Elon Musk, Chip Giant?

In this episode of Motley Fool Hidden Gems Investing, Motley Fool contributors Travis Hoium and Dan Caplinger and analyst Tim Beyers discuss:

• Musk’s chip dreams
• SaaS recovery
• What technologies will survive the next decade
• Stocks on the radar

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 May 8, 2026.

Travis Hoium: Do we have a new chip company in town? Welcome to Motley Fool Hidden Gems Investing. Welcome to Motley Fool Hidden Gems Investing. I'm Travis Hoium, joined today by Dan Caplinger and Tim Beyers. Guys, I think we've got to start with what I think was one of the wildest news items of the week. TSMC has been this brake on this AI capex spending for years at this point. But now Elon Musk is saying, hey, we need more chips. We need more capacity. I am willing to put up to $119 billion into becoming now not just an EV company, not just a satellite company, not just an AI company, but also a chip company. Tim, I want to start with you. What in the world is going on here? Because it seems like chips is one of these businesses that is really hard. Intel has not gotten this right over the past decade, and suddenly Musk comes in, and do we have a new player in town in the chip game?

Tim Beyers: It's a floor wax, and it's a dessert topping. For those who remember their 1970s SNL references, it's, no, look.

Travis Hoium: I've got to look that one up.

Tim Beyers: There is nothing that Elon Musk thinks he can't do and so here we are. Now, to be fair to him, what he believes is that in order to serve all of his various businesses computers, and he needs and he needs computed scale. He needs it for SpaceX. He needs it for Tesla. He needs it for xAI. In order to solve that problem, he wants to create Terafab. Tarafab is this idea of just this massive scale chip manufacturing facility organization I think there are reasons to ask questions, but there is a logic to it, so let's give him credit there. But TSMC is an incredibly efficient supplier, and they are able to manufacture chips at scale because they've been doing it for decades. They do it at the smallest possible form factors and if you want to do what Musk wants to do, which is manufacture AI compute, then what you end up getting is a real push to manufacture the smallest chips possible right now that's at two nanometer. TSMC is already there. Musk is presumably going to get there, but I think there is a lot to be determined with this. The vision from a log as with most things that Elon Musk gives us, there is a logic behind this, but the difficulty level is just extreme.

Travis Hoium: Dan, the reason that this I think is so important, is it impacts so many companies in the entire ecosystem. You've got the chip manufacturers, TSMC, you have Intel. You have the AI chip suppliers like Nvidia, AMD. Is this something that investors should be thinking about, maybe there's a new supplier in town, that maybe this is going to be this vertically integrated company that's going to take on a Google? Where does your head go? Because it seems wild on the surface. But like Tim said, there is some logic to it, so you got to take it seriously.

Dan Caplinger: There is, but I think the thing you have to remember is when it comes to Elon Musk, Musk is going to look after Musk's own companies first. I think that the whole purpose of this, regardless of talking about overall industry capacity, regardless of saying, hey, there might be an opportunity for us to make a contribution to the industry writ large, really, I think the Terafab vision is about helping SpaceX, helping xAI, helping Tesla to do what they need to do to build optimist robots, to make massive launches of goods and services into orbit to further Mars missions, solar power capacity for space based data centers. Even the chips necessary to get all the way to full self-driving, which we're still waiting for on Teslas. That is the first and foremost there, and because the trend was always for Musk to try to vertically integrate that, I don't think that Taiwan Semi or any of the other chip fabs really need to be terribly worried about this because from a long-term standpoint, it was going to happen anyway.

Travis Hoium: You think that Musk building out this chip capacity just makes sense in the long-term Musk vision, and I want to put some numbers to this. SpaceX is not public yet, but it could go public later this year, and definitely is a stock that, a lot of people in The Motley Fool universe are probably going to at least be interested in. But Tesla is going to be at least a partial funder of this Terafab if it ends up happening. They have $44 billion worth of cash right now, but they also have almost $8 billion worth of debt, and their free cash flow, I believe, they’re going to spend $25 billion this year in capex, is likely to go negative this year. You also need a lot of money to be a car company. Dan, the thing that we have to throw into this, too, is that this vertically integrating is very risky because if you don't have the demand, then you just are stuck with a whole bunch of fixed costs and a whole bunch of capex that you've spent by the way, we found out this week that xAI which bought all these Nvidia chips, didn't have demand for their Grok AI tool, so now they're just selling that to Anthropic. That may end up working out, but if we get to a world five years from now where you're suddenly building all this capex and we do have some bubble, that seems like a really tough place to be.

Dan Caplinger: It is, but I think that Tesla, in particular, and Musk more generally, has generally been pretty good about adapting to changing market conditions. The example I'd throw out is supercharger. I think at some point, Musk would have thought that the supercharger was going to need to compete against other third-party charging infrastructure, but the fact is that the third-party charging infrastructure just has never come close to matching what the supercharger network was. Given that opportunity, given excess capacity in the supercharger network, given excess capacity and demand from the rest of the EV world, Tesla saw an opportunity. Musk saw an opportunity opening up essentially the supercharger network to these third parties. I could see the same thing happening here.

I think the question you raise is, Travis, is Musk going to get the timing right, or is he going to make these supply agreements too late? There's a lot in the air right now, and it's going to take three or four years even for, this project even to come close to completion, let alone getting up to capacity, so you're right. The timelines going to be important, and we just don't have a lot of our information about this is coming from a one-page property tax abatement application in some county in Texas. We don't have the details yet, but we've been around the block with Musk plenty of times. The details come when they come, and you fill in the blanks. In the meantime, there's a whole bunch of people trying to speculate about how those blanks are going to get filled.

Travis Hoium: Tim, let's speculate a little bit. Do you think about the investment landscape and this announcement. The one company that came to mind for me is I mentioned early on, TSMC has been this break on the AI build-out. Like, you can't overbuild when you can't get enough chips.

Tim Beyers: Right.

Travis Hoium: We've now seen Intel, their stock has skyrocketed, which maybe gives them the cash and the ability to invest a little bit more. We've seen, Micron and other memory companies say that they're going to build more capacity. Now you have Musk coming in as well with $119 billion plan. That's an area that I'm curious to hear what you think about the supply demand dynamics longer term. But is there any other areas for investors for either opportunities or risks as a supplier like this potentially comes into the market?

Tim Beyers: Let's talk about how this probably plays out, and then I'll give you a thought. I think the first thing is, Musk is he's done some crazy things. He's not stupid. I think he might be what my friend Bill Mann likes to sometimes call Harvard stupid, where he's so arrogant that he thinks he can't be wrong. I think that is a feature of Elon Musk. But he knows enough to know that he can take this in stages. I do think there is a stage where Tarafab can come in and solve a problem, and that's with memory. I don't know that they're going to go straight to the most advanced chipmaking, Travis. I don't think they would be smart to do so. But if you are filling part of the capacity constraints for memory, that would be super interesting. Who do you partner with to get there? I'm not entirely sure who that would be. Wouldn't surprise me if it was like a Samsung. But you mentioned, like, where do you go for investing in this type of opportunity? I'll give you two that I think are interesting. One is you've already mentioned, which is Intel, and I know the stock is up materially. But the stock is up materially on Intel foundry doing nothing. Bupkis, really hasn't done anything.

Travis Hoium: They're the reported partner.

Tim Beyers: They are.

Travis Hoium: With this Terafab with a 14 A, which isn't actually operational yet, but that's the idea, I think.

Tim Beyers: Right and so you're talking about, so 14 A, now, it's not exactly this, but that is now you're getting under that's sub two nanometer. It does make sense. Like if Musk wants to compete at the most aggressive form factors to make the most aggressive compute, and if Intel can actually pull this off and have a manufacturing process down way under two nanometer, then yeah, that is an interesting partner, and it could really scale up Intel foundry. If Intel foundry becomes meaningful billions and billions of dollars of revenue and profit, then suddenly the math on that company looks a little different. The other, I would say is SML because you cannot get away with building all of this stuff and not having the monopolist. Or the most advanced chipmaking equipment. Like, if you want to build.

Travis Hoium: Isn't that a break on these plans, though? A [OVERLAPPING] sold out for the next however many years?

Tim Beyers: A 100%, it is. There’s no sense that there is going to be an alternative to ASML, and I don't think Musk is going to build it. But ASML right now, is in a wonderful position for the next five, maybe even 10 years. Look, I don't think you're going to get unbelievable returns on ASML, but if you or I could get 7% over 10 years, and that was relatively guaranteed in a market as turbulent as this. Would you take it? I would. I think ASML is interesting.

Travis Hoium: Well, it definitely is going to be interesting to watch because we have the SpaceX potential IPO coming in the next couple of months, still, I think in the plans for June. What happens with Tesla? Does that get rolled into SpaceX? Do they build out a new chip manufacturing business? Lots to watch, and we'll be covering it here. When we come back, we're going to talk about the death of the SaaSpocalypse. SaaStock actually went up this week. We'll tell you what's going on. You're listening to Motley Pool Hidden Gems Invest.

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Travis Hoium: One of the down parts of the market in 2026? There's been some hotspots in semiconductors, in energy, but software SaaSpocalypse. We've talked about the SaaSpocalypse on this show. The potential disruption, the idea of disruption, has hit a lot of those stocks. But this week, that narrative was really broken, Tim. What earnings reports stuck out to you because it seems like almost every company that reported earnings this week did not report something that filled that SaaSpocalypse narrative.

Tim Beyers: Well, not all of them, but I think it was probably better than expected, and I think Datadog is the one that stands out for me so that's Ticker DDOG rallied over 30% on results for Q1 that were just outstanding, much better than forecasters expected. Revenue was up over 32% and passed $1 billion. In a quarter for the first time, it was really impressive. This is also a very efficient company. Like, for every new dollar of sales and marketing that they invest, they got back $3.74 in revenue. That's the thing that boosts margins and gets you free cash flow, and they are still producing free cash flow so I think that's good.

But the real story with Datadog here, Travis, is that they have some AI-powered products. They have one that observes the behaviors of GPs. For those who don't understand Datadog, what Datadog does is it looks at the infrastructure that you have as a company. It looks at how the software's behaving, how it interacts with systems, and it looks for outliers. When it spots outliers, sometimes it takes actions, sometimes it reports on it. A lot of the output of it is like logs, like, have a log, it says, hey, all this crap happened. That is actually really useful, so useful, in fact, that they said, this is from CEO Olivier Hamel, one of the co-founders and apparently he went on CNBC and said, we got seven and eight figure deals with two of the world's largest technology companies, and it's for their AI research labs. Now, that sounds like, you are hitting all of the buzzword bingo when you say that on CNBC, so of course.

Travis Hoium: That's actually valuable buzzwords. That is, trying that's not coming out of MBA school. Like, I.

Tim Beyers: No, that's what people want to hear. It's a healthy business that is growing fast, has good margins, has free cash flow, and is doing deals that seem on to the point that you made about, Hey, maybe we're breaking the SaaSpocalypse thesis here, it feels like, wait a minute, this is a company that has AI tailwinds. I'm just going to maintain here, Travis, that I still think enterprise software is the single greatest distribution mechanism. For AI technology and features. I think that is true. It doesn't mean there isn't going to be disruption. There will be disruption. But if you are an enterprise software company and you have AI that is delivering for customers and you can charge for it, I think you're probably better off than the market is giving you credit for Datadog prove that this quarter.

Travis Hoium: Dan, what stuck out to you?

Dan Caplinger: I took a look at Digital Ocean Holdings. That's Ticker DOCN. That stock was up 40-50% this week. They announced their latest quarterly results on Tuesday, and they had a bunch of AI-related news that helped build sentiment. They launched their AI-native cloud product during the quarter. As a result of that, they saw recurring revenue from their segment of AI-specific customers triple year over year. They posted 22% sales growth in the first quarter of 2026, but they now expect that 2027 revenue growth will accelerate to greater than 50% because of its embrace in AI. I think to Tim's point, one of the most interesting points inside of the report was Digital Ocean said that they saw by far, their biggest growth come from customers that are spending at least $1 million on the platform. They saw a 78% increase in the number of million-dollar customers that they have. That I think is important because the SaaSpocalypse assumes that those big clients are the ones that have the most financial incentive to do things on their own [OVERLAPPING].

Travis Hoium: Code is something to basically replace their suppliers.

Dan Caplinger: Exactly. What Digital Ocean is saying is that, if anything, the opposite is true. It's the biggest customers that are the most likely to value the company-specific AI integration that a Digital Ocean that a software service company is doing. That I think is the takeaway for SaaS companies is build those relationships with your strongest customers because they're the ones that are going to be able to let AI evolve with you, partner with you to take the best from AI rather than becoming what shadow competitors.

Travis Hoium: Tim, we got a minute left. It seems like the story that I'm gathering from earning season Zeta Global is another company that I follow. Revenue is up 50%, another AI tailwinds is the story here is investors have to think about is AI naturally something that is a tailwind for them, or is AI something they're trying to shove into a product that isn't really natural? I'm thinking of service now and sales force are companies that have been talking a lot about AI they haven't quite gotten the same reaction.

Tim Beyers: That's true, and, you have to wonder, it's the difference between an organic innovative, like it comes from the ground up versus a volton. If it's a volton, it doesn't really work. Now, what both ServiceNow and Salesforce have working for them is data inside their systems, and you can build around that. But it is going to be interesting, Travis, to see not only the start-ups that are building from the ground up, but also the incumbent companies who are building new features from the ground up. I think the ladder is going to be really, really interesting in the box.

Travis Hoium: When we come back, we're going to get into a time capsule and see what Dan and Tim think about the next 10 years. You're listening to Motley Fool Hidden Gems Investing.

We like to have a little bit of fun in this segment, and I want to get Dan and Tim to jump in a time capsule and see what the future is going to look like a decade from now. Also look at this is what is going to be in the next big thing graveyard. This is the challenge with investing with technology. If you get the big things right, you can make a lot of money. But if you get them wrong, you can end up owning stocks that go to zero, and you're wondering why that's the case. Tim, I'm going to have you go first. Ten years from now, are we going to still be using LLMs, is a product like ChatGPT or a Claude going to look similar like it does today, or is that going to be a thing of the past?

Tim Beyers: No I think it's going to be totally different. By the way, what I love about this, there's something internally we do on the investing team. It's something that Bill came up with. I'm giving Bill way too much credit right now. [OVERLAPPING] It's just very uncomfortable for me, but I will give him credit on this. We call it the DeLorean exercise. You called it a time capsule, but it’s the DeLorean exercise from Back to the Future, where you go to the future and then you work back to the present. If I do that into the DeLorean here, in this case, I believe that what we see from these LLMs right now is nothing like what we'll see 10 years from now. Usually, technology over time abstracts, and the abstract layers get more and more abstracted. In this case, I think they get more and more embedded.

Travis Hoium: You're not conversing like you do right now. It is entirely embedded inside the system, doing something it is intelligent. It is acting with AI, but it is embedded to an experience. Let's say you want to rent a car, certainly there is AI going to be involved in that. But your interaction will be, say, the voice interface, or it'll be the phone. It'll be a chat, but you're not really decided.

Dan Caplinger: Is Siri in a really good spot, then? That's what comes to mind.

Tim Beyers: Maybe. Like, maybe. I could see that, but I just think embedded, not explicit, I think, is the big takeaway for me.

Travis Hoium: Dan, what do you think about the future of LLMs?

Dan Caplinger: I'd agree with that in the sense that I mean, there's still when I was a kid and learning programming, I learned machine language, and there's still machine language out there. It's just so deeply embedded in language after language after model that hardly anybody would be able to follow the path all the way down to the zeros and ones that make the computer do the things that the computers are doing. For me, it's going to be a question of user experience more than anything else. I think that what the chatbots are doing are collecting valuable data on how do their human users best relate to AI technology. They'll take that data. They will try to come up with form factors that will better give the information that most people want the most. If there's a way to facilitate that, if there's a way to streamline it, then for now, chatbots are an effective way to get the data, but there's going to be more efficient ways to get the data in the future. That's the direction that I think most AI adopters are going to go in to try to maximize that flow, the most relevant information as quickly as possible. As Tim says, as a result, it's not going to look the same. It's going to be a much more streamlined way of getting to whatever it is that you want to do.

Travis Hoium: How does that impact a company like OpenAI? Again, a company that could go public later this year, a lot of their value, I think, real or not, is in the fact that they own ChatGPT. They have 800 million plus users using their products. That consumer business is extremely valuable. Does that itself get abstracted away, and then you're basically just a model company, and maybe that model layer is being commoditized, too. This is such an interesting thought process for investors, because I think what we see as value today may not be valuable 10 years from now at all.

Dan Caplinger: Absolutely. This is why. This is the right question, Travis, because this is why you are seeing OpenAI build out an ecosystem. Why are they building out a browser? Like, it sounds crazy that they would build out a browser. Everybody's got a browser. The reason is you must own the portal, and guess who owns the portal right now? That is not OpenAI. That is Alphabet. Alphabet owns the portal. The reason we know this is because Chrome is everywhere.

Travis Hoium: My OpenAI account, by the way, is a sign-in with Google. I've always thought that was a fascinating dynamic.

Dan Caplinger: Right, so the portal is the thing. You have to own the portal if you want to dominate, and right now, OpenAI is in the race to own the portal, but they do not own the portal. They don't, so whoever owns the portal is going to have real command like a real grip on this side of the industry. This is why Alphabet has persisted and why they couldn't be so easily disrupted by chatbots.

Travis Hoium: Let's move on to the next one. Dan, what is autonomous driving going to look like 10 years from now? Just to kind of lay the context, WeMod is doing something like 500,000 rides a week, so they are out there, that is real. They're really the only company that has scaled at all. Tesla is still in this early testing phase, but there's a dozen other companies. But 10 years from now, what does this business look like?

Dan Caplinger: I think it's much bigger. I think it's going to take off, and it's much to my consternation because there's nothing that I like better than getting behind the wheel of my Mazda Miata and getting out on an open road.

Travis Hoium: I'll do that, I think. I can ride in Autono's vehicles. It's all fine.

Tim Beyers: It's allowed, for sure. But right now, it's funny. I've been to several big cities where there are extensive experimentation going on. I was in Vegas a couple of months ago is the one that's most obvious. They had the WeMod. They had the Amazon product. There's all kinds of cars competing for iTime in the big markets, but not seeing passengers in them for the most part yet. I think that the younger generations are much more willing, less excited about driving themselves, much more excited about putting the time of their commute to work. I do think that all of this, yes, it's been a long time coming. Yes, regulation has been slow, yes, the promises have outpaced the reality. But I do think that we eventually get there. I'm also heartened by the work that we saw recently over the past week or two from Joby Aviation, finally getting that electric vehicle off and vertical takeoff and landing experiment from a Manhattan helipad out to JFK Airport on Long Island. That is a fascinating area for me. That's probably not a 10-year item. That is probably a 20- 25-year item. But I do think autonomous driving is coming, and there will be huge demand for it from people who are not like me, but who are much happier not letting somebody else take care of the transportation.

Travis Hoium: Tim, I want to frame this even a little differently to you. When Uber launched, it was the idea of getting into a stranger's car to take a ride somewhere was crazy. Now it's just something that millions of people do every single day. Do we look back on autonomous driving as a similar step change in how we think about transportation in general?

Tim Beyers: I think we look back on autonomy 10 years from now as something that is a given. I think autonomy is a given. Is autonomous driving a given? That I don't know. What I mean by this is that again, going how technology historically has developed, right now, autonomous driving is this big massive thing. All of the roads have to be mapped, and we had to be able to have vehicles that can go anywhere autonomously. I think this breaks down to very purpose-built use cases, and it doesn't always have to be a car. It can be short hop. Like, cities can have autonomous vehicles that get you places. Like, if you have, for example, a downtown civic transportation system, might be light rail, would that light rail be autonomous?

Travis Hoium: I think it would be.

Tim Beyers: Would you have short-haul trains that also are autonomous?

Travis Hoium: Yeah. I could absolutely see that. Of course. Semi trucks is another thing we've been talking about for a long time.

Tim Beyers: Just think about something that is predefined, purpose-built. Wherever there is a predefined route, I think autonomy really has a chance to take over that use case. If it's wide open and really hard to define, autonomy is going to be harder to disrupt that particular use case. But there's plenty that are predefined, Travis, and I think autonomy takes those over.

Travis Hoium: All right, Dan, I think I'm more on your side with the bullishness, but my question for you is, I have a 9-year-old, a 5-year-old, and a 1-year-old. At what point are they not going to learn how to drive? We live in the suburbs. I'm assuming they would even today they would get their license at 16. But are any of those kids gonna just say, Yeah, you know what? WeMod or whatever it is, is ample? I don't even need to learn.

Dan Caplinger: It's already happening, Travis. I mean, you're going to do the right thing. You're going to teach your kids the skills that they need to live.

Travis Hoium: Yeah, we're getting a manual. That's what we're goin to do.

Dan Caplinger: That's right. You got to know how to do the stick shift just in case. No, seriously. It could happen at any moment. But like Tim says, I think that the predictability and therefore, the ease of putting autonomous driving into motion in areas and use cases where there's greater predictability, is higher. It's easier to do than it is in unpredictable ways. Odds are probably better that those kids, if they're taking a school bus to school, that the school bus might be autonomous, than they would then say, Well, I need to get from a certain point to some other unpredictable point sometime in the future. Nevertheless, the 1-year-old, I mean, you know, it's a 15-year time horizon. I think that they're definitely going to have the option, whether they're gonna say, You know what? I like to drive. That's up to you, Dad. You've got to figure that out.

Travis Hoium: Well, I'll try to steer them in the right direction. Let's end on this one. This has been a fascinating space to watch, and that is space Cell service. You have something like SpaceX with their service, they're working with T-Mobile. You have AST SpaceMobile. It's one of those concepts that makes a ton of sense in theory. But then in practice, you look around, and you go, Well, isn't a land line always going to be faster? I have a fiber line coming into the house. There's 5G service ample around most cities in the U.S. and even around the world. Dan, is Space cell phone service going to be one of those things that we look back and go, Man, that changed everything, or is that going to be in the technology graveyard, at least for investors, 10 years from now?

Dan Caplinger: Yes. I hate to do this. I hate to do the lawyer thing. I don't think that it's going to be like that, everybody's got Space cell service on their phone. I don't think that the land-based networks are going to go away are going to get fully replaced. But it's such a hugely valuable niche service that I don't think it's going to go away either. One case in point.

Travis Hoium: Does that mean that you can make money on it? That would be my angle here because some of these companies are incredibly highly valued. Do they live up to that economic potential?

Dan Caplinger: Can you make money on it? The answer is yes. Can you make enough money on it to justify current valuations? That's more questionable. The way that you make money on it is by identifying, carving out niche markets, and then extracting the most value from those markets. What we've seen lately, that I'm aware of, StarLink just recently did a big price increase for its general aviation customers. If you're going more than 100 knots, they increase the price of StarLink service. It's like five fold and while they have kind of come back down and said, Maybe we're not going to give that because there were a whole bunch of GA folks that were just kind of appalled by that and saying, Hey, you got to spend $600-800 on a receiver, and now suddenly you're jacking the monthly subscription price up and threatened all kinds of stuff. That I didn't think was going to go anywhere, but you've seen this from companies like Garmin, Ticker, GRMN, where, yes, their primary GPS technology got commoditized.

But there are niche purposes like Aviation, like Marine, where you're able to charge a lot more because the marginal utility is a lot higher in those use cases. Same is going to be true for this. Companies that are able to discreetly serve those markets and extract full value from them, I think, are going to be financially successful. Again, not sure if it's enough to justify the valuations involved at this point, but they're not going to just disappear.

Travis Hoium: Tim, quickly, do you think we're going to have space phones or is this kind of a flash in the pan?

Tim Beyers: Maybe, but I've got a simple phrase here for you, Travis, on making money in a sector like this. Picks and shovels, baby, picks and shovels, and I'll tell you why, because none of this works unless you get more miniaturized satellites and you really introduce massive cost reductions in the unit cost of launches. You have to have more mini-satellites. You have to be able to launch them effectively. You have to be able to launch them. Even probably from, like, you need to have space platforms in which you can repair and also launch new mini satellites that would allow this kind of network to act pervasively and give you the kind of coverage that would make these things affordable. But that's the move. Like the phones themselves, who cares? The network itself.

Travis Hoium: Yeah, there's infrastructure that needs to be built there.

Tim Beyers: None of it matters. Not a lick of it matters unless you get incredible unit economics in launch and mini satellite. That would be where I'm looking.

Travis Hoium: That makes sense. Well, when we come back, we're gonna get to the stocks on our radar. You're listening to Motley Fool Hidden Gems Investing.

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, do don't buy or sell stocks based solely on what you hear. All personal finance content and follows The Motley Fool’s editorial standards, and is not approved by advertisers. Advertisements are sponsored content and provided for informational purposes only. To see our full advertising disclosure, please check out our show notes. Like to end with stocks on our radar, Tim, you're up first?

Tim Beyers: What do you got?

Travis Hoium: I got Sport Radar. Dan, this is Ticker SRAD. They provide data to sports leagues and to gamblers, and they got absolutely crushed by two pretty damning short seller reports. This was recently that accused them of doing business with illegal gambling sites, which is not great. Company has since denied the claims, but here's what's interesting, Dan. They just reported this week. Their earnings and revenues up 11.9%, free cash flow, up 37.5%. I like this. Following that report, CEO and founder Carsten Coral bought 340,000 shares on the open market. That's sweet, sweet insider buying. I think that's a signal that we should pay attention to. Sport Radar TickersRAD. Dan Boyd, what do you think about Sport Radar?

Dan Caplinger: Yeah, illegal gambling, insider buying? What's not to love there, Travis?

Travis Hoium: I did have Tim as the one with the controversial pick today, but Dan Kaplinger, what's on your radar this week?

Tim Beyers: Dan, I'm pitching another bargain stock opportunity, MercadoLibre Ticker, MELI, is down 10% after first-quarter results. Revenue very strong for the Latin American ecommerce company, but profits were down. They missed the consensus forecast by quite a bit. The concern here is that part of Mercado Libre's business is its Mercado Pago credit division. It has been boosting the amount of leverage, it has as it extends credit to more customers. U.S. investors seem to be concerned about that. But Mercado Libre knows its environment, it knows its geography, it knows its customers. Big gains in merchandise volume over the ecommerce site, total payment volume on the financial side, other key metrics. Long-term thesis is intact here, and getting to buy on a 10% dip, I think, is a value opportunity for you.

Travis Hoium: Dan Boyd, what do you think about a discount for Mercado Libre?

Dan Caplinger: Well, we all know that US investors have never been wrong about anything ever, so we can take that to the bank there. I think Mercado Libre is a great company. They have a long history of doing a lot of cool things. They've been making money for a long time. I've already been sold on Mercado Libre, and I don't think that potentially illegal gambling is going to unseat them this time around.

Travis Hoium: Well, congratulations to Dan Caplinger for taking the stocks on Dan's watch list this week, for Dan Caplinger, Tim Beyers, and Dan Boyd behind the glass, I am Travis Hoium. Thanks for listening to Motley Fool Hidden Gems Investing. We'll see you here tomorrow.

Dan Caplinger has positions in Alphabet and Nvidia. Tim Beyers has positions in Alphabet, Datadog, MercadoLibre, Salesforce, and Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing. Travis Hoium has positions in Alphabet, Garmin, Intel, Joby Aviation, MercadoLibre, and Zeta Global. The Motley Fool has positions in and recommends Advanced Micro Devices, Alphabet, Datadog, DigitalOcean, Garmin, Intel, MercadoLibre, Nvidia, Salesforce, ServiceNow, Sportradar Group, Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing, and Tesla. The Motley Fool recommends T-Mobile US and recommends the following options: short May 2026 $22.50 calls on Sportradar Group. The Motley Fool has a disclosure policy.