this product line was basically non-existent. It wasn't on the map. They're doing maybe 3 to 4,000 paid rides in 2024, and then it's rapidly expanded to now doing over 500,000 paid rides per week. Tesla's of course testing their system and they're expanding, but they so far haven't revealed any numbers of their paid rides per week. We also have Zuks in the mix, but again, they so far haven't revealed any numbers publicly, and both of those pale in comparison to Whimo today, and Whimo continues to expand rapidly. They just announced today that they're doing so again. We also have Google winning in YouTube TV time. If we look at this chart, this one's a little bit outdated, but the trend is still completely intact up to current day. YouTube is the black portion of this chart. And you'll notice that if you look at this very carefully, in fact, it's kind of hard to see at first glance, but if you follow the numbers left to right, you can see a trend here. YouTube is the only streaming service that is compounding its market share of TV watch time every single month and every single quarter. The only one. Netflix isn't even doing that. a Disney Plus, Paramount, HBO, Apple TV, all the other ones combined. None of them are doing that. But YouTube, YouTube is the sole market share gainer in TV watch time over the past couple of years. YouTube on the television alone commands the biggest TV watch time by far. It's not even close to the second place. And their gains continue to compound. They're gaining market share as the biggest leader in the first place to begin with. Google is winning in the robo taxi and they're winning on the television. Of course, we can look at cloud. There's no exception here. Google has the fully integrated full stack cloud development with Gemini causing them to grow rapidly. Just look at the revenue growth over the past couple of quarters. Google's winning in cloud. They also have the RPO backlog. Another example of Google winning. Their backlog has grown dramatically through contracts of Anthropic and other companies. And it's also grown organically with lots of smaller companies. In any case, you can see that Google's winning in its cloud backlog. You can also see that Google is winning in its core business, the one that a lot of people said Google would lose in. Search queries are at an all-time high, an all-time high last quarter. AI overviews and AI mode are increasing search usage, including commercial queries. They're winning in search. Google's also winning as a subscription business. Overall, Alphabet counts 350 million paid subscriptions across its products with YouTube and Google 1 as the main drivers. Q1 was Alphabet's strongest quarter ever for consumer AI subscription plans, largely driven by adoption of the Gemini app. They're making their AI subscription wrap into all their other products from Gmail to maps to drive to all your documents to now your Google Nest subscription and camera backup to now the Google Fitbit Air product that they're coming out with. All of these are wrapped into the AI subscription and it's growing like crazy. 350 million subscribers is bigger than Netflix. Google is winning here as well. So Google overall just represents a business that's winning left and right. And that's what I like to see with the companies that I'm looking at. And although it's difficult to find another company that's winning in the same way that Google is, I've tried to find the closest ones. Let's go ahead and look at number one here. Number one is Amazon. Amazon is the most similar to Google and that I believe over time it will be proven that it's going to win in many different verticals in many different meaningful ways. And like Google before, which was at a period of time forgotten or in doubt and trading at a low valuation, Amazon has gone through the same thing. Google's concerns were that it was going to have its search business disrupted. Amazon's concern is that it it simply is just a low profitable company. It's putting too much into capex. It's going to have low returns. The concerns are a little bit different, but the price point was the same. Both of these companies went down dramatically. And I believe that Amazon has an opportunity to prove that it's going to win in all these verticals. And we can see that already happening. The first place that Amazon is winning is in cloud. It is winning big time in cloud. In fact, the last growth rate was almost 29%. And this is already at a size that's massive. Amazon also plays the least amount of tricks when looking at its cloud growth. For example, Azure includes a bunch of other Microsoft cloud products. So it's really difficult to see how fast just Azure alone is growing organically. Even Google includes a little bit of cloud products as well. When we look at Amazon AWS, it's simply AWS. They're not throwing in other Amazon services in the mix. So this is a very pure form of looking at the growth. It grew almost 29% which is incredible and I expect it to continue growing fast. Amazon, similar to Google, has a massive backlog of customer commitments to cloud. And even though it it looks similar to the size of Google's, Amazon is actually burning through this backlog faster, which is a good thing. You want to be able to fulfill on your customers commitments faster. The sooner you can do that, the better because the sooner you can realize that revenue. So, this is another positive data point for Amazon showing that they are winning in cloud. Amazon also similarly to Google where they have their TPUs. Well, Amazon's winning with their tranium. These chips are incredibly powerful. The custom chip business revenue run rate is 20 plus billion. And Andy Jasse highlights that if they used Amazon as a customer themselves, like if they had to buy these chips from somewhere else, it would be a $50 billion run rate business. That's a little bit more revenue than the trailing 12 months of AMD. And they're doing that within Amazon. In fact, the Amazon management has noted that their chip business is so valuable that over the next couple of years, they're likely going to be selling server racks and chips to other companies just like Nvidia, just like AMD, they're going to be one of the exporters of chips. So, you can expect that in the future from Amazon. They also have another business which is grocery retail. Of course, this is massive. Units grew by 15% year-over-year, the highest growth since late COVID lockdowns. the grocery business and same day delivery, ultra fast delivery, those last mile deliveries are increasing at a rapid pace. It's going to be very soon where most of the items that you order across the United States will be delivered same day. And that boxes out basically all of their competition when it comes to same day delivery, when it comes to last mile delivery. Over 1 billion items delivered same day or overnight so far in 2026. A billion items already. When we look at advertising, Amazon of course has a massive advertising business, Agentic Commerce. They've addressed this before many times, but they say that they have implemented AI tools into their shopping. And if you've used Amazon recently to shop on, which many of you have, you'll notice the AI summaries of the reviews. They're very good at summarizing what people's thoughts are on an item. You also have an AI tool that gives you the long-term price history of a product. So, if you look at the long-term history of an item, you notice it goes down once every year, you can say, "Hey, Amazon, when it gets to this price, automatically buy it for me." They're doing all these agentic shopping tools within Amazon, making it so that people want to shop on Amazon.com. And they're getting much, much better at this at an incredible pace. They've also just recently, as of today, ditched the Rufus name and they swapped it for Alexa. So, now Alexa's directly built into Amazon as a shopping assistant. They're also swapping out the logo. So, as you're on Amazon now, you're going to get like a cursive A as your shopping assistant, and it's going to be a very big part of the shopping experience on Amazon. But I believe Amazon will be one of, if not the biggest winner in Agenta Commerce with all the different meaningful businesses that Amazon's in, the size of their businesses, the markets that they're in, all the levers that they have to pull. And fortunately for the Amazon shareholder, Andy Jasse, who seems to have ignored all the market hype, all the pressure from investors, all the people telling him to do buybacks instead of invest in the business, he has the ability to ignore them just like Sundar Pachai did to investors saying to cut spending on Whimo. These investors don't have the long-term view. The managers of these companies like Andy Jasse and Sundar Pachai have the long-term view. And I believe that over time, Amazon will prove that their direction is the right direction. They are going to be massive winners. The cash flows of Amazon, which right now are going into the red to fund this investment cycle, will be incredible, far exceeding hundred billion. Now, Google and Amazon are two companies that I believe are going to dominate markets in different ways. But another company on a much smaller scale that is dominating a very big market in and of itself is Uber. and I want to go over some of the ways that Uber is winning today and why this company is seriously worth considering buying. I don't own Uber in my portfolio, but these are the reasons that I'm looking at it. The first thing that you have to address with Uber is the competition that's coming from robo taxis. We know that this is the big elephant in the room. In fact, it's the reason that Uber stock is down today. For example, if we look at we look at Uber's year-to- date performance, it's down 10% while the markets are going up. In fact, over the past year, it's down 17%. past 5 years, Uber's performance has also been lacking, up only 57%. Remember, companies like Google are up hundreds of percentages. So, what's going on with this company? Well, it's not a failing of Uber's fundamentals, and that's what we have to disconnect here. Uber's price is heavily disconnected from the fundamentals of present day. For example, the revenue has been growing much faster than most other companies. This is 18% revenue growth on a trailing 12-month basis, now at $54 billion. We have free cash flow skyrocketing, forming this perfect operating leverage line. It continues to go up every single quarter sequentially. It's actually incredible how much it's grown. And part of this is because they're now doing share buybacks. Uber is reducing its shares outstanding. They did so by 2.4% which is quite good. You can see them accelerate their share buybacks. Look at the returns of capital. These are the total buybacks that they're doing on a trailing 12-month basis. So they've spent $7.75 billion on buybacks and the company is still producing $10 billion worth of free cash flow per year. So Uber has transformed into this cash generative machine. In fact, on the note of Whimos, Uber sites themselves in cities where Whimo has launched like Austin, Atlanta, San Francisco, Los Angeles, Uber reports no evidence of negative impacts on its overall mobility growth. So even where Whimo's launching, somehow Whimo's taking market share, but Uber still continues to grow, it it seems hard to believe on first first glance, but it could be one of those situations where it's like the Jevans paradox where simply more supply of mobility doesn't slow down the major growers like Uber. US mobility and total mobility, which is another name for just their ride sharing. That growth has both accelerated. So total and US are accelerating. Uber's category position in San Francisco and LA is higher than six months ago. So they're they're taking this head on, saying that Whimo is not going to kill our business. You're discounting our business heavily because of the threat, but we're actually doing just fine. In markets where Whimo operates on Uber's platform, like Austin and Atlanta, Uber is seeing strong performance, higher uh higher driver earnings, and more drivers joining the platform. Overall, management views Whimo and other AV players as complimentary to Uber's own hybrid network strategy rather than purely competitive. So, this is where there's a lot of contention and there is some risk here. There is a little bit of unknown in the future of how these robo taxis will play out. But every bit of evidence we see so far is that Uber continues to win. Their bookings are going up. Their drivers are going up. Adoption continues to grow. They're accelerating in all of these categories even in the midst of Whimo launching. Now, of course, there's a couple other ways that Uber is winning. One of them is Uber 1 membership. They've gotten it up to 50 million. This is where people pay to get into the ecosystem. They get all the discounts and they know that if someone signs up for Uber 1, this membership, they're much more likely to be booking rides or or paying for Uber Eats, right? To to be buying things on this. So, they want as many people as they can. And the conversion is quite good. 50 million users on this subscription is really good for Uber because it creates another high margin revenue stream for the company. So, this isn't just a ride hailing business. It's not just a food delivery business now. It's also a subscription business. And Uber continues to show that nothing is slowing down this company. Another company similar to Uber that's frequently forgotten is Door Dash. And Door Dash is also winning. Now, Door Dash is naturally just not as popular on Wall Street. And I think the reason why makes sense. Uber has capitalized the dense city markets. If you go to a place like New York or you go to any type of busy financial hub place where there's Wall Street highrises, you're going to have Uber. You're not going to have Door Dash. And Door Dash intentionally did not go to those places. They knew that they were already saturated. So instead, Door Dash went out into the suburbs. They went into the mom and pop stores. They went into the places where there's big neighborhoods and big homes. And because of that, they were able to capitalize on a massive market. There are Door Dash deliveries all over the place in neighborhoods like mine, everywhere. I mean, they're just going everywhere almost every evening. There's food being delivered at people's doorsteps. The reason why is because life gets busy. Many times people a couple times a week will just want to have their favorite restaurant delivered rather than have to go drive out while taking care of the kids. So you have a a market fit here and Door Dash has been incredibly effective at saturating these large areas. In fact, when it comes to food delivery, food delivery within the United States, Door Dash dominates. They are winning. They have 60 to 70% market share. Uber's done good in food delivery. They're growing, but Door Dash is even growing faster. In fact, Door Dash is the biggest food delivery company in the world, and it's taking market share at the same time every single quarter. Door Dash is also becoming a technology company. They're not just looking to become a network company. They want to have software for restaurants to use that help them order to help them and manage their entire restaurant. In a way, Door Dash is actually competing with Toast, the restaurant software. They're actually creating similar software and it's working. Since they have massive network effects and they're already integrated with this entire delivery network, they're getting more and more restaurants to sign up. So, Door Dash is evolving. They're also going into grocery delivery, competing with Amazon for the last mile and so on and so forth. There's a lot of growth paths for Door Dash and the numbers continue to reflect that. Now, Door Dash is not as diversified as Uber. So, if you're looking at the positioning, you could make it maybe a smaller position than Uber and then you would capitalize on the entire ride sharing and delivery market. If you own Google with Whimo, if you own Amazon with their logistics, and you owned Uber and Door Dash, you would have all meaningful market share of robo taxi and ride sharing today. The only one that you would be potentially missing down the road is Tesla. But it's very likely that these companies will be big winners in this category overall. Now, as I look out for more companies that are big winners over the long term, I can't help but notice Shopify. For example, Shopify is simply the non-AM Amazon retailer. It really has become the default merchant experience for non-AM Amazon online selling. There are some people that will sell on Amazon. They'll sell on walmart.com. But for the companies that don't, 90% of them are going to pick Shopify to sell on. They really do cuz Shopify has everything. It is by far the most advanced online merchant that you can sell on. Shopify is winning in a lot of categories including the raw growth of the company. Look at how fast this is growing, 32%. Because Shopify figured out a business model similar to Mastercard and Visa where they grow along with the consumer. As all the merchants under them grow, Shopify has a take rate. They're offering merchant solutions. They're offering capital. They're offering shop pay and all these different things that grow right along with them. So, they are a very diversified business at this point. Shopify is winning in both its subscription solutions which is a smaller portion of the business and its merchant solutions which is the growing bigger portion of the business. Shopify is also winning as a cash producing business. Look at the free cash flow over time and it shows many of these highly scaled companies. Now the cash flows have grown to 2.13 billion. Meanwhile, the stockbased comp continues to decline. The financials of the company look strong and there's reason to believe they'll be much stronger in the future. Shopify is also winning in payments. They're beating out companies like PayPal in payments because, well, they're a hybrid. They're an online retail company. They're a merchant company and they're a payment company combined. And that makes it so that they have a natural advantage over pure play payment companies or pure play merchants. Shopify is doing all of it. But the biggest case that they're winning in and the most important one is being the default layer of online retail outside of Amazon. they have cemented themselves into that position. If any company is not selling on Amazon, again, they're likely to choose Shopify over any of their competitors. And that choice is becoming clearer and clearer. It's hard to imagine such an important company that's so structurally advantaged in the decision-m is going to have trouble making money in the future. So, Shopify is likely to continue being a long-term winner. Now, as we continue this search for companies that are winning right now, some of them are not fully being recognized by the market or there's concerns by the market that I believe are unfounded. One of those is Meta, which is my most significant new investment of 2026. I've highlighted Meta and Amazon as two companies that I think are particularly good buys this year. When we look at Meta, there's a a lot of different ways that this company's winning that the market doesn't recognize. For one, Meta is most commonly viewed as just a Instagram and Facebook ads company. So, it's just an ads company for Facebook and Instagram, right? And that's basically the business. That's not exactly the case with Meta and I don't believe it's the proper framing for this company. A better way to describe Meta is I believe it's a company that's building out the world's largest AI distribution platform directly to consumers. They have by far the most users on their platform of basically any company on planet Earth. They have over 3.5 billion. Try finding another company that has more daily users than Meta. It doesn't really exist. But on top of that, Meta is building out a technological infrastructure to be able to distribute artificial intelligence to those 3.5 billion users. So when you look at Meta through that lens, it's not just Facebook and Instagram. It is these platforms of AI distribution. The mechanics of it make a bit more sense. For example, Meta is using AI to win already. You can look at this through the revenue of the company. It's very difficult to argue that they're not winning in artificial intelligence when their revenue is growing by 33%. In fact, Jensen has already said that Meta is by far the best at monetizing AI and using AI today. They're literally the best company at using AI. And you can see it in the fundamentals in the evidence of the company that they're showing you. So while the market's looking at this skeptically, ironically, Meta is the first company to show massive AI usage to show the effectiveness of it. You can also look at a couple different things here. For example, one of the things that's often quoted about Meta this last earnings report is that they declined in their daily active users. The Wall Street Journal wrote about this. Many ex accounts and Twitter accounts posted about this without the important context that the only reason that this went down was because of outages in Iran and a restriction in Russia. And if you were to take out those two one-time outlier events, Meta would be continuing to grow in its daily active users. In fact, they expect this to continue growing over time. So Meta is growing its family of daily active users over time. They're winning in their total distribution platform. Meta is winning in attention. Attention is important. The more that people are on your platform using your stuff that you're creating, the more there's opportunity to monetize and grow different various businesses. And there's no company that has more people's attention for longer amounts of time than Meta. They're continually getting more people using it and more engagement. People watching their reels longer, people posting longer, people enjoying the product more. Meta is winning with Instagram. Instagram is an absolute monster. The algorithm is incredibly good on Instagram on discovering new content creators and spreading it. It's a real competitive force to Tik Tok. In fact, it's growing at short-term uh short form videos very quickly, which is another category that Meta is winning on. People are watching their short form videos for longer. They're watching them more consistently. Meta's AI investments are making it so that they're matching it in very unique ways. not just a normal social graph, but now they're using it where very quickly they can identify which type of of subjects, which type of reels you'd like, even ones that haven't been seen that much by other people. This is all through artificial intelligence. Threads is another category that is seemingly nent. It's just a smaller tool competing with X or Twitter and it seems to be winning. They have 150 million monthly active users. It continues to grow and they're starting to monetize it. Another growth path for Meta. Meta also is a company that outside of its incredible core business, which is growing rapidly. They're also one of the only companies right now that's showing real progress in wearable AI with the glasses being one of the ones that has consumer fit. So, this isn't a category that they've already won in and there is going to be competition coming from Apple, but Meta has their own AI model. They have one that works very well with wearables with incredibly low latency. So, that's another category that Meta has a unique advantage. Overall, this is a company trading at a low valuation that's growing incredibly fast, that's winning in many categories that are so far being too heavily discounted by the market. Now, as we look further, there are companies that are winning on all fronts. One of them that I have to mention is Broadcom. This is a company where the revenue has grown incredibly fast. It's grown to $68 billion in revenue on a trailing 12-month basis at a pace of 25% year-over-year. We also look at the financials of the company. The IBIDA is rocketing upwards. We have the net income rocketing upwards. We have the free cash flow likewise growing incredibly fast. This looks like the free cash flow you would see in a company like Visa, but this is Broadcom. And it's a stock that's not often talked about. In fact, when we look at Broadcom, a lot of people be scratching their heads asking, "What do they even do? We know about Google. We know about Amazon. But what does this company actually do? It's a little bit in AI. Don't they make networking stuff? Well, yeah, they do a little bit of that, but Broadcom has really won because of three main reasons. One of them is their custom chip solution. For example, you have companies like Nvidia that are just good at everything when it comes to making chips, making GPUs. They are incredibly good and they make these ones that are allpurpose. So, Nvidia are good at like everything and that's really good for big cloud customers because they want to be able to service every use case possible. But we also have companies like Google, Microsoft, and Amazon that are looking for solutions on how to power artificial intelligence without buying strictly from Nvidia. They want purpose-built solutions specifically for these use cases, not necessarily chips that are good at everything. And that's where Broadcom comes into play. See, Broadcom is more like a tailormade solution to the specific type of demand that these companies have. They're making chips that are very tailor made to AI processing and they're working directly with their customers to provide these specifically designed chips. Because they're so purpose-built, they can undercut the competition. They can grow a large amount of sales. They can fulfill on things that companies like Amazon really need. So Broadcom's biggest way of winning today is by making custom tailor made chips for these companies. And that business has continually been resoundingly good. It's just grown compounding over and over again. Another way that Broadcom wins is by all the stuff that's not chip related, but it's still in the server. For example, when you look at like a server rack or a server farm, you'll see lots of cords and networks and switches and those type of things. Yeah. The the company has to make those. Someone has to make them. And Broadcom's really good at making all that networking stuff. So, if you have the brains of the system, which is the Nvidia GPU, you still need some way for them to all connect together and work properly. That's very important. That hardware behind it is incredibly important. And Broadcom has been at this for a long period of time. So, they've really cornered this market of making networking gear outside of just the brains, which is the chips and the GPUs. And they've really made this a growth business. They continue to win at this. They continue to be one of the best. So, part of their revenue is that segment as well. And then the final way Broadcom is winning today is through VMware. This is their virtual private cloud. See a lot of companies want their own basically their own private hosting, their own private cloud where they control everything. It brings a lot of advantages for companies, but building it out physically is incredibly difficult. Broadcom is providing software solutions in many cases in a subscription to do this digitally where they can accomplish the same goal and make it a lot lot less effort for the companies trying to do this. So they're also pushing into that. They've changed the monetization of it. They've forced it into a subscription and it's going really well for Broadcom. So, the company's actually becoming a bit more diversified. Even though Broadcom is reliant on AI trends and general growth, they're more diversified through networking, through VMware, and through specific tailor made chip development. And this is all showing through the financials. It's a company that's performance has been outrageous, up 840% over the past 5 years. Just year to date, it's up 20%. In past one year, it's up 78% and there's more to go for this one. It's at a decent valuation and it continues to grow. Now, finally, we get to Marcato Libre, another company that's winning in many different categories, including just the general revenue of the company. This is a revenue chart that looks unreal. In fact, it just looks fake, but it's one of these ones where it's growing so fast, uh, it's almost incomprehensible. In fact, Marcato Libre is one of the fastest growing revenue companies for consecutive quarters, in fact, years. And Marcato Libre dominates in a lot of different categories. For example, in South America, it's a retailer, it's a commercial business, it's a credit card business, a fintech company, you name it. It's an advertising business as well, and so on and so forth. It's one of those companies that seems to do it all, a little bit like Amazon. And a lot of people call it the Amazon of South America. And while that's true, I actually think that there's a a bigger bullcase for this company. What Marcato Libre has done is it's taken an area, a geographic location that does not have really good infrastructure. For example, if you go to Europe or the United States, you're going to have roads. You're going to have freeways and highways. Especially in the United States, you'll have many ways to freely travel without much resistance from one place to another on a very straight paved road. It makes for incredibly easy logistics. In South America, that's not the case. There's a lot of roads that are dirt, a lot of roads that aren't really uh taken care of by the government. There's a lot of places that need a lot of help with logistics. In fact, getting stuff from one place to another in some cases is more difficult and expensive than you'd think. Marcato Libri has built out infrastructure to compensate for this. They built out infrastructure to accomplish this where the government could not. So basically it's a backbone infrastructure of South America that is also commercializing that transportation. They're doing something where the government couldn't do. They're building out this massive network. They're doing it incredibly rapidly and effectively and they're doing it for cheaper than any other alternative. Now it is true as of recently Marcato Libre's performance in stock hasn't been great. The stock price has floundered around for the past 5 years but if you zoom out just a bit further the past 10 years it's gone up around a,000%. So this stock can move and I believe when we look at it now the valuation is not so bad considering the rapid growth of this company. It's down 21% this year giving investors a little bit of a discount to enter into the stock. Now the company will be around for a long period of time. It'll become increasingly powerful as it continues to dominate infrastructure and fill in this muchneeded deficit in South America. and they're also incredibly technologically advanced in the way that they're fulfilling things. So, I look at this as a real opportunity as a company that is winning on all fronts. So, there's seven stocks to look at that I believe each one of these will be much bigger in the future. Now, let's go ahead and move on to some news. Now, we also have an update on the saga between Ryan Cohen, the GameStop CEO that made an unsolicited, very public offer to buy eBay, a company that's substantially larger than GameStop. When he was pressed on how they're going to fund the purchase, how they'll pay for it, Ryan Cohen looked confused at the question and said, "Have cash, half stock." That's all he said. And he said it multiple times, "Half cash, half stock." And uh that that answer didn't really suffice to the eBay team. They have responded to this offer and not surprisingly they rejected it. They say, "Dare Mr. Cohen, the board with support of its independent adviserss has thoroughly reviewed the proposal and has determined to reject it. We have concluded that your proposal is neither credible nor attractive." Right off the bat, not not credible nor attractive. We have taken in account things such as factors like eBay standalone prospects, the uncertainty regarding your financial financing proposal, so how you're going to pay for it. Um, I don't know how they weren't convinced, by the way. When he said have cash, have stock, how are they not instantly convinced by that? Like that that's a for sure sale right there. They also say the impact of your proposal on eBay's long-term growth and profitability, the leverage, operational risks, and leadership structure of the combined entity, and the resulting implications of these factors on valuation, and six, GameStop's governance, and executive incentives. Now, eBay is not some amazing company. I've looked over it. It really isn't. But it's better than GameStop and I don't think they want to combine with an even inferior company to their own, especially one that's led by Ryan Cohen that's not giving a very convincing case for doing it. So, not a surprise on that one. And I don't believe that this is going to be the end of this saga. I think that Ryan Cohen has more up his sleeve. Now, finally, we have to talk about the fail of the week, which in this case is a lawsuit coming against Netflix. Now, while it's true I own Netflix, so this comes from a biased perspective. I'm invested in the company, but this is a fail of the week nonetheless. Netflix is being sued by Texas for allegedly spying on children and addicting users. That sounds real bad. Spying on children sounds salacious. When I see like spying on children, I think of like hidden cameras or something really creepy. And that's right in the headlines based on this lawsuit. Let's go ahead and take a look at some of the details and see how Netflix is spying on your children. Netflix was sued on Monday by Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton, who accused the streaming company of spying on children and other consumers by collecting their data without consent and designing its platform to be addictive. Texas said that for years Netflix has falsely represented to consumers that it did not collect or share user data when it actually tracked and sold viewers habits and preferences to commercial data brokers and advertising technology companies making billions of dollars a year. That sounds so bad. Netflix is just like this secretive company collecting all this data, selling it to brokers, selling you out. You're the product when it comes to Netflix. The California-based company was also accused of quietly using dark patterns. Dark patterns to keep users watching, including an autoplay feature that starts a new show when a different show ends. So, when we look at this, let's go ahead and just dive in to what these accusations actually are. The first one in this lawsuit, which I've read through the whole thing, the first claim is that they were secretly collecting data on your children's accounts on Netflix and selling that to brokers. It's not really true at all. What happened in this case is Netflix came out with an ad tear uh option. Previously, Netflix only had paid tears. Remember, after a while they introduced an ad plan. Now, Netflix did not change the agreement with any of the paid tears. All those paid tears that previously existed still are paid tears with no ads. Amazon, in fact, actually included ads in a previously paid tear. Netflix didn't do that. Instead, Netflix said, "We want to make the umbrella bigger for affordability. And for the people that want to have a paid tear that has some ads in it at a reduced cost, we're going to offer a new plan for them. In the new plan that Netflix offered for those individuals that signed up for this new plan, they have all over their terms and service and agreement that they will collect data on your behavior and your profile to be able to offer effective advertisements. That's all over. They have it everywhere there. And by the way, there's nothing nefarious about that at all. It's literally the thing that Google has been doing that uh Meta has been doing for years and years and years. You use your applications, they see what you're interested in, and they advertise based on that. It's the reason that YouTube is effective at selling ads on YouTube videos is because they look at the type of videos you watch, they track your data of what you watch, and then they tailor the ads to your interests. The only purpose for doing this is so that they have more effective advertising. And again, there's nothing novel or unique about what Netflix is doing here. Uh, another thing is when when it comes to spying on kids and spying on on children, what Netflix is doing, they're looking at the data of how long kids watch different shows so that they can try to make other shows that kids watch. This is really the craziest thing ever. This is again just phrased like it sounds so bad when all they're doing is looking at what shows kids like watching and for how long. It's like in Disneyland. If Disneyland never kept track of how many people ride which rides, they never kept track of how many people bought which foods were were sold in the food courts, why would they not keep track of that information? They want to know what's selling, what people are enjoying, and what they can do in the future. Netflix is doing the same thing. They're looking at analytics on their app to determine how to better serve their customers. This is basic business. They're being sued for basic business. Now, the craziest part of this lawsuit, the most hilarious part, is a claim that Netflix is using, quietly using, they say, a dark pattern, many dark patterns to keep their users addicted and to continue watching, including an autoplay feature that starts a new show when a different one ends. Can you believe how evil of a company Netflix is? How evil it is that when you start a TV series, when one episode stops playing, another one starts playing after like 10 seconds. They just assumed that for you. They didn't get your permission. They didn't get your written consent after every episode that you want to start the next one. They just assumed it. It just started playing automatically. If that happened, you are a victim. And Texas is going to protect you. They're going to make it so you have to hit the remote and hit play to every new episode after episode. They don't want it just playing without your permission because that's taking advantage of you. They're going to watch longer because of that. And of course, you lack the willpower to turn off the TV. That's not an option. If the episode just it just starts playing, you just have to sit back and go, "Well, I guess I'm starting a new episode. I I can't get up and stop it. It just started playing on its own. I'm a victim here." This is what the attorney general of Texas is arguing that autoplay the next episode in a series is a dark pattern. Now, of course, we can look at uh some other companies. I I think the next the next one that they're going to target is Spotify. After all, if you start a playlist on Spotify, the next song starts playing automatically without you even pressing play. How are you supposed to even stop listening to music? They just keep going until you turn it off. It's a dark pattern. In fact, the biggest dark pattern was legacy television. Remember the time when you would turn on the television? You'd have just the bunny ears or the antenna or just cable and you turn on a television and there wasn't even a break between episodes. They would just keep playing with ads in the middle. In fact, they would never turn off 247. Now, to the to Texas Attorney General, that wasn't a dark pattern. They never sued TV stations for having continuous TV. But in the case of Netflix, they're doing something evil by automatically playing more content when content finishes. That is obviously a dark pattern that consumers need protection from. Another part of this lawsuit, by the way, mentions that Netflix tailor the content on an individual user basis, and they try to make it so that you enjoy the content that you watch, which creates an addiction to the television. In other words, Texas is actually saying that Netflix should not be able to recommend shows that they think you'll like, that they should just have a generic uh screen with all shows, not tailored to anybody's profiles. If they know that you hate reality TV shows and you always thumbs them down, Netflix should be forced to continue recommending those no matter what because that's good for the consumer and that protects the consumer from watching too long. After all, if Netflix just made their service as bad as possible, people would watch TV less. This is far and away the dumbest lawsuit I've ever seen. Netflix collected basic analytics data of their user profiles, of which users agreed to. Netflix introduced a new advertising tier of which users freely agreed to. Netflix autoplays episodes after one's finished. They're not restricting you from turning off the TV. They're just continuing their service as long as you're using it. And then the biggest crime Netflix did here is recommend shows that they think you'll like. That's what they're being sued for. Uh these type of nanny state lawsuits to try to protect people from basic functionality need to come to an end. And I don't know when they're going to finally get slapped down in court, but I'm hoping this is the start. That is the fail of the week.