OpenAI Wants Another $100 Billion

In this podcast, Motley Fool analyst Asit Sharma and contributors Travis Hoium and Lou Whiteman discuss:

• OpenAI's reported $100 billion capital raise.
• Gemini's performance and cost advantage.
• Which executives get candy and which get coal?

To catch full episodes of all The Motley Fool's free podcasts, check out our podcast center. When you're ready to invest, check out this top 10 list of stocks to buy.

A full transcript is below.

This podcast was recorded on Dec. 19, 2025.

Travis Hoium: It's a day ending in y, and that means OpenAI is raising money again. Motley Fool Money starts now.

From Fool Global headquarters, this is Motley Fool Money. Welcome to Motley Fool Money. OpenAI is reportedly in talks to raise another $100 billion. Give or take at a give or take valuation of about $800 billion. This comes after Greg Brockman, one of their co-founders, said that the company had to make trade-offs about whether it had enough compute to build the next model or whether it was going to serve ChatGPT. The question is, how long can they keep raising money without having a profitable business model, Lou? That seems like a fundamental tension, and these numbers are getting absolutely enormous.

Lou Whiteman: Yeah, no, you're asking the right question, and I don't know if any of us know the answer, and that's the scary thing. Just for fun, I asked AI, "How much money is there in the world?" It depends on what OpenAI needs, but it feels like AI is going to just swallow everything right now. Look, here's the problem. OpenAI doesn't have the cash-generating machine that Meta has, that Microsoft has, that Alphabet has. That is turning into a significant disadvantage here. All these companies are doing amazing thing. Remember, at the beginning of OpenAI, when we just marveled at this tool, and we're like, wow, this is magic. But now Gemini is giving me that magic. Everybody's giving me that magic.

Travis Hoium: People are baking is spending $20 a month to get magic in their pocket.

Lou Whiteman: Right. Frankly, I'm one of those people. I'm having fun with AI. I'm exploring AI, but I'm not going to buy seven different models for this. They needed the WOW factor before. If the WOW factor is rolling off and they still need all of this money, I don't know where they go from here. We're seeing pushbacks all over the place. This is a real question. At some point, they need to get their financial house in order and figure out, either as Greg said, how to do more with less or what compromises they have to make here.

Travis Hoium: How do you think about this tension? We'll get to the stocks. I want to ask specifically about some of the companies that public market investors may or may not have some exposure to, but how do you think about this business that seems to be holding trillions of value in public markets up right now. Should we be worried about their business model, or should it just be about pushing the frontier forward with artificial intelligence as far and as fast as possible?

Asit Sharma: I think we should keep an eye on the business model. OpenAI made some really consequential choices which serve them well in the last few years. As Lou mentioned, the explosion of interest we had in generative AI and how the world has changed. It's really due to OpenAI stepping up and pouring so much money into its frontier models. And at the beginning, those models were meant to be everything for everyone. But as time goes on, I think it's become more important that these big models can't be Swiss Army knives. They're simply not. You have to focus at some point on your markets and how you're going to monetize. Interestingly enough, competitor Anthropic has openly said, "Look, we're focusing on the enterprise market. We're not out to get the most retail customers. We see some profit here with deep-pocketed enterprise businesses, so that's where we're focusing our model."

Travis Hoium: That's specifically coding. That's where they have been ahead of the game. It was probably a month ago now when Gemini 3 came out, that beat all benchmarks. It did not beat Anthropics Claude on some of the coding benchmarks, which then they even took another step further beyond that. But that does seem like if a mode is building in this business from a model standpoint, Anthropic does have the focus to be able to do that.

Asit Sharma: Yeah, in fact, I saw an interesting note on a Reddit thread, some developers the other day, which said, "Okay, if you're prototyping something, maybe go to ChatGPT for the architecture conversation." Go to Gemini for the implementation of it, but go to Sonnet or Opus for the coding of it. You hit this on the head, Travis, that all of these models now are getting better in certain parts, but to be dominant in every category is not something the other businesses still want to chase. OpenAI almost seems like it has to, but of course, they're talking now about making the appropriate trade-offs. To me, that means they're going to have to focus on that big wide funnel of the hundreds of millions of users that are avidly going to ChatGPT and talking to it every day and figure out how to get conversational commerce going. Move in that direction, you have to understand over the long-term, the cost of your compute, and how you can reasonably sell it. It's a really simple equation eight now. They still haven't figured it out.

Travis Hoium: They do seem to be leaning more toward that consumer side rather than the enterprise, they're not a hyperscaler themselves. Do they have to get into something like advertising or is a new business model, and we see this on the Internet? New business models come up when new technologies come around. Advertising does seem to be the thing that's a common thread here between all technologies. You can go back to television, radio. Now we're on the Internet, where it's all about advertising, and that's how you take away that pain point of somebody actually have to pay for something to watch a football game, for example. But that's fundamentally how they make the business work. Do they have to figure that out, or can they be a consumer company and do something else to make money?

Asit Sharma: They can't be a consumer company and do something else to make money and expect the types of margins that investors want at these valuation rounds. At the end of the day, they'll have to get margin for somewhere to make the latest entrance, the people are coming in with the next tens of billions into the hundreds of billions of investment into OpenAI, to make that payout worth it for them to raise more capital. I think behind the scenes, sure, they're talking about how they pull advertising in. We can already see from the partnerships that company is making to bring brands into their funnel, Shopify is one that this is absolutely where they're headed. Now, the other stuff that they're exploring some of it even sketchy, a G-rated show, so I won't get into it. But some of that they'll be at the margins, other ways they can monetize the consumer.

Lou Whiteman: Every business that we discuss that has margin almost in this space when we think about Clouds, it comes down to that. Alphabet with YouTube, Meta with any number of its advertising properties, Netflix, so on.

Travis Hoium: Lou, the impact on public markets, obviously, OpenAI isn't public. It's possible that they will IPO. You would think if you're raising money at $800 billion valuation, eventually those investors are going to want liquidity. That means going to the public markets. But the companies that are public, Oracle, CoreWeave, Nebius, these have been the hot names in AI. But they've all dropped precipitously, and they're the ones that are actually funding the acquisition of Nvidia chips. We talked about circular financing, but there is a circular almost business model here and financing model here that is starting to impact these public companies negatively. Is that something that we should be concerned about with OpenAI at the core?

Lou Whiteman: We should be watching it. I think it's the same question, though. All of this makes sense if it ends up making sense.

Travis Hoium: It works until it doesn't.

Lou Whiteman: If there is a pot of gold at the end of this rainbow, none of this is a problem. I think the question is, and what you guys are getting at is that, is there a pot of gold at the end of OpenAI's rainbow, and how do they get there? I think if nothing else, it's time to differentiate. It's time to not paint the entire sector with one brush and say, "AI, good, which every trend, every innovation we've had has had winners and losers." The question for OpenAI is back to what you're saying, consumer, business, whatever. Right now, they're in a position where they need to look for revenue. Wherever they can find it, and they need to look for investment wherever they can find it because they need a lot of money. They need more money than any one single source can do it. I respect that everything is on the table. However, just because they might be doing what they should, I don't know if that guarantees success.

Travis Hoium: Yeah, do you have thoughts on whether these companies? Are they building a house of cards? Is this a new phenomenal business model building data centers that we just haven't seen before? Where's its head at?

Asit Sharma: I think long-term, the investment in data centers is needed, and some companies are going to have some rough times in the future as demand and supply normalize. Whether that's three years from today or five years from today, or we read the tea leaves much sooner, and those companies get punished. I don't know about those time frames, but everything that we're seeing today is predicated a lot of it. Let's not say everything. A lot of it is predicated on what Sam Altman thought a few years ago, that the more of compute that we throw with these models, the better they'll get at different tasks and so we need to invest lots and lots of money to make way for that compute. Nvidia played into that. Jensen Huang is a firm believer in that. There's some proof in the pudding in that as we use these models and ask them to reason more, that entails more compute. But we've totally avoided the other side of the conversation, which is, how do we make this stuff more energy efficient? How do we make on the algorithmic side, this stuff more efficient? How do we make on the development of the models, this side, all of this more efficient? By avoiding those conversations, we're setting up a future in which it has to be like boom or bust for some companies. They're going to win on that big scaling model. That's where OpenAI has thrown its chips. There'll be lots of little players, too, smaller players who don't need all of that power, and I think something you want to talk about, Travis, is maybe Gemini's smaller models. Those are interesting and we can go there if there's time.

Travis Hoium: Yeah, I want to get to that next. We need to take a quick break. We will get to the recovery of Alphabet in 2025. You're listening to Motley Fool Money.

Lou Whiteman: Yeah, what a year it's been for Alphabet. The thing that they're reaping benefit from today is a lot of work that they did years ago.

Asit Sharma: There were some discussions, I think the Investment Community, maybe last year, the year before that, look, Alphabet ought to be able to catch up because it has deep expertise. In fact, Google scholars were the ones who came up with transformer technology that we're all riding off of today. But I would have been surprised if you told me that at the beginning of the year. How is it doing it? It's not having to focus again with these huge scaling laws as OpenAI has done, and they've made those choices. Alphabet has really deep expertise in smaller models, and they have the very deep pockets to go ahead and experiment and play around. You sent out a tweet and an image to me and Lou this week, which was basically discussing how good Gemini Flash 3 is. This is a smaller model from Gemini in terms of cost and compute efficiency. I'm not going to get into all the details here, except to say that and the 2.5 model from Gemini are really efficient. You point out one 10th the cost. Now, you have to keep in mind, you're probably referring to developers who are using the API, but still let's go there. Maybe a 10th the cost of, say, OpenAI and some of its competitors. What it does, it gives you a lot more intelligence for less money. If I could boil it all down. You may not want a genius level intelligence, but what if you want reasonably good intelligence for something that's sufficient, they've provided that.

Travis Hoium: Let's give an example there. Duolingo was one of OpenAI's biggest users, maybe even their biggest user of their API. The example there would be if you have a conversation with their advanced plan, you can have a conversation in a different language, and the AI we'll talk back to you. We'll have a conversation as you learn a language. That conversation maybe a tenth of the cost coming out out of this Gemini model versus a comparable OpenAI model. Is that the way to think about it? Now as the companies are going, how do we make money on this? That becomes a big piece of the equation?

Asit Sharma: I think so. It's slightly beyond my pay grade. I will say this the way I think of it myself is if you're a smaller developer and you've got a database, and you need to use the AI to develop a conversational bot, it is a lot cheaper for you to run that through Geminis model. What it costs you per token, you get so much more out of these models, so I think we can extrapolate safely. If you're an expert in AI, write back to us if we're wrong, but I think you can extrapolate and say, sure, they could potentially use that model. They are going to get everything that is Duolingo get everything it needs in terms of reasoning and also real time compute to provide you an excellent tutor, probably using that model, I would guess. For all intents and purposes, that's a good example.

Travis Hoium: Lou, when you look at the comeback of Google and Alphabet, is this just where we were headed from the start, and they are just using their power to bludgeon the competition or starve the competition, however you want to look at it, it's gonna be tough. I saw something today they have five of the ten most downloaded apps, free apps in the Apple App store. It just seems like there is so much power coming out of mountain view and OpenAI is going up against that.

Lou Whiteman: We love to talk about this as competitions, Sharks versus jets, whatever. But I think this is just businesses being rational businesses, and I don't think it is like they're going after OpenAI. I think Alphabet is just doing what it should be doing. The fear for a while now is that these models would be commodities. That basically, if all these models can essentially do the same thing, you're not going to pay for seven of them, and price is inevitably what you're going to look at. Alphabet has it, and I don't think this is a loan to Alphabet. I think it's bad news for OpenAI, but I think you're going to see this in a lot of the winners is that they have the ability to price competitively, and they're doing so. It is really lousy for OpenAI because they don't have the existing revenue streams. They don't have the ready access to especially corporate customers. But look, everything we're talking about, this is ASA was talking about efficiency. ASA was talking about energy use. This is everything we want to happen for humanity, for investors, for everything. I think it could be both bad news for OpenAI, but if we are getting to a point where these things are more cost competitive and they can actually be put to use by more companies, this is a good thing, and I don't think it's a surprise that Big Tech, the ones with all of the resources in the existing business, that they're the ones that can capitalize it over a start-up.

Travis Hoium: Lou, I want to ask you quickly about the market. We've been basically flat over the past month or so, but we're having a pretty good year up 16%, I think it is for the S&P 500. The interesting thing is the Fed started cutting rates, and yet the 10 year is up. How do you think about going into the end of the year at the start of 2026? Is the market starting to run out of gas, or is there something else going on?

Lou Whiteman: Look, we are always just a measure of conventional wisdom. It's always just like how many bulls and how many bears at a given moment. I hate when we try and read into things are going up, so they will continue or things are tough now, so it's a new paradigm or something like that. I think what we've seen that some of the benefit of the doubt, especially among the big AI companies, is fading, that there is just a hint of skepticism. All these things that people have been talking about for a year now, Travis, the buildout crypto all of the expenses, all of these just worrying signs that didn't really resonate in the market now are just inching in. Again, I don't want to predict the sky is falling. I don't want to predict that it goes down from here, just like I don't think six months ago, we should have said, it has to go up from here since it's not bothering. But again, back to what I said before, in every wave we've ever had, there have been winners and losers. I think there's just more of scrutiny and less benefit of doubt being given to everyone, and I think that's what's playing out in the.

Travis Hoium: I agree, Lou. I think the support that AI companies bring to the market means that capital is staying put. It's rotating around, and we're seeing different themes get money and then being sold. But overall, perhaps this keeps the markets at least level next year. I'm terrible at predicting these things, but we'll see 2026 is almost here. We'll be back in a moment. You're listening to Motley Pool Money.

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Travis Hoium: We'd like to have a little fun in this segment. Today, I want to have Lou and Asit hand out candy or coal for some of the most important executives or people in finance throughout the year. Lou, I want to start with you. Brian Nichol has been one of the most important people in food, retail, now running Starbucks. Does he get candy or coal in his stocking this year?

Lou Whiteman: The key here is this year because Nicholas had a heck of a career, and I'm taking that away from him, but this has not been the year that he is going to want at the top of his Wikipedia page. I don't think he's getting coal from me. I worry about these yesterday's brands becoming growth stocks again in general I struggle with that. But look, the China joint venture, I think there's at least questions there. There's operational issues with what he's trying to do back to Starbucks. There's been employee action and Starbucks is a really tough company to get its Mojo back. The jury's still out. It's early, etc. I'm not going to declare it a failure, but there has been more questions than answers this year, and so I am not praising the Brian Nichol 2025. I'm sorry, I can't.

Travis Hoium: Asit?

Asit Sharma: I'll give him spot him another year. I think this is a really difficult business to try to turn around.

Travis Hoium: He did go from the King of the world to massive project moving from Chipotle to Starbucks.

Asit Sharma: Yes, it's easier to stay King of the world. I'm not sure I agree with all of the capital decisions that Starbucks has made, but I love at least the push to reinvigorate the brand, to bring it back to what it used to be. I'm not sure that's still possible, but I'll spot him a little bit of candy, like one peppermint candy cane. Ask me next year, and we'll see whether that turns a little more Cole or I'll give some more candy.

Travis Hoium: Lou, do you think that a brand like Starbucks can get back that magic? Can I just think about my I don't go Starbucks, particularly often, but when I do, you walk in there and there's a counter with 50 cups of coffee and people randomly grabbing them. It's just very different from 10, 20 years ago when it was a place that I would go do homework in college and people would just go hang out at Starbucks. That doesn't even seem to be possible in a lot of Starbucks today.

Lou Whiteman: This is a theme that I'm thinking a lot about. Maybe it's just old age, but companies that I think will do fine, but the stock, it's separating out the company and the stock. I think there's a place for Starbucks. I think you can get the magic back, and I still don't know if that pays off for investors as a real wow growth investment. I think it's possible, but I'm getting more and more skeptical about what worked before and inherits the Earth up ahead, and I think about that with Starbucks, Nike, so many of the brands that I'm so in love with over the years.

Travis Hoium: It'll be interesting to see what we look back on those brands being starting at the pandemic. That was a real turning point for a lot of the ways that we live. You can have a lot of opinions about that's Jerome Powell. Is he getting candy or coal in his stocking from you?

Asit Sharma: He's getting candy. Whatever you think of Jerome Powell, he and I both know what it's like to do your job well when your boss is constantly telling you, I just want you the heck out of here. I'll walk that back. I think our managers and leaders at the Motley Fool Love, all three of us. That was a little bit of a joke, but look, tremendous pressure went from a tightening cycle to an easing cycle this year ended the year with one more bit of quantitative easing. I think doing this against the backdrop of the enormous pressure of the interest rate environment we've been in, the inflation environment, also the supply.

Travis Hoium: Didn't have a lot of data the last couple of months.

Asit Sharma: Didn't have data to work off of. The supply imbalances in trade due to tariffs. There's a lot going on there, and I wonder if he didn't adopt some of the methods of one of his earlier predecessors, Alan Greenspan, who famously used to lie in the bath tub to relax and read economic figures. I would guess Jerome did a little bit of that this year, but he held his term, I believe, is up in May of next year. I'm going to give him some high marks. The man deserves a little bit of candy in his stocking.

Lou Whiteman: I'll give him a lot of candy, because everything was had said more, not just that his boss or the person who would like to be his boss giving him flack, but look, the markets got used to money being free. The markets became convinced that the only way we can benefit is if money was free. He was not only putting up with or trying to navigate pressure from above, but also, I think pressure from retail and pressure from New York and Wall Street. I think I'm showing my bias here, but I think his take on it that, no, we want to preserve our firepower and not run too fast, I agree with him on that. I think it took a ton of courage to not give in and to take all that. Nothing but candy for me and bathtub or wherever, enjoy your retirement room because you've earned it.

Travis Hoium: Let's move back to tech, and the company that's AI adjacent, we've been waiting for them to get into the AI game. Apple's Tim Cook. Seems like he's missed a lot in 2025. The VR headset was not a hit. Their AI strategy. I don't know what's going on. Yet, they're selling a ton of phones, and at the end of the day, that's what drives the business. Lou, where is your head at with Tim Cook, candy or coal?

Lou Whiteman: He's getting candy. Now, he might not get as much candy as Jerome. I might take some of Jerome Powell's candy and give it to Cook. But look, multiple things can be true. I don't buy the idea that Apple didn't fail at AI because Apple always comes in and innovates. Apple spent a lot of money trying to get AI right, and they didn't, it didn't go to script, so I don't think we can give them a pass on that. That said, everything we talked about, commoditized models, the importance of having revenue, of having a customer base. I think Apple ends up a winner in AI, just working with Tim and or working with. It turns out they didn't have to come up with their own model. I think they're fine. The next big thing is still a real question. You're right they haven't solved it. I'm not Tim Cook, but I don't know the answer there so that is lingering over them. But if nothing else, one of the best run companies in the world gets a solid B this year, even if not an A plus, and that's got to be worth some candy.

Asit Sharma: I'll agree with that. For me, Tim Cook gets two really small peppermint candy canes so there's 24 packs that come, let's give him 1/12th of those. Tim Cook did Tim Cook this year.

Travis Hoium: That's like a night for the kids at my house.

Asit Sharma: Yeah. But he did what we expected of him he is this operational genius. It doesn't matter what the environment is. I mentioned tariffs just a moment ago. He navigated all of that pretty flawlessly even look at the latest Apple models. They're starting to get traction in China again, which was a market. I thought they were going to have to at some point, just not write off, but.

Travis Hoium: It wouldn't have the dominant position they had for a long time.

Asit Sharma: Get used to being maybe a number two so they're still competitive there, and people still want their phones. The key question for Apple is who succeeds, Tim? Can we get someone who executes the level he does? Or do we need a visionary? Because the IP at Apple all the billions that have been poured into their IP is sitting there but has not been successfully monetized outside of its phones and its content. They've tried so many things over the years, like the Apple car. They made a stab at AI, but I agree with Lou. Maybe just partnering up is the way for them to go. There's so much that Apple could do as a company beyond their phone near monopoly for high end phones. I think that, look, this is the question, could you get someone who has a little bit of the Steve Jobs visionary capability in him or her with a lot of Tim Cook's operational excellence? It's a really tough question.

Travis Hoium: Have we ever seen a company do that? Go from visionary to operating person back to someone who is visionary, but at this scale that's the other thing is you're talking about one of the biggest companies in the world, somebody young, vibrant coming in and going, Hey, Tim, get out of the way. I'm coming in I got ideas.

Asit Sharma: With all this AI, you could construct an avatar that blends the two together. I have no idea how they're going to make this work.

Travis Hoium: It will be very interesting to see what happens with Apple over the next couple of years, especially with that succession planning. That seems like it's going to be a huge topic. Asit, I'm going to start with you with the next one. Sam Altman, candy or coal in his stocking.

Asit Sharma: I've been talking this around the margins, my opinion of Sam Altman this year. It's slightly some coal, a lump of coal. But for a more surprising reason, after everything we've discussed before, I think Sam really whiffed this year with ChatGPT 5.2. He talked that up in a way that we were ready to be blown away as we were in earlier years whenever they released a great new model, and it was really disappointing. In fact, I still go back sometimes to my 4.0 setting because that model of GPT just understands me so well. I love it so much. Are you listening, Sam? Sam, what did you do? Why did you do this? Why did you not understand that talking up a product that was not going to change the world is not a great strategy when you're going out competing in this battlefield, sir? Anyway, so there's a little bit of coal that I have for him and his stock.

Travis Hoium: Lou.

Lou Whiteman: I think I have the answer to that or a potential answer to that and that's because that's what he needs to do.

Travis Hoium: He's got to raise that next $100 million.

Lou Whiteman: Again he had the most success raising funds when Open AI was magic. He needs Open AI to be magic, whether it is or not. Look, I give him credit for doing what I think he has to do. Now, I don't know if that will end up working out for him, and I don't know. It's a tough thing. At the end of the day, I went to ChatGPT, and I found out that a pound of candy canes is worth 7-15 bucks. A pound of coal is worth about $0.15. Given the way Open AI needs money, I'm going to give him candy canes and not coal just so he can sell the things, need a little less money to raise. How about that?

Travis Hoium: Fair enough. Alright, let's go to someone who was in his final days officially as the CEO. Warren Buffett. Lou, you got to give him candy, right? This has been quite a run.

Lou Whiteman: But are we doing it for this year?

Travis Hoium: Well, let's do this year.

Lou Whiteman: Brian Nichol has had a great run, Travis. Here's the thing, who am I to question Warren Buffett and that sincerely, and I'm a shareholder. But if you look at this year and you look at the last few years, I do ask myself the question. If it was anyone other than Warren Buffett, what would we be thinking?

Travis Hoium: Outside of that Apple investment that they made about a decade ago, not a lot of great wins over the past decade.

Lou Whiteman: You can walk and chew gum at the same time. I get saving your investment capital for better markets I get that I agree with Warren. A lot of the markets, to me, have looked overvalued. I've still found ways to place stock. But they have, what, a third of $1 trillion in cash. I feel like you can deploy some of that and still have an ample reserve. I don't think they're going to deploy $350 billion into a Dow turn. I'm going to give him candy it's going to be See's candy, of course, it has to be. But I do think, and we can talk about Greg Abel, too, but I do think that man, the pressure is on because at some point, the benefit of the doubt of Oh, it's just I think if we took the label off this company and looked at their actions over this year and the last few years, I don't think there'd be a lot of people rushing to buy in.

Travis Hoium: Asit.

Asit Sharma: I'm going with 24 of those small candy canes. I want to give Warren the whole box. I think he deserves it. I think his message implicitly is, Hey, shareholders I gave you about a third of 1 trillion bucks on the balance sheet, cash. I gave you this amazing assemblage of operating companies. I present to you Greg Abel, who I have trained. I have built the culture that we needed. I've done many of these deals on handshakes, and I hope my successors can do the same when they acquire companies. We've been one of the most successful investment vehicles on Earth. I'm going out on top with no regrets. I still have my health. I'm still drinking one can of Coke or more every day. What more do you want? Give me the candy. [OVERLAPPING] I don't know how he has any insides left.

Travis Hoium: Alright. Quickly, Lou. Larry Ellison, candy or coal.

Lou Whiteman: I guess he needs to get candy because every son should have a father so supportive, if nothing else for that.

Travis Hoium: Hey, dad, I want to take over media.

Lou Whiteman: Larry has always been someone who knows the way the wind is blowing and who can position himself and I don't mean that as a backhanded compliment. It has worked out for him well. I think he has done that well this year. I know there's questions about Blue Owl. I know there's questions about everything right now. I'm not going to bet against Oracle coming out, if nothing worse than fine from this, too, just because Larry knows how to work the room.

Travis Hoium: Asit, quickly, what do you think about Larry Ellison in 2025?

Asit Sharma: I think Lou did such a great job of hitting his highlights. I want to give him a little bit of coal, an admirer of Larry Ellison, own some Oracle, have recommended it in a service. I just didn't like at the end of the year with all that debt, and I understand the argument that it's staggered out there. That they are just pitching more into a leveraged position and placing such a concentrated bet on their role in AI, which could be a great role their technology is amazing. It colored my view of Larry, but he's a wild guy he's an adventurous guy. We know that. He's always been this way, and so we see it manifest in his business dealings and the risks he takes.

Travis Hoium: When we come back, we going to get to Stock Center Radar, you're listening to Motley Fool Money. As always, people on the program may have interest in the stocks they talk about and the Motley Fool may have formal recommendations for or against, so don't buy or sell stocks based solely on what you hear. All personal finance content follows the Motley Fool's editorial standards, and it's not approved by advertisers. Advertisements are sponsored content and provided for informational purposes only. See our full Advertising disclosure, please check out our show notes. We like to end the show by asking each channelist for a stock on their radar and get some questions from Dan Boyd behind the glass. Lou, you're up first. What's on your radar this week?

Lou Whiteman: Consulting giant Accenture, they released earnings this week. Numbers look pretty good to me. Revenue up 6% year over year, earnings per share up 10%, both top the Wall Street estimates. Look, investors have been down on consultants this year, worried that a tough economy would limit new business. Talk of AI replacing consultants in the future. But Accenture booked $21 billion in new business in the quarter a lot of that AI related, and 33 new clients. There are 33 clients with bookings greater than $100 million. Stock is down 23% for the year, Dan, I think that's a market overreaction. Accenture looks really interesting.

Travis Hoium: Dan, what do you think about Accenture?

Dan Boyd: Is there anything going for Accenture other than AI right now, Lou?

Lou Whiteman: Yeah. Oh, they do a lot of work that isn't AI. It's just AI is all anyone wants to talk about. Look, Dan, at the end of the day, if you're a CEO and you want to do a project, you hire Accenture just so you can blame them if it goes wrong. That's the bull case.

Travis Hoium: Asit, what's on your radar this week?

Asit Sharma: I'll make this short and sweet. I'm looking at Embraer. This is the Brazilian jet Maker symbol EMBJ. This is a business I wrote about 13 years ago, and the stock did nothing, but here we are. The aerospace industry has changed. Now the company has a tremendous backlog. It has a number one position in 76 Cedar plane the type of plane that I take when I have to fly from Raleigh to Washington. It also is a leader in the small and midsize business jet category. It's a business that's operating at pretty good margins for an aerospace manufacturer about 9%. Also, Embraer is really great for its maintenance services. It's getting a lot of incremental revenue from maintenance and repair.

Travis Hoium: Dan, what do you think about small jets?

Dan Boyd: I don't know anything about small jets, Travis. I am worried about investing in a small jet company. It seems like I don't need a small jet. I can't afford a small jet. Are people buying small jets?

Asit Sharma: Well, Dan, the bulk of their business, actually, you probably flown on an Embraer and didn't know it in a small market, but we understand from before the show, you don't fly to small cities you only fly to big cities.

Dan Boyd: No, Asit, I'm big time, Dan Boyd.

Travis Hoium: Alright, big time Dan Boyd, which stock is going on your watch list?

Dan Boyd: I don't know. Again, I'm getting big time Asit here, and I'm going to go with Accenture so sorry, jets.

Travis Hoium: Or Lou Whiteman, Asit Sharma, Dan Boyd behind the class and the entire Motley Fool team. I'm Travis Hoium. Thanks listening to Motley Fool Money. We'll see you here tomorrow.

Asit Sharma, CPA has positions in Microsoft, Netflix, Nvidia, and Oracle. Dan Boyd has positions in Berkshire Hathaway and Chipotle Mexican Grill. Lou Whiteman has positions in Accenture Plc, Berkshire Hathaway, Nike, and Shopify. Travis Hoium has positions in Alphabet, Berkshire Hathaway, and Shopify. The Motley Fool has positions in and recommends Accenture Plc, Alphabet, Apple, Berkshire Hathaway, Chipotle Mexican Grill, Meta Platforms, Microsoft, Netflix, Nike, Nvidia, Oracle, Shopify, and Starbucks. The Motley Fool recommends the following options: long January 2026 $395 calls on Microsoft, short December 2025 $45 calls on Chipotle Mexican Grill, and short January 2026 $405 calls on Microsoft. The Motley Fool has a disclosure policy.