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Hey, I'm Cramer. Welcome to Mad Money. Welcome to Cramerica. Other people want to make friends; I just want to make you some money. My job is not just to entertain, but to educate, do some teaching. Call me at 1-800-743-CBC. Tweet me at Jim Cramer. You can't worry about where a stock's been; just focus on where it's going. That's becoming my watchword for this explosive market. You need to be extremely flexible, more than you might like to be. You can't pass up on a good stock just because it's moved up beyond where you thought it could go. You're liable to miss a score of a lifetime.
Pleasure. That feels like the takeaway from what you see every day around here, including this one where the Dow gained 182 points, the S&P advanced 0.2%, and the NASDAQ edged up 0.07%. Today we host our Investing Club monthly meeting, and frankly, I was furious at myself as the steward of a charitable trust and a teacher of how the market works. I felt I haven't delivered enough of late, not enough value.
Sure, Jeff Marks and I have had some real winners. We're not doofuses. We're not bozos, for heaven's sake.
But when I look at the winners, though, I invariably find the same pattern. These stocks have rallied, often gigantically, before I bought them, and I did not let that fact stop me from purchasing them. Meanwhile, my biggest missed opportunities were stocks that had run where I let the price scare me away, and that is what made me so furious.
Let's start with a couple I did right, if you don't mind. GLW. That's Corning Glass Works. GLW. Here's a company I hadn't thought about in ages. I didn't know what they were up to other than making the glass for my cell phone. Then on September 12th, 2025, we went to Harrodsburg, Kentucky, where Corning makes the glass for that, and I listened to the formidable Wendell Weeks talk about how Corning's fiber was starting to take a lot of share in the data center. I was down there to talk to Apple, but I'm listening. I'm listening. I'm listening. I only knew that copper ruled in the data center because it's cheap and conducts better, both for power distribution and the high-frequency signals. But Wendell was patient with me. He walked me through things. He calmly explained that glass is superior to copper when it comes to speed and cybersecurity. It doesn't have corrosion. He said that's enough to displace copper both as a way to connect separate chips and as a way to connect transistors within a chip. And those are gigantic markets. My first reaction: oh, I thought, wait a second. Corning had just rallied from $52 to 77 bucks. I had missed it.
Too bad. Oh, I wish I had it earlier. If only I'd gone down to Harrodsburg earlier. But then I said, wait a second. No. No. The CEO's conviction was so fundamental, his knowledge of what could happen was so crystal clear, I had to buy it. I just had to. So what do we do? We bought Corning for the charitable trust at $77. And you know what? The stock's now $190.
Even after it doubled, it turned out to be cheap, as Nvidia bought the right to take a stake in Corning for $3.2 billion. Good thing I didn't let the stock's relentless rally scare me away from buying it for the charitable trust.
Same goes for ARM Holdings. The chip design company had been putting up some pretty good numbers. But more important, it announced that rather than just licensing its technology to other chipmakers, ARM would also make their own CPUs. Big change. Right when we started hearing that these new AI agents needed a ton of advanced CPUs to operate, it's a windfall for anyone who can make CPUs, meaning Intel, AMD, and ARM Holdings.
I don't know. ARM's trading at 172. It had been at 115 just a couple weeks ago when I learned this. All right, six weeks ago. I had passed on almost 60 points. So what did I say? I said, well, I'm too late. But you know what? I couldn't resist the temptation. CEO Rene Haas was so darn bullish on our interview from the Nvidia GTC conference, and he's always been straight with us. I'd already missed Intel. I'd passed on AMD. So I decided enough is enough. Just forget where that darn thing came from and do some buying.
Sure enough, as people realized that we're going to need more CPUs in the data center, ARM at $172 when I purchased it proceeded to roar right to $320.
There are so many stories like this. I just wish I had realized that you needed to forget where it was and focus on where it's going to go. I mean, for example, okay, I sat down with Michael Dell at the same Nvidia GTC conference that I met with ARM's Haas. Michael told us it totally exposed. I mean, it was like an amazing story. Like, I couldn't believe it. Like, I was like saying, you mean this? You mean this? I mean, it was downright unbeatable. Right there on the tape. Stock at $156. Oh, I was furious at myself, though. I had actually told club members that we were going to buy this one. But did I buy it? No. Why? Because the stock had been at 117. I had missed it. What was I supposed to do? Come on top of an almost 40-point gain? I'm not an idiot. In retrospect, I was an idiot. I should have bought it because now it's at 305.
Oh, then there's Marvell Technology. Lots of people think that this one was totally uncatchable, but that's untrue. Late last year, okay, get this. Late last year, there had been this kind of noise about maybe Marvell had lost a huge chunk of business. Okay, last time CEO Matt Murphy had come on in December when the stock was at $88. He told us that he just reported and there was no loss of business. People were lying about what he was saying. I want you to listen to the adamancy of this man who spent several million dollars in the open market buying his stock, and you tell me what you do.
There's all this noise out there. I am the signal. I know what's going on. I have the visibility. I have the relationship with these customers. And so our business is rock solid in our data center, right? And nothing has changed since last Tuesday.
Does that sound like a man who's in doubt about his company's fortunes? I was two feet away from the guy. Two feet. I wanted to wait until I was not frozen for the trust. You know, I was free to trade. But when I was free, did I buy it? No. You see, here's why. Because I remember when the stock was 70 and now the stock's at 90. I had missed Marvell. My bad. Next.
That was the signal. Yeah, he really was. The company just reported a monster quarter this very night. That $88 stock traded to $218 today before succumbing to profit taking this very evening. I whiffed. Hey, maybe I can try it tomorrow because it looks down.
How about though, when I'm attracted to what looks like value? How about when I own Microsoft for the charitable trust? Thinking, well, it's got Ignite, right? It's cheap. It's good. It's ready. I smell a bargain.
I think my nose got this one totally wrong. Stupid nose. I'd cut it off, but I don't want to spread my face. Now I look at it, same price as it's always been, right? I mean, it's been there forever, but I got to say, oh wow, that's cheap, right? It's doing nothing. I mean, the others are flying. I don't think this one is doing nothing. The same enterprise value to sales multiple as Alphabet. It's got a ton of software. It's hated, but that's got to be liked eventually. Of course, the stock would be recommended by everyone, except for this Ben Wright from Melius, who's adamant that Microsoft's vulnerable from so many different directions. Non-voice AI, huge gaming business, a Windows product that you wish you didn't have to deal with, but your employer insists you have. Memo stock could be a huge source of funds to purchase SpaceX, Anthropic, and OpenAI once they come public. Microsoft's done absolutely nothing while most of the rest of tech has exploded higher. The opportunity cost here for me has been horrendous, but I liked it because it hadn't taken off, because it hadn't doubled. That's looking like a darn big mistake now. And if it doesn't do well this next quarter, well, guess what's going to happen?
Sell, sell, sell. Yeah. Nine years we've owned this stock. Sell, sell, sell. I look at where it had come from. Nowhere. And somehow I thought that was good.
Look, there's just too much opportunity out there to hold on to stocks that refuse to budge. The lesson here is that if you think a stock's headed higher, don't use where the stock has come from as an excuse not to buy. Notice I'm not even including the wow ones. Micron, Western Digital, Seagate, Sandisk. I'm not talking about those. I'm talking about the more easily attainable. Those ones are just incredible. Obviously, I missed those. People have made billions in those stocks. No, the ones I went over here are all logical, up a lot, but in retrospect, not all that much.
Meanwhile, we held on to Microsoft for the charitable trust, assuming it represented value, and the value you got, nada. The real value was in the other stocks I just mentioned, not Microsoft. So here's a brutal bottom line: tech stocks that haven't moved in this environment probably do not represent value. They represent value traps. Don't think about where the stock has been, because if you do, you'll own Microsoft instead of Marvell or Micron or ARM or Dell and so many others that have moved. But they will likely keep going higher. Why? Because they're crushing expectations. They're out-executing the competitors, and they're cleaning up in this new era of artificial intelligence, the dominant theme of what perhaps may be a lifetime. Will in Kentucky. Will.
Jim, this is Will from beautiful Lexington, Kentucky. How's it going?
Well, man, I wish I were there. I like Harrodsburg, though. That's more my kind of Corning-Apple style.
All right. So I know we've got some uncertainties around AI still, and previously you've put these kinds of stocks in a too-hard bucket. But now that the multiple's gone down a little bit, and I know you respect Bill McDermott, is now the time to buy now?
I think the stock is bottoming. I don't think that it's going to have a huge year because I do think that in the end people want hardware. But I mean, do I agree that Bill McDermott is going to do a good job? I think the stock is, again, I mean, there's upside, but I feel there's a little bit of upside in some of the other softwares too. But what I really want to be in is hardware because that is what's moving in this new era of artificial intelligence, accelerated computing, and just amazing opportunity. Right? Look, you have to stop thinking about where a stock has been and instead focus on where it could be going. That's how you can own the winners in this market.
Flexibility on Mad Money tonight. Salesforce earnings just crossed the tape. I'm digging into the results with the CEO, Marc Benioff, to learn more about the quarter. Then we've gotten a raft of retail earnings over the past couple of weeks, and I'm breaking down the reports to see which companies are separating themselves from the rest in this economy. And can Snowflake's blowout quarter tell us about the, well, what is it going to tell us? State of software, state of AI. Why don't we talk with the CEO and find out. Cramer.
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What do we make of these numbers from Salesforce, the cloud software kingpin with a stock that's been under pressure for well over a year from AI worries? After the close today, Salesforce reported a strong set of numbers. Revenue growth reaccelerated, coming in higher than expected. They posted a very big earnings per share beat, though most of that was from a bountiful $27 billion buyback. But the stock couldn't get traction in after-hours trading, possibly because the remaining performance obligation, sort of like the backlog, came in light, fueling fears that Salesforce might be having trouble signing customers to longer contracts, even though I think they would beg to disagree. There's a lot to consider here, especially with the stock so far off its highs and a buyback that's one of the biggest in the entire market. So let's go straight to the source. Mr. Benioff, welcome back to Mad Money. All right, Marc, you got sharply better than expected earnings. You are guiding for very good numbers in the second half. I'm trying to figure out the disconnect between a stock that looks like it's down and what I see as very big numbers. Help me here.
Jim, it's the SaaS apocalypse. So welcome. We're all drinking SaaS Barillas here, but yes, you're right. Revenue is up, you know, very significantly, as you can see, and we have just a fantastic quarter, up 14% year-over-year on revenue. It's our first $11 billion quarter, Jim. Isn't that amazing?
Oh, I think it's incredible, and I know you bought back a lot of stock because you believe the stock is inexpensive. Someone might say, listen, you bought back a lot of stock and the stock just keeps dropping. What's the point of buying back the stock?
Well, Jim, you're right. You know, we can look around for great opportunities in the market, but Salesforce is probably the greatest, and we are excited to be able to return that to our investors. In fact, it's one of the reasons why you saw that the Q1 GAAP diluted net income per share was $2.42, up 52% year-over-year, Jim. That's non-GAAP diluted net income per share of $3.88. That was up 50%. We've never seen numbers like that. It's really because we've been able to buy back the stock and return that to our investors in a material way.
Okay. Are you happy with how the Agentforce is going? Because I know that you use tokens as one method. You also use billions as another method. I'm trying to get my arms around what the tokens method looks like. To me, the agent revenue number is pretty good.
Well, you saw Agentforce revenues now over a billion dollars, Jim. That's incredible. And Agentforce is now on all of our products, from sales to service. Even inside our core applications now, we have Agentforce Co-worker that lets our customers work with Agentforce directly, giving them tremendous capability to do things they've just never been able to do before.
When I call CVS, is it possible that I might be speaking to an agent who can route me better than someone who just puts me on hold?
Well, you know that CVS is one of our largest customers, and we're really excited to be announcing that they're using Agentforce and doing it in incredible new ways. We've seen healthcare continue to look for ways to connect with their customers using agentic technology. You probably also saw UCLA Health. You can even go to their website, uclahealth.org, and you can use Agentforce to kind of get information on directly working with the physicians and the technology available there.
All right. So Marc, let's talk about this SaaS, whatever you want to call it. There are people who are saying, listen, you're being disrupted. You're being disrupted by these new AI platforms, and what it's doing is making it harder for you to get longer deals at good price increases. What do you say to that?
Well, Jim, I mean, you can see we just had a record quarter. It's kind of, it's really incredible. And when you see the number of million-dollar transactions that happened in the quarter, well, this was our record level. We've never seen this many large transactions happen. And also, I think we're going to see in the second quarter, you know, attrition is probably coming down. A lot of the predictions that are happening in regards to the SaaS apocalypse just hasn't happened. I mean, it really, you think about how you look at Slack and the incredible growth rate of Slack. It's been really driven by the AI wave and the ability now for these companies to do things that they have not been able to do before. All of this is really made possible by this tremendous new AI technology.
All right. Should I be worried about Tableau, which I think might be more in the crosshairs of what we're talking about, or the commerce silo, which I always kind of liked and I know is very important, near and dear to you?
Well, I think that when you look at Tableau, Jim, we just got done with Tableau conference a couple weeks ago. The new Tableau is incredible, and it's bolstered by this AI capability, that is the agentic capabilities now within Tableau. You can talk to Tableau. You can create Tableau capabilities in entirely new ways. That gives Tableau the same kind of Agentforce power that we now have inside all of our apps. See, at every level, all Salesforce apps, whether it's sales or service or marketing, whether it's analytics like Tableau, whether it's commerce, even whether it's Slack, are just all made powerful by this agentic platform. And now I think you saw that we've completed our transaction, and we had a great first quarter here with Informatica. It was just incredible to see data perform so well in the quarter as well.
All right. Can you help us understand, you're very excited about the tokens number. I'm trying to understand for our viewers why that is such a good number. Put it in some context.
Well, when you see just the number of tokens that we're able to distribute to our customers, it really gets down to the adoption of the products. That is, well, you know, are people using Agentforce? Well, you can see it in this incredible token number. And the token number basically shows that we continue to just outstrip, you know, our ability to deliver to our customers this incredible capability. That's why tokens are so important.
All right, so let's look at the price journey. I tend not to want to do that with software companies. But at a certain point, I say, well, wait a second. After this number, which is a rather huge earnings per share number, and yes, okay, so it's from a buyback. I don't know. I saw Apple have huge numbers from a buyback for many years. You're selling it like 12 times earnings. I mean, my thinking is just keep buying back stock until if the marketplace doesn't want it, you buy it because you know the numbers better than anybody.
Well, Jim, you just articulated our philosophy very well, which is that we are doing everything we can to create customer success, to deliver every customer the ability to use this amazing new agent capability. And if the market is not delivering on our results, then we are very happy to buy back our stock as well.
Now you are buying it back ahead of what you said, and this was, I thought, terrific again. You said it'd be a second-half acceleration. You're not backing away from that. You're very close to it, and you're sticking with those numbers.
Well, you can see we're going to have a monster year. We're going to deliver more than $46 billion in revenue this year. There's no enterprise software company that's doing more than Salesforce is. And I think that being the largest in the field, delivering the agentic capability across all of our products, helping all of our customers cross the chasm into this new world of the Agentic Enterprise, this remains our main focus.
And then finally, I just want to get a feel for how you're viewing the world. I mean, you know, all we ever hear about is Anthropic hurting, is hurting you, hurting everybody that's in software, OpenAI. What's the matter with that narrative? Why is that narrative so false when we do see so many companies in your industry being hurt?
Well, Jim, I think that, you know, that isn't exactly what's happening. What's happening is we have an incredible new capability, which is artificial intelligence. Everyone who's used it knows this is an incredible new asset. It's a new type of infrastructure. And by bringing that in, for example, one of the tremendous success stories in the quarter is Slack, but also Slackbot. That inside Slack now, you have the ability to talk to this incredible AI that is giving you these amazing results. Well, Jim, guess what? That Slackbot is driven by Anthropic. And so by building Anthropic now into Slack, we're able to take an incredibly successful product. By the way, Slack is used aggressively by Anthropic, by OpenAI, all the companies you just mentioned, to run their own businesses. But now Slack has the ability to go through, to be able to look at your messages, to be able to read your channels, to be able to have a comprehensive understanding of your business and give you tremendous advice. That's the power of AI. It's the ability to read large amounts of data and be able to come up with these tremendous insights.
Well, to me, look, I'm glad you're buying back stock because I think the sellers down here are wrong. It's just too inexpensive. I just don't get it, but we'll see what they say. And just, second half awaits us. How about that?
Jim, we're going to keep focusing on our customer success. And you're right, we're going to continue to drive our revenue. We're going to continue to deliver tremendous cash flow. You saw the cash flow number was incredible for the quarter and for the year. It will be extraordinary. And then, Jim, finally, we're going to do exactly what you said, which is we're going to return incredible shareholder value by focusing on buying stock back during this time of incredibly low prices. That's called the SaaSpocalypse.
Excellent. I want to thank Marc Benioff, chair and CEO of Salesforce, CRM, a stock that I do own for my charitable trust. Thank you, Marc.
