Mad Money w/ Jim Cramer 3/20/25
43:07 Share

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My mission is simple, to make you money. I'm here to level the playing field for all investors. There's always a bull market somewhere, and I promise to help you find it. Mad Money starts now.

Hey, I'm Kramer. Welcome to a very special Las Vegas edition of Bad Money. Welcome to Kramerica. Oh, if you want to make friends, I'm just trying to make you some money. My job is not just to entertain, but to teach you. So call me at 1-800-743-CBC. Tweet me at Jim Kramer. Today, it's about the batteries, stupid.

Oh, sure, I can talk about all the things that everyone else is talking about, all the things that are beyond our control. The endless drumbeat of tariffs equals inflation, equals higher interest rates, equals recession. There, okay? We've all memorized this equation of woe, and it's what's ruling the averages, even on a mostly sedate day like today, where the Dow declined 11 points, S&P dipped 0.22%. Yes, of course, the Nasdaq shed 0.33%. So...

What are you doing? You're complaining with endless negativity wherever you turn. And isn't that the case? I think it's a tremendous opportunity to have a little extra cash because the market's unlikely to power higher anytime soon. It's probably more likely to drop lower, meaning this is a good moment to keep some cash on the sidelines while you watch and learn.

What do I mean by learning? Today, we find ourselves at the Home Depot annual store manager meeting in Las Vegas. Talk to the top brass, including CEO Ted Decker, in a moment. Home Depot is an amazing company, both by the numbers with a total compound annual return of 25.5% since its IPO.

And by the culture, as few companies give more to charity, especially for veterans, and few take care of their own, like Home Depot does. It's easy to talk tariffs, mild speed bump here, or higher interest rates not as important to Home Depot as the positives from higher housing prices. As for the pervasive gloom coming from all the uncertainty, well, that is a little bit harder to figure out.

But for me, when I know things are bad, what I like to do a little different. I like to hunger down. I like to learn. So today I learned about how battery technology is replacing gasoline technology for power saws, drills, mowers. Now listen, this is a big change. Billions of dollars. And it's happening right now as the rechargeables are at last more powerful than the gas guzzling brethren.

I know that may not be the needle mover for a retailer's largest Home Depot, but you always need longer-term reasons to stay the course. See, we own Home Depot for the Chapel Trust, and when you walk the aisles, you have to have more than just good previous growth, which they have.

I say you keep your eyes open and you listen to what can drive new sales. You always need replacement cycles with the appliances, in this case, whether it be the drills, whether it be the power saws. One of the things the company's banking on, the radical improvement in the power of electric motors over gasoline motors.

Keep in mind, there are huge numbers of outdoor appliances that still run on gasoline, which is dirty and dangerous. But people stick with them because they are thought to offer superior performance. Hey, look, that used to be true. But you know what I did today? I watched a head-to-head power saw contest here, and the electric was much more powerful. Now, that replacement cycle alone won't change Home Depot's next quarter. But that's not the point, people. At this moment...

everybody's given up on so many stocks. I hear, oh, especially technology. If we're going to own anything through this environment, we need something that increases our odds of winning. I file the rise of electric outdoor appliances away. So when Home Depot stock gets hit, and it will get hit by the pervasive negativity, we got one more reason to feel comfortable owning it. And of course, if it drops more, buy it for the travel trust.

See, this is something I learned during the Great Recession. Back then, I stuck with Home Depot when everyone told me to sell, sell, sell, because homes were losing value for the first time since the Depression. Of course, the company ended up buying back a huge amount of stock during that period, ended up in incredible shape versus the competitors, many of which went by the wayside.

At the time, this stock was an $18 stock, and it felt like the world was ending. Now it's a $355 stock, and it feels like the world's ending. You know what? Home Depot stock is still cheap, and it's well off its highs, even though the underlying company is doing incredibly well. Now, you may be skeptical, thinking that higher interest rates tariffs are more important than everything I just said, more important than the specifics of this home improvement chain or what they tell me. I disagree. To me, this is when you keep the faith. And if the stock of Home Depot drops, well, guess what?

Buy, buy, buy! But don't take it from me. Earlier today, we checked in with Ted Decker, the chairman, president, and CEO of Home Depot. I want you to take a look. We do have a lot of negativity, I feel, in the country. People are worried about what they can't understand. They're worried about tariffs. Now, you have equipment that is going to be tariffed. I am starting to take the view that

is going to be a little bit more transitory than people realize. There could be a spike momentarily, but you'll do everything you can to keep costs down for the consumer because that's the way Home Depot has already done it. That's what we do. And let me start by saying, you just had our founder, Ken Langone, on your show. Yes. Just start by saying, we're all bullish on America. And there's a lot

going on, but this is the greatest country in the world. Thank you. And as Ken said, there's so much optimism. We feel it in Home Depot. And whatever would happen, we're going to work through it. You know, we had tariffs in 2017. I mean, when did we have, you know, customs houses in all our ports? We've had tariffs forever.

we will manage through it and come out the other side better than anyone. So it's not something we worry about. You have been a great fighter of inflation. I think people don't realize, particularly in Washington, there are some companies that have said, you know what? We're drawing the line. We're not taking that price increase. You're one of them.

We are all about being the advocate for value for the consumer. Our business is built on providing value and great quality and customer service. We call it our three-legged stool. So we want the best assortment, we want the best value, and we want the best customer service all under one roof. So value has always been part of our equation. And we want to sell value.

product we want to move volume we're a big box retailer at the end of the day and now increasingly wholesale distribution we need to sell product we're not out here to milk margin we are here to provide value and drive units for our suppliers and our customers now how important are interest rates we had a big fed meeting people are concerned that uh

that rates have not come down enough versus the appreciation of your home since 2019. How do you balance it? Well, we focus on the appreciation of the home. I mean, you know these numbers, Jim. Since the end of 19, U.S. home values have gone up over 50%. The U.S. home is the single greatest asset class in the world. We think it's something like $45 trillion

of value in U.S. housing. So interest rates may come and go on different rates. We had some historically low rates. We're working our way down from what was a shorter-term spike in rates. But home value is going up 50%. The store of wealth, we think there's something like a $13 trillion increase in

in equity in Americans, homeowners, home value since the end of 2019. Well, what that says to me is that if I improve my home, it's not an expense. It's a capital investment. Very different mindset. Yes. And that's the way we think about it.

So you do an investment in your home. You do make an addition. You put it in a new kitchen, a new master bedroom. You freshen it up. That is an investment in your home. One of the things that also should help you, it's not like the housing stock is brand new. It's been aging for a long time.

As you'd imagine, our housing stock is the oldest it's ever been, and that would be obvious, but with the lack of building, we are anywhere between two and five million housing units short of demand. So since we haven't been building that much, you're actually aging more than you normally would. So well over half the houses in this country are now over 40 years old. So the amount of work and upkeep

you need to make on those houses. They've gained in value, but they need a lot of work. And we're the place to go to help people do that. One of the things we know if you've got an asset of that great worth, where you could damage it the most is having a leaky roof. And you've really taken care of that with that acquisition. We've taken care of that with our friends at SRS. Absolutely. And those who have a pool, unfortunately, I know it, that if it gets rusty, it's done. And it's a, it's an

It may be your most expensive asset if you do have one, and you can't put it off. Well, desalinators and pumps, they tend to go, and we're there for you. So what categories are doing well right now? Well, garden, as you can see, this is our season. We've had tremendous success with our decorative holiday programs, our Christmas programs.

programs are unbelievable. And then the Halloween program with our giant skelly, which I'm sure you've seen here in the distance. That is very scary. Just taking America by storm. But someone asked me the other night, they said, where, you know, who's coming to visit the show? They said, where should I spend my time? Where's the most excitement? Where's the most innovation? I said, literally, there's 600,000 square feet of innovation. You can go booth by booth

Bay by Bay, there is innovation at the Home Depot. Yeah. And I wanted to ask you, you did a survey.

of what are the top priorities of people? That's new. You just released it. What are the top priorities for your customers? Well, our customers, you know, the wear and tear on the home. So we need, you need to maintain. There's so much to do. Leaky faucets, as you mentioned, leaky roofs. A lot of people painted in 2000, the early days of COVID. I think everyone painted some room in their house. Well, now that's five years old. So the scuff marks and the,

dog prints and all the rest, it's time to repaint. So we're bullish on painting. Again, any of these things that can preserve the value of your home, your greatest asset. Now, I wanted to ask you, any impact on, say, a

Immigration, we need workers. We just came back from a conference for NVIDIA. What did they talk about? Without immigration, we don't have enough workers. At the same time, obviously, we have a balance. We want borders. What's your take on the issue? Well, the thing that we focused on, Jim, and talked about for a long time at the Home Depot is the United States has a shortage of skilled trade workers.

In our industries, in construction and electrical and plumbing trades, we think it's something like 400,000 shortages of skilled trades. If you talk to builders, if you talk to large-scale remodelers, they'd say one of their biggest issues

is that skilled tradesperson on the job site. So we're very, very interested in partnering public-private partnership. Say, how do we get more trades? We at Home Depot, we committed $50 million to train 2,500 tradesmen

tradespeople. We're way beyond that. I think we're up to something like 5,000 tradespeople that we've trained. So when they finish the class, they're a licensed plumber. They're a licensed electrician. We're working with the military. We're actually on military bases with the Home Builder Institute, whereas service members, when they've

said i'm transitioning back to civilian life we'll go on base and we'll teach them trades so that when they come out of the military they can go right in to skilled trade and it's a great job these are six-figure jobs you're generally your own boss you make your own lifestyle and i think as a nation john ferner and i at walmart wrote a op-ed on this last year where we said not everyone needs a four-year degree there's just technical schools and associate degrees and trade schools

It's a real need. It's a great career path. And that's what Home Depot is focused on. They're telling me that we're out of time, but we're not because I want people to know the culture, how much money you've raised, what you've done for veterans. It's a different kind of company. Well, as our founders always talked about, core value of ours is giving back. And we've always been generous and we help

help a lot of people, but we focus on the military. And there's so many military folks who have PTSD, who are homeless, who are not living in safe homes at the moment. So Frank Blake initially, years ago, consolidated our giving into Veterans Affairs. We've had a series of commitments, $100 million, $200 million. We've passed all those.

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Just before the break, you heard the first part of our interview with Ted Decker, who's the chairman and president and CEO of Home Depot. But I didn't come all the way out to the company's annual store manager meeting in Las Vegas for just a quick conversation. Right now, I think Home Depot has its finger on the pulse of the economy, giving you a great read on housing and the broader repair and renovation space. That's why I had much more to discuss with Decker. So take a look at part two of that Home Depot interview.

All right, first off, Tim, what are we doing here? This is our annual store manager meeting. So every year we come out to Las Vegas. I think we have about the largest private trade show. So 600 odd thousand square feet of product.

product, new innovation, all our suppliers are here. We bring in 2300 store managers. We're out here for a few days. We have some general sessions. We have some recognition of great performance from our store leaders. But most importantly, we get out here and we see product.

Because Home Depot is all about great product. And we have just thousands and thousands of new items out here that we introduce to the store managers. Great innovation by our great branded partners. And this is an important time. It's spring and maybe people don't realize that you basically have

A second holiday season. Yes. Yeah. I mean, this is our holiday. This is our Christmas. Spring for us is the biggest time of the year. And people get outside again and get planning and working on projects. And we've got some live goods here behind us, just some beautiful, beautiful product. And it's such a fun week for us out here. I don't know if people understand the scale of the brand and the scale of the company. It is huge.

Well, Home Depot, so we love our brand. We love our orange. You see a lot of orange around here. But there have been so many studies about the value of Home Depot, the brand itself, the intrinsic value of the brand by many. Look at the Gartners and Foresters. They have us as a top 20 global brand. So when you think we're not even in Europe or Asia, all the great brands in the world

Home Depot I've seen as high as top 18 brands. So this in and of itself, it's an American institution. And the brand is so valuable and powerful in and of itself. And under you, you keep evolving. You don't stand still. You made a great acquisition, one that you promised certain things. It's already ahead of that. Just last year, it's working.

It's working. So the pro has always been a very important part of our business. If you look at our retail store business for years, that customer base is largely split between pro and DIY. So the pro's always been important for us and that's why we have great pro brands. We always thought if we have great pro brands,

The pros will come, it'll be a halo effect with the consumers. So brands like Milwaukee, brands like Kills, it's a Bayer product, Masco Corporation just announced yesterday that Kills, the number one by far primer, every pro is using Kills primer.

came exclusive to the Home Depot as of yesterday. So not only do we have these great brands, they come exclusive to the Home Depot. But pro's always been a big piece of our business. And what we're trying to do is build out the capability sets to get more share of wallet from those larger pros and the more complicated purchase occasions.

They're all in our stores now. We just want to sell them more. So we're taking on wholesalers and we need capabilities like delivery, greater depth and breadth of assortment, house credit, account management, et cetera. And when we met SRS, we just fell in love with that company, with Dan Tinker and that management team.

And we found out not only do they have a great roofing business, they have a phenomenal pool business and landscape business. They took share all last year. They had a great year. We could not be happy with SRS. They're teaching us so much on this true wholesale B2B approach to the business. Things like house credit. They're teaching you. They're teaching us. I mean, when we go to set up house credit, we're sort of negotiating our contract with Dun & Bradstreet on how we get back

ground on these companies. But they know how to do it. They know how to do it. They've been doing it for years. We talk about a sales force. We're hiring hundreds of sales people. They have thousands of sales people. We're starting to do private fleet and delivery. Again, we have hundreds of

of trucks on the road with our drivers. They have thousands. So they are teaching us. It's been a great relationship. And have they been helping you with e-comm? Because I don't think people know the scale of your e-comm and the speed of your e-comm. So for us,

Ecom, what we like to call is interconnected retail. We're a project business. You generally are coming to Home Depot if you're fixing something or building something. We'd like to talk about how we solve problems or fulfill dreams. So it's an involved purchase journey. You're not just coming in, getting something and leaving.

So Frank Blake coined interconnected retail. It isn't just e-comm, it isn't omni-channel. That customer, through their purchase journey, is weaving through our digital assets and our physical stores, maybe getting delivery, maybe getting something installed, working with our entire asset base. And that's how we first started to build this interconnected e-comm business. We also love selling things online. We're now the fifth largest retailer. A few people would say, who are...

I won't mention the names of the really big online retailers, but you probably wouldn't think of Home Depot as one of those players. We're the fifth largest in pure dollar sales volume in e-com. And you mentioned speed. Speed's everything. People expect virtually everything, not even next day, not even same day, intraday. And we have worked so hard over the last several years building out our supply chain, our direct fulfillment centers, which are pick, pack, and ship.

We've built big and bulky, many more market delivery operation centers. As I said, we've started to invest in private fleet. We have never been faster on more products than ever in our history, and it's showing in our sales. Ted Decker, Chairman, President, and CEO, Home Depot.

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And now, a next-level moment from AT&T business. Say you've sent out a gigantic shipment of pillows, and they need to be there in time for International Sleep Day. You've got AT&T 5G, so you're fully confident. But the vendor isn't responding, and International Sleep Day is tomorrow. Luckily, AT&T 5G lets you deal with any issues with ease, so the pillows will get delivered and everyone can sleep soundly, especially you. AT&T 5G requires a compatible plan and device. Coverage not available everywhere. Learn more at att.com slash 5G network.

While we were at NVIDIA's big GTC event earlier this week, we also got a chance to check in with some of NVIDIA's key partners, companies that can help bring out the value of their high-end chips. For example, Cisco announced a new AI factory architecture. They're developing something with NVIDIA

to help enterprise customers deploy, manage, and secure their AI infrastructure. Yesterday, I got a chance to speak with Jason Wong. He's the founder and president and CEO of NVIDIA, along with Chuck Robbins, the chair and CEO of Cisco, about this new announcement and what it means for AI security. Take a look.

Here's a treat. We have Jensen Wong from Nvidia, of course, and Chuck Robbins from Cisco, emblematic of the partnerships that we saw. These are exploding, meaningful partnerships. Jensen, what's it like to partner with Chuck to do some of these things? I need to know how these things work. Well, you can't partner with a nicer guy, and you can't partner with a company with more might and more domain expertise.

There are two things that we're working on together, and both of them are completely revolutionary. The first one is, as you know, we've been inventing AI for the clouds, but we want to bring AI to the world's enterprise. And AI reinvented the entire computing stack from compute, networking, storage, the operating system, and the way you develop the applications on top.

and yet today's IT infrastructure, enterprise IT infrastructure is basically the same as it's been for a long time. And so Chuck and I are going to go and work on re-racking that entire infrastructure. And there's a few trillion dollars worth of infrastructure built around the world, and we've got to go reset that. That's the first thing. The second thing we're working on

and this is an area that Cisco and Chuck's been in for a long time and it's new for us, is telecommunications. As you know, telecommunications is also built on data centers.

And that data center is about to get reinvented with 6G and AI. And so the two of us are working on a whole new stack for that. Any one of these would be a trillion dollar opportunity. I know that since you bought Splunk, you're even better at these things. So what's it like to work with Jensen and the NVIDIA team? And how is it additive to Cisco? And by the way, to Cisco shareholders? Well, you can't find a nicer person to partner with than Jensen.

It's been fascinating. So Jensen called me probably 14 months ago and I said, you're the king of the world. Why are you calling me? And we sat down and started talking about the enterprise opportunity then. And we talked about the fact that our technology stacks are super complimentary.

so we have even though he does have a bit of a competition some of your products yeah but we talked about it early on and i said if our teams are going to do it we're going to position our networking gear and he's like fine do it that's fine you're a lover not a fighter well he is we're both lovers we're both lovers and so now we're partnering on networking yeah nvidia the last announcement we made exactly

he's he validated our networking within their validated architecture i think we're the only ones you validated yeah and then we agreed if a customer wanted it we'll build an ethernet switch based on his silicon so it's we want to give the customers what they want people at home who are they're looking for business and consumer they may understand this is actually far bigger than consumer right i know it hurts to say that because we have consumers watching but it's true it's much bigger and when you

You think about the security implications of this transition that Jensen was talking about. They're going to be huge. And when you get into just the initial AI inference applications are one thing where you're going to need all this new modern infrastructure. But the second phase is this agentic AI that we talk about and the need to reconstruct the underlying Internet logic.

to actually enable agents to communicate with each other in a secure way and actually achieve the vision that has been laid out for agentic AI, that it's a complete restructuring. Is the system that we have now ready for agentic AI or do we have to throw the system out, put an all new system in? Well, as you know, the computers that people run AI on are the ones that we're sitting in front of. That's what it looks like. And those systems are in none of the world's companies.

Well, then we have to place the whole world in this trillion. That's a two, three, four trillion dollar opportunity. No question about that. Yeah. You agree, too? Yeah. I mean, it's a giant journey and we got to start it. And so that's why I called Chuck. You know, nobody knows enterprise computing better than Chuck. And so so, you know, we we need to go and and re-rack.

the whole world's companies. I love that term. It's very persuasive. Yeah. Right? Well, you walk in these data centers, what is it? It's just racks and racks of technology. And I think the, you know, we believed...

A year ago that the enterprise opportunity was going to dwarf what we've done in the cloud space. And I've heard you say the same thing recently. So we think this opportunity is even bigger. Put your business roundtable hat on where how do we help as a country? I asked you this earlier. The country has to get behind you. The administration has to get behind. This is also a competitive world. How are we doing?

Well, I think we're winning right now for sure. I mean, look at this guy and what we're doing in this space and then the ecosystem that you see all around us here that's been built up around the AI factory notion and clearly we're winning. And I would say based on the conversations I've had with the administration, I know you've had a lot

uh they they want to protect that lead and they want us to win and i believe that their policies that they're going to implement will will ensure that that happens but if you're going to put a 25 tariff on hardware it could end up being on hardware that is an impediment to growth well we'll see where they land i think that uh you were talking about tariffs earlier today i think there there's going to be a lot of logic behind where they end up

I think the reality of their thinking around reciprocal tariffs in some countries that perhaps are treating us not as fairly as they should, I think that's an area that they should certainly go after. But I think they also want to make sure that whatever they do,

that they maintain this lead that we have and make sure that we win the AI race. Well, you are both leaders of American tech, of course, international, you use international business. Are we, is American tech, is the conversation as important as, do people get it? Do you think the average American gets how important what we're discussing is to their lives?

Well, there are two ways to answer that. Well, first of all, you were talking about international, Jim. I think that in no initiative and no foundational technology that I've ever known since the internet has the world and the leaders realized the importance of artificial intelligence to them. And the reason for that is because no country wants to outsource and let somebody else advance their intelligence.

And so this is really, really important to every country. And that's why the conversation is so relevant. With respect to people across the country, I do think that artificial intelligence as a technology is in the forefront of almost every conversation. And so everybody knows about the technology and why it's important, I think. It's impossible for them to realize the social impact

And the economic and the industrial implications of artificial intelligence. But at the same time, the notion of GDP, the Federal Reserve, where are the economies? This transcends all that. That's just not as important as we used to think. Well, five years ago, we thought 5G was super important.

And this dwarfs the whole discussion around 5G. Every time I went to Washington, we were talking about 5G and Open RAN and all these things, and they were all worried about it. No one talks about it anymore. It's all about 8G. But this is unbelievably positive. We have to put a value judgment on it. Don't we have to decide to either believe or just think that the world is flat? Everybody is so excited about it because we all see the wonderful potential of it. Whether it's for science or health care or just economic productivity.

I mean, we all see the insane opportunity ahead of us. You know, of course, there's also the wonderment of it. Right. You know that that's the word because that requires our imagination. And we got to get our heads bigger. We have somehow you guys, you're the leaders. You have to explain how important this is to our country and the world because it is not. We're trapped by the four walls of our current intelligence. Well, if you think about

One of the most powerful things this partnership is we come together and we actually simplify Enterprises ability to deploy AI applications. That's when you start unlocking the benefits in healthcare So the the enterprise customers need help understanding how do I do this simply and secure and how can I do this in a way that I feel good about it and I trust it and it's secure and I'm not at risk with my

employees or customers data. And that's what we're gonna do together. And I think that's when you're gonna see this healthcare, the thing you talk about all the time with science and healthcare and revolutionizing cures for diseases as an example.

We need to go help them build the infrastructure that's going to allow them to do that. To do that, we need enterprise IT. That's correct. Yeah, that's why enterprise IT is such a major trust. And that benefits the human in the United States every day. Well, I want people to understand that. And you both of you are great communicators. Chuck Robbins, who is the CEO of Cisco, $400 billion in 2000.

But now much bigger in terms of what you can become. Much, much bigger. And of course, Jens Wang, video CEO. Gentlemen, thank you so much for being the leaders that you are. Thank you. Mad Money's back again.

While we're in the Bay Area for GTC, I got a chance to catch up with a true AI pioneer, OpenAI. And that's the company that kicked this whole cycle off when it launched the original ChatGPT. Now, over the past couple of years, these guys have grown exponentially with its valuation rumored to be near $300 billion based on the latest financing rounds. Earlier this week, I got this chance to speak with Sarah Fryer. She's the CFO of OpenAI. I want you to take a look.

Welcome back to Man Buddy. Jim, it is always so good to be here. Thank you for having me. Thank you. Nine months now you've been here as CFO. What's the learning curve? Where are you? The learning curve is steep and I am still definitely on this upward bound of it because the industry changes every single day. There's so much to learn about in AI, as you know. But what's your mandate as CFO here?

So it's a couple of things. I think number one, it's about how do we make sure we are well capitalized to really get to our full ambition. As you know, with AI, it's both about investing in compute, investing in great researchers and investing in data. So that's number one. I think number two is building a strong business model where we have revenues that are coming from consumers, from enterprises, from developers.

And then finally, it's the stuff I love to do. I like to spend time with customers. I like to be part of helping build a team. And it's been super fun so far on all those fronts. It's interesting you say when you talk about the capital. I was amazed to hear that you say basically we're spending at a level of a hyperscaler. But I also know that you're not making money. And you just said that your job is to be sure that you have money. You are a potential $300 billion company that has to have the money for that. What are you going to do?

Yeah, so first of all, we're going to build a great business because the best way to fund any business, as you know, is with free cash flows. So our products today, 400 million people, consumers, who are using ChatGPT every single day. I hope your users are all using it. And of that, a certain portion of them pay us a subscription fee for either Plus or even Pro, $200 a month, and it's taken off like wildfire. It has, even though I felt discouraged after I read the video. I didn't think I could have enough use cases for it.

Pro has been unbelievable. The fastest. So one of the the anecdote of things I look in our business is how fast a business gets to 100 million dollars of ARR. So our enterprise business. Yes, that's a lot of people. People should know that. Ten months. Our self-serve business took one month. Our pro business, one week.

One week to get to $100 million of ARR. That is how fast it took off because people love it. They want access to coding. They want access to deep research, which we're going to talk about in a minute. They want access to even multimodal, so more voice, more visual, and so on. And $200 a month seems like nothing. You probably pay more than that for your coffee. I got discouraged by the very video that you're—

and he sends me two. I said, I don't need this. We'll have to up our game on that. Yes, you do. But strong business model, because you asked me the question. Selling out to consumers, to enterprises, and to developers. And then on top of that, bringing in investors, because we're just at the beginning of what we're doing. Now, say I interview a CEO today,

I want to know, I can pull 10 research reports, take a couple hours. Is there a better way? A much better way. So I would start with deep research, which I was talking about earlier. Deep research is effectively an agent that goes out and takes longer than just a quick call

call response. It can take up to 15, 20 minutes. And you can set it a pretty sophisticated question, right? Instead of just saying, hey, I'm about to interview Sam Altman, the CEO of OpenAI, I'd say, I want to interview Sam Altman, but I really want to get into this analogy he uses between the old transistor industry and the AI industry. Why are the two similar or different? And

And it's going to go off and use reasoning to not just go pull a bunch of sources and regurgitate what exists on the web, but it's actually going to go deeper and give you a thoughtful answer in the way a good analyst would do it. But a good analyst that might take days, maybe even weeks to pull that same report. This is what we've been waiting for. So it's here. And I should know that I'm glad you told me that because I need I can't have the days to be able to learn things. Now, let's talk about about.

about money for a second, and this time for Stargate. You've got a guy who founded, co-founded your company, who immediately says, even before the announcement's over, they don't have the money. I find it hard to believe that this consortium put together not only doesn't have the money, but the people aren't throwing money at it.

Yes. So let's—a moment on what Stargate is. So as I talked about, to build AI into what we see it to be in the future, we need a lot of compute. So Stargate is what we announced with President Trump, $500 billion invested starting here in the United States to build out 10 gigawatts of compute capacity, which is amazing. Do you know Ireland, as you know where I'm from, uses about 7 gigawatts a year, just for comparison. All right.

A lot of brain power, though. A lot of brain power, yeah. Good point. But we are starting out with our first couple of gigawatts here in the United States. So investing in the United States. This is the Abilene, Texas. This is Abilene, Texas with Oracle. It is our work on Denton with CoreWeave.

And now starting to do greenfield sites for this endeavor. Because here's what I see. We are building a lot of intellectual property down into the data center layer because we, OpenAI, are the frontier models, right? We know what infrastructure you're going to need to serve AI in the future. So just like

Back in the day, Amazon, when they were flying on e-commerce, said, huh, we have this thing called AWS, Amazon Web Services, right, cloud computing. They could have outsourced it to someone else, but they didn't. Today, they have 40% share of the cloud computing market at a 38% operating margin.

That is the business I believe we can build today with Stargate. Well, then that's a business that I want to pay more than a half a trillion for. We'd be happy to take your investment, Jim. Well, that would make you the 12th largest company in America, which wouldn't be so bad. Now, you are doing, you have unbelievable clients. And I think, you know, I'm talking about a Square, Duolingo, Canva. By the way, when you use Canva, which I've done with chat,

I mean, I can design an ad campaign. I don't need an advertising agent. I don't need anybody. Well, what's incredible is when you take that thought and move it up and down the economy. I was with a bunch of small business owners. Which I know you care about. I care a lot about. And they do not have access to an ad agency, even if they wanted to. Right, right. And so now what we're seeing is small businesses can create an ad campaign effectively.

A busy mom can create, like, the meal plan for her family this week. And the CEO of Grab, Anthony, who's amazing, can build transforming outcomes for his business. Can that mom afford it?

Yes, because it's largely free. Like if you want to use TechGPT, it's free. But then if she wants more, because she wants to be able to talk to the model more, do deep research, that's when she starts to pay. And so that's our model. We bring you on for free. We want to make sure AGI is available to the planet. But then if you want more, which we think people will want more, then you start to subscribe and that builds our business. We'll have much more with OpenAI CFO Sarah Fryer. Stay with Kramer.

It is time for the lightning round. We're going to start with Joel in New Jersey. Joel. Hey, Kramer. This is Joel from New Jersey. Do you still see waste management as a strong buy?

No, I think it is a super strong buy, a lifetime super strong buy. I'm a buyer right here. And every time I've ever sold that, it has been wrong. Let's go to Sam in Pennsylvania. Sam. Jim, listen, company Seville caught my attention with its sizzling performance. The company did $270 million in revenue last year, and it was profitable. Caught my attention with Klarna coming up, given Klarna is valued at $15 billion, Seville with its $1.3 billion, and it's better cash flow. I think it could be a buy. What do you think?

Well, I think that there's a lot of these companies and that's kind of the problem. When we see so many companies in the same sector, we're going to have to say no. I don't like it right here. I want to go to Mike in Massachusetts. Mike. Hey, Jim. I want to know, is it too early for the Sam Altman nuclear power startup down 50 percent in the last two months? It's Opel.

Oh man, is it too early? It is way, way too... It is mega too early for that one, buddy. And that, ladies and gentlemen, is the conclusion of the Lightning Round.

Ladies and gentlemen, we are in a short seller's paradise, an incredible moment for anyone who wants to bet against U.S. stocks. I know that because I used to short stocks for a living as a hedge fund manager 25 years ago, betting against all sorts of overvalued companies when I thought the tape was going against them. And right now, the shorts are practically shooting fish in a barrel.

What gives them the advantage here? First, we have a tariff deadline beckoning. A frightening deadline, actually. April 2nd, when the big tariffs are going to kick in. That means we're headed for a moment of maximum fear as regular stock buyers either flee to the sidelines or move the money to Europe. How do I know this? Okay.

Okay, put yourself in my shoes, will you? Let's say I come out here and I say I wouldn't worry about the tariffs anymore. The markets come down, so now they're priced in. If the tariffs are then met with a firestorm of resistance, very likely they'd skim you live on YouTube and social media. If you try to go against the pervasive conventional wisdom right now that things are really ugly, I'm telling you, you're going to get steamrolled. Second, I don't see how the White House can back down. If this administration wants to be taken seriously, they need to follow through on their promises.

There's no better sign that Trump means business than his willingness to sacrifice our stock market in order to bring the pain to our trading partners. When you're members of the administration using terms like transition, that means be afraid. Be very afraid. Sell, sell, sell, sell, sell, sell.

Third, for years we've been conditioned to believe that everyone must do their part to get prices down because we don't want inflation to get out of control. Unfortunately, someone isn't doing it. Tariffs are inflationary, which means the Fed has to focus on them. That's how we get all this behind-the-scenes grumbling from some Fed officials who say there's no real hope for rate cuts if inflation spikes because of tariffs.

So, we're in an unholy crossroads where money managers need to sell because of Washington and Wall Street is more than happy to cut estimates based on the broad rubric of tariffs. Bad intersection. But what happens to this market after the tariffs are implemented? Maybe another month of wrangling, maybe two months, maybe the whole summer. It could be real bad. So, we end up with this building negative that can sink 10 ships. You saw it all at work this morning. Futures were down huge, even though nothing was going on. They only bounced back, but then we had an anemic market finish. That

It's simply fund managers getting short to prepare for themselves for tomorrow's posting from the president. Tomorrow's talks by administration officials prepping the tariff beach before the land ain't. These hedge funds figure they can't afford not to be short here because we'll hear nothing but bad news about inflation, the Fed, the president, Treasury secretary. In that environment, you only need to know one thing, people. You must say nothing.

this too shall pass. But the shorts, as long as this is front and center, they'll be ready to profit from building negativity until we finally get over it. And we won't get over it

until the president either wins or throws in the towel. In the meantime, there'll be stocks that can buck the trend. There always are. Understand, though, the short sellers aren't after individual stocks. They're after the S&P 500 futures. As long as you're steeled against their selling, you'll make it. Otherwise, don't be surprised when the futures are down all night again because of nothing, because that's the new normal until the tariff issue resolves itself. I like

I like to say there's always one more good something. I promise I'll be right back just for you right here on MadMoney. I'm Jim Cramer. See you tomorrow. All opinions expressed by Jim Cramer on this podcast are solely Cramer's opinions and do not reflect the opinions of CNBC, NBCUniversal, or their parent company or affiliates and may have been previously disseminated by Cramer on television, radio, internet, or another medium.

You should not treat any opinion expressed by Jim Cramer as a specific inducement to make a particular investment or follow a particular strategy, but only as an expression of his opinion. Cramer's opinions are based upon information he considers reliable, but neither CNBC nor its affiliates and or subsidiaries warrant its completeness or accuracy, and it should not be relied upon as such. To view the full Mad Money Disclaimer, please visit cnbc.com forward slash madmoneydisclaimer.

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