CNBC Squawk Box with Brad Gerstner - July 6th, 2026

Yeah, incredible to be here, Andrew. Thanks for having me. I remember coming on Squawk Box three or four years ago when we first started talking about this. And of course, last July 4th, the president signed the Invest America Act into law as part of the big beautiful bill that created an investment account for every child at birth. Every child gets on their phone a little share of Microsoft and Nvidia, et cetera. That started on Saturday. You can gift into these accounts. Every child forevermore born into this country under the age of two is going to get a thousand dollars invested in the S&P 500 that can compound for their lifetime. If you start with a thousand dollars, as you know, and that is matched, and you add just ten dollars a week, that's fifty thousand dollars for every child at eighteen. This makes real the promise of the American dream, not for some, but for everybody. Every child a shareholder in the upside of America. So, today is a big celebration. We're going to have the first ever joint bell ringing by the Nasdaq and NYSE, and the first ever remote bell ringing from the Oval Office at 9:30 Eastern time. So, it's a great celebration. We've got incredible CEOs from Michael Dell to Ryan McInerney and across the spectrum who've joined the Invest America CEO Council, who are giving huge contributions of their own. And of course, you mentioned Gwynne Shotwell's gift this morning, an extraordinary gift. Two million shares of SpaceX to two million kids that they'll hold in their accounts over the course of the next 10 to 20 years. And when they're 18, they can hold on to the shares of SpaceX or sell those shares. But it shows the flexibility of this platform. This is not a program. This is a platform. It is the largest unlock of direct philanthropy in the history of the country.

Yes. It's incredible, the outpouring of support. I've said many times, America is the most giving country on the planet, and the last year has definitely affirmed my belief in that. The president asked Michael Dell and I to go out and raise a hundred billion dollars for these Trump accounts, and we're well on our way. We already have commitments of tens of billions of dollars into these accounts, and I would say across corporate America, across the Business Roundtable, across the S&P 500, our hit rate must be over 90%. Everybody wants to participate in this. But here's the key. This is not just about the largest companies in America. Take Altimeter. We have 36 employees at Altimeter. We have about 85 kids of those employees, and we're going to donate to every one of those kids' accounts. This is for every small business, every local restaurant, every landscaper, every contractor, every medium-sized business, and every large business. We make it really easy to add money to these accounts. Every account has a QR code associated with it. All you have to do is Apple Pay or use a debit card, and you can transfer money into any of these accounts. And so, we hope that, working with the Small Business Association and many others, that we're going to expand this, and it's already starting to take off among not only the largest companies in America, which of course you know all the incredible names, from Nvidia to Salesforce, from Dell to iHeart, but to all businesses in America.

Yeah, well, first Andrew, we have about 16.8 million 529 accounts in America, and 90 plus percent of those are with people in the top 10% of income. So, 529 accounts, which is a college savings account, is perfectly good, but the fact of the matter is it does not fulfill the president's Main Street agenda. The Main Street agenda is for the 75% of families that today feel like they're left out and left behind, like the American dream is escaping them. We're going to get every single one of those families into the game. And so, I hope that over the course of the next few months, we're going to be auto-creating with the Social Security Administration 70 million accounts for every kid under the age of 18, so that we can get this money into those accounts and get it compounding. And for moms and dads, here's what I would say to you. We've done lots of studies, all cohorts of Americans want to see their kids do better. If it's $5, if it's 10 bucks, it's as easy as double-clicking Apple Pay on your phone. Most families have this. You can Venmo money into the accounts. We want to make it frictionless for friends and family and parents to contribute a few bucks at a time into these accounts. Every time money hits these accounts, Andrew, it's automatically swept the next day into the S&P 500. So, they will be fully invested in the greatest companies in America, compounding in the upside of America, true direct ownership. This is not a government program. These are individual private accounts for 70 million Americans hopefully over the course of the next few months, where they own the best companies. They own Nvidia and Microsoft and Apple and Walmart, etc. So, we're well on our way. Today's a big celebration, a big milestone. And hopefully we'll see a lot of people get on board.

Yeah, no. It's a great question. The last thing anybody wants is crony capitalism. We don't want the government picking and choosing stocks, which is why the legislation required that any cash into the accounts automatically swept into the S&P 500. But, the legislature gave broad authority to a whole group of categories, which included gifting. So, only shares gifted into the accounts can remain as shares. Any cash that comes into the account has to be going into those index funds. And so, if you look at the broad exclusionary language, the 529 accounts established, it basically said, 'These have to be treated like 408 A accounts, IRA accounts, except where otherwise determined by the Treasury Secretary.' And the Treasury Secretary, obviously, IRA accounts never contemplated gifts from folks like Michael Dell or Gwynne Shotwell. So, we had to come up with a set of rules. The Treasury Department promulgated those rules. The President tweeted about it last week. I was very happy. I'm telling you, the idea that Warren Buffett could give a share of Berkshire Hathaway to every kid in America, that Elon Musk could give shares of SpaceX, that Sergey Brin could give shares of Google, this idea will unlock transformative philanthropy and get everybody into the game. It's all upside for the kids of America. So, I'm thrilled we're heading down this path.

Well, I'm a huge fan of Alex and I think Alex made some really good points. But I would say this, follow the money. The revenue growth of these companies is the fastest revenue growth we've ever seen in the history of technology. That continues unabated in May, in June, and into July. So if they're really upset with the companies, then I don't think they would be using the products. So two things can be simultaneously true. Alex is right. It's really important that we support open source models in the US. So for those companies that want the choice of open weights and open models and controlling that part of the stack, they're able to do that. But for the vast majority of companies, they want the best. And the best frontier models, the American thoroughbred models, are going to be OpenAI and Anthropic and X with Elon, maybe Gemini in the mix, etc. And so we want the thoroughbreds to run, we want those models to do great. I give huge credit to the White House, Secretary Bessent, Howard Lutnick, etc. When they disabled Fable, we went through a process, we got it back online quickly. We need American models, both open source and closed source, running as fast as we can because the preeminent race is the race with China. We must stay ahead of China for both economic and national security reasons, and I think we found a good balance here. But I don't think it's either or, Andrew, it's both. We need to support American open source models, both the models out of Nvidia, which are terrific. We've got Misha and the team at Reflection that are building some great things, and our closed source models. And I think insofar as Chinese open source models are concerned, we just want to make them play by the same set of rules. We do not want them distilling our models, taking our IP, and then competing against us for free, the way that they dumped steel on the United States. Make everybody play by the same set of rules. I'm confident if we do, that America's models will win, and I think that we're in a pretty good position right now coming out of the recent discussions.

Well, again, I think we got to be pretty careful with the verbs and the language that we're using. Did Meta Stories rip off Snapchat? The history of Silicon Valley is replete with examples of competitors copying other products that others have, and then they have to win the game on the field. I've talked to Dylan about this at Figma. If Figma had a choice to make, they can use the model or not use the model. I think some companies will say, 'Listen, we're going to go open source because we don't want to have any interaction with these companies.' But, make no mistake about it. AI platforms are horizontal. They're not going to be confined to a narrow little area of applications. They're going to build their own applications. Remember, when Apple built iOS, they also built a mail app and a calendaring app and a browser app called Safari to compete with Google. They built a lot of apps of their own and I'm certain that OpenAI and Anthropic are going to build some apps of their own. Some of those will be competitive. Some of those will be novel. I don't think that's stealing. I think the history of Silicon Valley is a history of competition like that. I would never want companies that we're invested in to be milking somebody for all their information, getting their product IP and then going out and deploying that. I don't think that's what happened here, but I understand the concern.

Yeah, well, the question coming into this year, Becky, and remember, we had two 25% drawdowns in AI data center semiconductor stocks over the last 18 months over this question. Would the AI revenue justify the investment in CapEx, the extraordinary 1.2 trillion-dollar annual investment in CapEx that we're seeing? People came into this year very nervous. In fact, on my podcast, my partner and I, Bill Gurley, were on opposite sides of this debate. I thought that the revenues would show up, but we didn't know. In January this year, we saw Anthropic's revenues with Opus 4.8 beginning to take off and then they went totally parabolic. That lit the fuse on the market with the SOX up 80% this year on the back of that revenue growth out of Anthropic. It's the single most important thing in the market. If you told me 3 months from now all of a sudden Anthropic's revenue or OpenAI's revenue stopped or stopped growing, that would be a real problem, not just for them, for the entire AI trade in the market. I don't see that. I don't expect that to continue. We're still very, very early. In a $125 trillion global economy, if you take 5% of that knowledge work, 5 to 10% of that knowledge work, and you use AI to empower it, make it more productive, that's going to be hundreds and hundreds of billions of dollars in revenue. If you look at the trajectory that Anthropic is on, I think it could be as high as a hundred billion of revenue by the end of the year. There's lots of talk, obviously, about IPOs for both of these companies. And so, I think there's extraordinary growth ahead. I think it's terrific for America, by the way. This is the single most important contributor to the GDP growth of the United States of America this year. It's contributing over 100 basis points of our GDP growth. Very important for us to see this continue. But listen, trust but verify. You got to see those revenues rolling in. They got to continue to build great products. I think there are a couple more models already being trained and in queue. Let's call these the post-mythos models that will be trained starting in September on Vera Rubin. And so, we're going to 10x the amount of compute that we use to train these models. We're going to dramatically improve the chips we use to train these models. We're going to stay ahead of China. And when we do that, we're going to have more and more products that are incredibly useful to both consumers like us, but also to enterprises.