Bring in show music, please. Hi, I'm CNBC producer Katie Kramer. Today on Squawk Pod, famous investor Paul Tudor Jones with a big look at the markets.
It still feels like 1999, a two-speed market. You've got it completely perfectly bifurcated in the sense that you have obviously everything that's adopting AI and everything that's not, and they're going in opposite directions.
The hedge fund manager on poverty, the post-COVID bull market, and the warning he sees from all the AI equity in a busy IPO landscape. Look out.
2027 is going to be really, really challenging for the stock market.
Then ever struggle with the vibes when it comes to friends, colleagues, classmates? Organizational psychologist and author Adam Grant on how to make real connections.
Deep talk is asking questions that we would normally ask the second or third time that we meet somebody, like, what's your biggest regret?
Plus, job cuts at the grocery store, Bumble stumble, and you know how you think your phone is listening to you? Anthropic with a warning about our smart devices.
You know, I talk less in front of my phones now than I talk in front of you.
I still don't believe it.
It's Tuesday, October 13th, 2026. Squawk Pod begins right now. Stand back by in three, two, one, queue up, please.
Good morning. Welcome to Squawk Box right here on CNBC. We're live from the Nasdaq MarketSite in Times Square. I'm Becky Quick, along with Joe Kernen and Andrew Ross Sorkin.
And maybe the scariest story of the morning: Anthropic warning that AI models could soon copy themselves across home devices. In a blog post, the company said that small AI models are, in its words, months away from developing the capabilities needed to replicate themselves across internet-connected devices like smart ovens or Android TV boxes that would allow the models to use the device's computing power to spread instead of relying on data centers. Anthropic said this scenario hasn't yet taken place, but if it does, the company said it would be, in its words, challenging to shut down since there would be no centralized shut-off points.
In other words, no ability to put in a kill switch.
This has always been the question: this idea, if you can replicate yourself and put yourself in places where nobody can touch you.
Does it make you think twice about having a smart home that's got everything from your...
I've thought twice about that already. Yeah, you know, we've said so many times, I always use foot fungus as the example, but you know, it happened just recently to Penelope. She was talking about something and it was just bizarre. I mean, there was no searches, no anything. Just...
Audio, just orally talking about something and...
Oh, you're convinced that the phone was...
There's no doubt. There's no doubt. It was so weird in such a weird context, like no other way that it could come up. And so, you know, I talk less in front of my phones now than I talk in front of you.
I still don't believe it.
You don't believe that they actually are.
I don't believe it's listening. I genuinely don't. I believe the algorithm is so good about figuring out what you're interested in.
It sees me picking my toes, Andrew.
No, it sees that somebody else is searching for something and knows that us three are together. So if I search for something, it's showing up on yours. So that is what is happening. If I'm searching for something, it may know, Becky's phone may know that I was in the vicinity and therefore might start looking up stuff for her based on what I've done or you've done or your kids have done or your husband's done. That I do believe is true, but I don't believe that it's actually listening to you.
Doesn't it have a microphone you can shut off for privacy?
It does, but I don't... I just...
But why does it have the ability to shut it off if it can't listen to you?
To be fair, there's been no... literally, people have been searching for this forever and nobody's ever been able to show one way or the other. You've never seen a whistleblower inside one of these companies say, 'Yes, we're actually doing this.'
We can ask Alex Karp the next time he's on.
You can ask Alex. You could. It feels like it.
I don't remember what it was, but it was... I think I can prove it because it was so bizarre.
It would have been one out of a million chance. It was so specific.
I wasn't searching for foot fungus, so that was totally on you.
Yeah, we can't speak for him. I don't think he looks like he could be a carrier.
This is crazy. In France, we are from France. Hackers targeted hundreds of French supermarkets in an attack that reportedly caused refrigerators and freezers to overheat, that spoiled food, sparked fires. Reuters reported fridges at several major supermarket chains heated to as much as 122 degrees Fahrenheit. A European Union official described the attacks as the weaponization of food. Don't mess with the French and their food. A major Dutch supermarket chain reported a security issue within its network, said its systems had been taken offline, but its stores would remain open. The company owns US chains like Stop & Shop and Giant.
Wow. That is something to think about.
It is. Yeah, there's another path to shutting things down.
Elon Musk emerging as the biggest known donor of the midterm election cycle. The trillionaire now sent more than $275 million to Republican groups since July. Roughly $160 million went to the main super PAC backing Republican Senate candidates. It's among the largest known political donations by an individual ever. Figures were first reported by the New York Times, also confirmed by a spokesperson for Musk's America PAC. Musk giving has now surpassed what he spent during the 2024 presidential election.
Grocery giant Kroger is planning to cut more than a third of its corporate workforce, or 3,000 jobs, over the next three years. That's according to an internal corporate memo that was viewed by CNBC. It's one of the latest changes from the new CEO, Greg Fen, who was formerly a Walmart executive. He took over in February. You may remember Kroger laid off nearly a thousand corporate employees last year to cut costs. All of this is coming. Remember Kroger-Albertsons? That was supposed to be a deal that was going to put together and win synergies. There was concern from regulators that it would wind up cutting jobs. Well, now you're seeing those jobs cut. It is coming as that rival chain Albertsons is seeking at least $8 billion from Kroger after their mega deal imploded two years ago. Albertsons is accusing Kroger's leadership of making lowball offers to regulators to try and keep the most profitable stores in the combined company. It's suing Kroger, accusing it of tanking the deal. Kroger has said that there was nothing that it could have done that would have made a difference. The Delaware trial starts next week, but remember at the time people thought, why aren't regulators looking at the idea that Amazon with Whole Foods and Walmart and Target all have so many grocery sales that they are putting forward? They're the biggest in the business at this point. If you looked at it, it was kind of hard to imagine...
...because they were antitrust crazy and Albertsons couldn't get together.
They were only too happy. Lina Khan is only too happy to not want to look at that. Sirius XM was the classic with... together they probably barely make it.
Dating app company Bumble reportedly in talks to be taken private in a transaction that values the company at about a billion dollars. The Wall Street Journal report saying a deal with investment firm Ithaca Holdings could come this week. The report also saying that Bumble's founder Whitney Wolfe Herd is expected to stay involved in the company. Bumble stock surged 50% following the Journal's report. The company now has a market value of about $580 million. Shares still down more than 90% though since Bumble's IPO back in 2021.
I figured that out. What changed so drastically? Was it a pandemic play or something, or people not going out to bars so you needed to do it all?
Pandemic was a big part of it, and that's when...
That's why it was up so much. Yeah.
Yeah, people were very excited about...
Right. All right. There's more competition now.
Coming up on Squawk Pod, legendary investor Paul Tudor Jones on the markets, geopolitics, and growing calls for AI regulation.
Intelligence is what this country is based on. But unfettered, right, unregulated intelligence is not a good thing. It can actually... too much of it can be a bad thing.
That full interview is next.
You're listening to Squawk Pod from CNBC. Today, legendary investor and philanthropist Paul Tudor Jones joined us live from Good Shepherd Services, which is a beneficiary of the Robin Hood Foundation. That's the New York anti-poverty charity that Tudor Jones supports. He also oversees an investment group with more than $100 billion in assets under management. Our Andrew Ross Sorkin takes things from here.
Joining us right now in an exclusive interview is legendary investor Paul Tudor Jones. Of course, he's the founder and chief investment officer of the Tudor Investment Corporation. He's also, of course, the founder and board member of the Robin Hood Foundation, which is hosting its annual investor conference next week. You got a huge lineup, and it's great to see you. And by the way, great to be here at Good Shepherd Services, which is a foundation that Robin Hood has long supported.
We've supported them for over 30 years. They're kind of like the Kobe or the Shaq of not-for-profits in New York City. They serve 30,000 kids. Just a spectacular organization. I first met them. It was run by Sister Pette, and if you met her, you would want to hug her. She was just the most brilliant, loving, warm human being. She says she's retired, but she's not. She's still working and has new ideas. And Michelle, who runs the place now, plays catch with her all the time. So it's a great place.
And again, the best thing about this is this place, it believes so firmly as we do, a child's circumstance does not determine their future. I want to talk philanthropy in New York City and Robin Hood and this conference as well, but I want to talk markets if you'd indulge me, because we have bank earnings coming out this morning. But I was thinking back to a conversation that we had about a year ago around the same time, and I had said something to the effect to you of, where do you think we are in the market cycle?
And you said something to the effect of, maybe it's like 1999, but remember that the market still went up another 40% after 1999. So here we are a year later. Where do you think we really are?
Boy, it still feels like 1999, a two-speed market. You've got it completely perfectly bifurcated in the sense that you have obviously everything that's adopting AI and everything that's not, and they're going in opposite directions. And that was pretty much the case in 1999. I tell you, it was so crazy. I did this conference about a week ago, and we were going through, you know, what period does this remind you of? And we're talking about 1999. So I asked everyone at the conference, I said, 'How many of you here were trading in 1999?' There's probably 200 people there. What percent do you think were trading in 1999?
Oh goodness. I'm thinking just the way you're asking, I'm going to go with 10%.
It was about 20%. And I thought, 'Oh my gosh,' because for me it's just so clear that again we're on this path that could be great short term but may not be so great long term. And I just was... I forget, I guess I'm dating myself. I forget that so many people haven't lived this. But what were you doing in 1999? How old were you in 1999?
In 1999 I was just graduating from college. I was writing about mergers and acquisitions, was the height of the boom in the M&A business, for the New York Times. That's what I was doing, right? And this was... it was a heck of a time.
So anyway, we are literally exactly like 1999 in the sense that we have kind of a two-speed economy.
But does that mean to you, again, you know, I remember you saying this idea that the market still has 40% to run. Does that mean that in terms of this thing cresting, we are still years away or we're still months away, and therefore how do you trade that?
So I think that for me the most interesting thing, and it's hard for me to see professionally much beyond December 31 because that's going to be really important obviously for a fund. So I'm trying to tactically think what I want to do for the rest of the year. Clearly, if you kind of just go back and look at midterm cycles, a whole variety of things that would tell you that we should have a really, really strong fourth quarter. Coming out of the midterms, the market typically bottoms sometime late October, early November, and then you get the fourth quarter push. I kind of look at positioning and think that's very possible. At the same time, if I was thinking for a year from now, 2027 is going to be really, really challenging for the stock market. And I say that because if I just look at the flows, and that's probably what we look at the most, what I look at the most, you probably got the most negative flow picture for the US stock market that we've had, say, since 2002. And by that I mean if we sum up all the buybacks, M&A, all the positive things that has powered this market so much for the past, say, since 2009, if I sum up all those...
...and then I subtract from that the IPOs, secondaries, unlocks, etc., then you've got certainly the most negative flow picture since 2009. So that underlying corporate support that was there year in year out is now really shifted when you think about the $2 trillion SpaceX, the coming Anthropic and OpenAI. It shifts the math and makes it more difficult for the market.
By the way, are you in the math of the valuations of some of these big AI companies? There was obviously a bit of a freakout last week as it related to OpenAI's valuation, right? We have Anthropic coming up likely in November. I don't know how you think that's going to trade.
I think Anthropic will do well. I think OpenAI, a lot of it will rest on what Anthropic does. You know, the reason why you've seen, I think, multiple compression in that space, in the whole tech space, is because obviously with all the concerns about AI safety and certainly with the rhetoric that's coming out of the administration that you're going to be responsible if you make a mistake, everyone's kind of reassessing. You can have these spectacular earnings, spectacular revenue streams, great projections, but if all of a sudden we wake up one day and a model has gone rogue or a bad actor has used it maliciously and you've got a donut, it makes...
But you've been warning about that issue for a long time. We've had you on the broadcast where I remember we started a conversation, we were starting to go in one way, and then all of a sudden you said, 'No, no, I just was at an AI conference and the people there genuinely...' I mean, you may have been one of the first people who said that on our air in terms of the sort of true risk. How big a risk actually is it in your mind?
So we run three quant teams internally, and then I have another business, sports analytics, and so we've been using neural nets forever, AI, forms of AI forever. And again, the difficulty with it is that you know what the output is, but you don't know why or how you got there. That's what happens when you have billions and trillions of permutations. You don't know why we got there. And so that's why AI safety has always been a concern for me because interpretability, what generates that outcome. If you don't know how or why it happens, it's got to be a great concern. And what I would say, I look at AI safety much the same way. I think it's exactly the same thing as border security in the sense that if you think about border security, this nation was built on immigration. That very famous photograph I think from the end of September with President Trump and the 20 AI leaders all there. Of those 20, nine are naturalized Americans. Three are children of first-generation immigrants. So immigration is responsible for the most powerful technology and that's driving the US economy right now. So when you think about border security, we had unfettered, unregulated immigration 2020 to 2024. It was too much of a good thing and the country revolted because we did not have the economic resources to deal with it, nor did we have the cultural and social desire to. So we obviously created a political path to change that. Now intelligence, which is the basis of AI, intelligence has been the hallmark of why the US has been so great, from the founding fathers to mainframes in the 60s, personal computers in the 80s, internet in the 90s, and now artificial intelligence today. So intelligence is what this country is based on. But unfettered, right, unregulated intelligence is not a good thing. It can actually... too much of it can be a bad thing. And 85% of Americans right now want AI regulation, and one way or another they're going to get it politically.
Let me ask you about another risk.
Wait, can I just say one last thing?
The best thing that gives me the greatest hope was President Trump's appointment of Jay Clayton. Jay Clayton, I've known him for 20 years. This guy's solid. He's smart. He's going to put humanities first. If President Trump lets him do his job, oh my gosh, it will be... you can't have a better pick to help us navigate these really challenging times.
Now, we've known Jay. He's been a friend of the show for a long time.
I want to ask you about a different risk. As I was leaving the studio to come visit you, Joe and Becky and I were talking, and I don't know if you recall when we were in Davos many years ago right before the pandemic. You called it as an issue that we needed to focus on, and we were curious how you think about this plague situation in Russia. Is that something you think we should be focused on at the moment?
It's not on my radar, but look, I'm a macro guy. You're always looking for tails, right? So I know we have a biosafety expert whose full-time job is to look at that right now. Right now, he's concerned, but he just says there's just not enough information. But there's a lot of smoke there, right? So you have to pay attention, but it's not impacted my investment strategy.
Okay. Talking about macro and smoke, tell me how you're thinking about oil prices and the situation in Iran.
I'm long oil, bullish on oil. I think it can rally another 20 or 25 bucks.
But if that rallies another 20, 25 bucks, don't you think that the equity market...
