Kevin Paffrath, Kevin Paffrath smiles for a selfie in front of the California State Capitol in Sacramento on Friday, July 16, 2021.
Kevin Paffrath via AP
Last year at this time, Kevin Paffrath was focused on his YouTube channel, where his half-million-plus followers could tune in for daily commentary on housing, stocks and stimulus checks. It earned him nearly $10 million over the last 12 months.
Now, the 29-year-old former real estate broker is following Gov. Gavin Newsom around his home state. It’s the best way he can think of to draw attention to his unlikely effort to replace Newsom in the upcoming recall election on Sept. 14.
Paffrath is a registered Democrat and self-declared centrist who voted for Joe Biden in the 2020 presidential election. While he’s highly critical of Newsom and says he’s been a “failed leader,” Paffrath is equally concerned that the Democratic Party has no emergency plan.
Should more than half of California voters support the recall on their ballots, the next governor would be whichever of the 46 successor candidates gets the most votes, making it much easier for an outsider to win. Paffrath is one of the nine candidates listed as a Democrat, but party leaders are urging a “No” vote to the recall effort and saying voters should skip the second question asking who should be governor if the recall succeeds.
“It was mind-blowing to us that they didn’t put at least somebody in, so that way, worst case, they had a hail mary,” Paffrath said in an interview on Friday over a coffee, after attending a Newsom press event in San Francisco.
In an early August poll by Survey USA, Paffrath had the most votes in the field of replacements, with 27%. The next six candidates are all Republicans, including conservative talk show host Larry Elder and reality TV star and former Olympic athlete Caitlyn Jenner.
“We think in the last two weeks of this campaign if the recall looks more and more likely, the Democratic party will be forced to pick a Hail Mary back-up candidate,” Paffrath said. “Given that we’re No. 1 in the polls, we hope that’s us.”
California Governor Gavin Newsom speaks with media at a long-standing encampment along Highway 80 in Berkeley, California, August 9, 2021.
John G. Mabanglo | Pool | Reuters
Democrats are right to be nervous.
A poll conducted by the University of California, Berkeley, and the Los Angeles Times in late July showed 51% of registered voters opposed the recall, with 36% in favor. But among likely voters, the gap favoring Newsom’s retention narrowed to three percentage points.
The anti-recall movement has raised about $51 million, almost eight times as much as the side trying to oust Newsom. Netflix CEO Reed Hastings has contributed $3 million in support of the governor.
Donors can contribute an unlimited amount for or against the recall, but only up to $32,400 in support of any specific replacement candidate. Paffrath said he’s raised close to $400,000 and has put in about $200,000 of his own money. The average donation is $70, he said.
“We don’t have the war chest that Newsom does, so we have to do everything in our power with grassroots and social media,” Paffrath said.
For example, Paffrath paid his brother-in-law, an app developer, to build his “Meet Kevin” app. And he’s trying to get in front of the media as much as possible. Most of his ad spending is via text message to let voters know there’s a Democratic alternative.
On Friday, Paffrath hung out outside Manny’s restaurant in San Francisco as Newsom spoke inside to the press. Dressed in a navy suit with a purple tie, Paffrath made himself easy to spot for reporters. He said he’s careful not to be disruptive at the events.
“We have to combat, this ‘Oh yeah he’s a YouTuber, he’s a prankster,'” Paffrath said. “We stand there very respectfully and reporters recognize us. They talk to us.”
From San Francisco, he’s following Newsom to Los Angeles and San Diego, and possibly beyond.
How it started
The recall effort picked up momentum during the pandemic as frustration mounted about the state’s shutdown of schools and small businesses, and the slow pace of the reopening even as Covid-19 cases and hospitalizations plummeted.
Newsom critics pounced at the opportunity to highlight the worsening homeless problem and increasing crime rates while taxes and living costs remained among the highest in the country. Paffrath said he wasn’t an initial proponent of the recall and didn’t get involved until it was well underway.
“The reason I think folks are frustrated is we pay our taxes, then we look up to see what our government is doing for us with the services we’re paying for,” he said. “And we see people dying on the street. We see blight. That’s why people are leaving.”
Paffrath, who lives with his wife and two young sons in Ventura, about 70 miles from Los Angeles, has made addressing the homeless issue his top agenda item. His proposal is to build new emergency facilities and lease commercial and office buildings, including many that have been vacated during the pandemic, to set up mass spaces with cots and small rooms, supported by staffing from the National Guard.
His aim is to get all of California’s 160,000 homeless people off the streets in 60 days at an eventual cost of $10 per person per day, covering food, medical support and bathrooms.
Paffrath has equally ambitious — some may say outlandish — goals for new types of “future” schools, a system of underground tunnels to alleviate traffic problems and the building of Las Vegas-style casinos as part of a plan to fully legalize gambling.
He also recognizes the existential threat posed by fires and droughts. He advocates spending on controlled burns and a pipeline from the Mississippi River to double water flow to the Colorado River. When it comes to solar plants, he wants to incentivize companies to stay in California rather than going elsewhere.
“I’m tired of hearing about Tesla building solar panels in New York and Nevada,” he said. “Those should be in California.”
$10 million on YouTube
Paffrath’s fans are used to hearing him opine on such matters. He now has almost 150,000 Twitter followers and 1.7 million on YouTube. Regular topics include interest rates, the crypto economy and politics.
Paffrath got his start in real estate a little over a decade ago by teaching people how to invest in the market. He became a broker and started buying property, then took his teaching experience and market knowledge to YouTube. By 2018 was making enough money — a couple thousand dollars a day — to let his broker license expire and to get out of sales.
At the coffee shop on Friday, he pulled out his phone and navigated to his YouTube earnings dashboard. Over the past year, the page showed, his ad revenue on the site topped $3.5 million. Affiliate revenue and money he makes from courses on building wealth brought in an additional $6 million or so, he said.
Kevin Paffrath on the campaign trail
Ari Levy | CNBC
But his focus now is on politics. Paffrath said he’ll run in 2022 even the recall is unsuccessful or if another replacement candidate wins. That’s as far out as he’s projecting.
“I don’t want to be a career politician,” he said. “I want to fix California.”
He also wants to assure Democrats that he’s not just using their party label because it gives him the best chance to win. With a legislature that’s three-quarters Democratic, he said it’s important to start on things that the majority cares deeply about, like the homeless problem.
Control of the U.S. Senate could also be at stake. Dianne Feinstein, the state’s senior senator, is the oldest member of the chamber at 88. She’s not up for reelection until 2024, and questions have been swirling around whether she’ll retire before then.
If so, the governor would get to pick her temporary successor. The Senate is currently at a 50-50 split, with Vice President Kamala Harris in position to cast deciding votes when needed.
Paffrath made it clear he would pick a Democrat.
“I’m not going to burn the party,” he said. “I don’t want people to think that just because I’m a recall candidate I’m going to go in there and do what Republicans say they want to do, start cutting things and throwing around the furniture. It’s not going to work. You’ve got to respect the legislature.”
Corporate travel and expense management platform Navan fell by as much as 15% in its first trading day on the Nasdaq under the ticker symbol “NAVN” after its successful initial public offering.
The Navan IPO, which priced on Wednesday night, valued the business-to-business software vendor at $6.2 billion, raising $923 million and with shares settling at the midpoint of its deal range, $25 per share. The valuation was roughly $3 billion less than where private investors last valued Navan in 2022 in a $300 million round.
Launched by CEO Ariel Cohen and co-founder Ilan Twig in 2015, Navan set out to disrupt a business travel sector where incumbents relied on clunky legacy tools and fragmented workflows.
The Palo Alto-based company, formerly called TripActions, refers to itself as an “all-in-one super app” for corporate travel and expenses.
Customers include Geico, Zoom, Lyft, OpenAI, Unilever, Anthropic, Adobe, Christie’s, and Blue Origin.
“We really care about the traveler, the road warrior,” said CEO Ariel Cohen in a CNBC interview on IPO day.
Navan’s big day is also a huge win for venture investor Oren Zeev, who runs the rare one-person VC firm and at the IPO price was expected to have a stake in Navan worth over $1 billion, having first invested in the founders in 2013, two years before Navan came to life. “It’s a first for me,” Zeev told CNBC of having an early-stage investment result in a $1 billion payday. He has no office, no assistant, no one on payroll at all, but a portfolio of 50 companies (40 where he sits on the board, including Navan).
Cohen said Navan’s focus on business travel and expensing allows it to not only support the largest companies in the market but companies with as few as 10 employees. The idea, regardless of size, is that any companies with travelers can make sure “they are not wasting their time,” he said in his “Squawk Box” interview.
According to Cohen, it can take on average 45 minutes to book a complex business trip using traditional methods, but with Navan the process has been whittled down to seven minutes, and has led to 15% savings for customers.
It has also been pushing further into AI, with a virtual assistant named Ava handling approximately 50% of user interactions, and a proprietary AI framework called Navan Cognition supporting its platform, as well as proprietary cloud infrastructure.
“You are always one click away from Ava our chatbot to fix a flight, connect to a new hotel … whatever you need,” Cohen said.
Credit card swipes, corporate calendar items, and photos snapped on a phone of receipts can all go straight into AI analysis.
With Ava handling 50% of customer discussions, Cohen says the era of long hold times with travel agencies are a thing of the past, whether it is a natural disaster or the recent airport delays and closures that creates travel headaches.
“You don’t have to wait with us. She will take care of it,” he said.
Navan does have a lot of competitors, from niche players like Expensify to enterprise software heavyweights like Oracle and SAP.
Expensify stock has cratered since its 2021 IPO, down to under $2 per share after its $27 IPO price.
Cohen says when it comes to the competition, Navan believes it can separate itself from the pack with its focus on the traveler. No one likes to deal with expense reports or spend hours on the phone with travel agents, but “that’s what we do,” he said. “We know how to support you really fast and we know there is an interruption and we are trying to understand your journey as a traveler,” he added.
Navan reported trailing 12-month revenue of $613 million (up 32%) across over 10,000 customers, and gross bookings of $7.6 billion (up 34%), according to its S-1 filing. For the July quarter, Navan recorded a $38.6 million net loss on $172 million in revenue, which was up about 29% year over year, but fell short of its previous timeline for profitability.
The IPO market has bounced back to life in 2025, fueled by a mix of hot AI and crypto names and more mature tech companies that grew in the past decade of Silicon Valley startup funding, such as Coreweave, Circle, Figma and Klarna (Navan was founded in 2015).
There have been 182 IPOs priced this year, an increase of 42.2% from last year, according to IPO tracker Renaissance Capital, with total deal proceeds of $33.3 billion up just under 17% from last year.
Sign up for our weekly, original newsletter that goes beyond the annual Disruptor 50 list, offering a closer look at list-making companies and their innovative founders.
FILE PHOTO: Formula One F1 – United States Grand Prix – Circuit of the Americas, Austin, Texas, U.S. – October 23, 2022 Tim Cook waves the chequered flag to the race winner Red Bull’s Max Verstappen.
Mike Segar | Reuters
Apple reports fiscal fourth quarter earnings on Thursday after the bell.
The fourth quarter, which runs through the end of September, is the first quarter that includes a little more than a week of sales of the new iPhone 17 models.
Analysts have said that early signs are pointing to improved demand for the iPhone 17 models, especially the entry-level and Pro models. Investors will be looking for any color from CEO Tim Cook and CFO Kevan Parekh on the demand they’re seeing for the new devices.
Analysts polled by FactSet expect Apple’s fiscal 2025 to be the first year of iPhone sales growth since 2022.
Apple has also been negatively affected by Trump administration tariffs, although the company has gotten praise from President Donald Trump over its plan to spend $600 billion in the U.S. and boost American semiconductor manufacturing. Apple also announced last week that it was shipping artificial intelligence servers from a factory in Houston.
In July, Apple said it could incur $1.1 billion in tariff costs. Investors will be watching to see if its actual costs came in under its forecast, as well as what tariff costs it sees in the current quarter.
Some investors want to see Apple step up its level of capital expenditure and AI spending. Apple has largely sat out the data center and AI chip investment boom that other large tech companies are spending tens of billions on.
Last quarter, Cook said that it was “significantly” growing its investments in the technology. That will likely show up in the company’s capital expenditures, but commentary from Cook may provide insight into the company’s AI strategy.
Cook will also likely praise the company’s five-year deal with F1 to broadcast its races in the U.S. on Apple TV, the latest development in the company’s sports and media strategy.
Expectations remain high for Cook and Apple. In the June quarter, Apple reported 10% year-over-year revenue growth. For the September quarter, analysts polled by LSEG are expecting 7.7% sales growth.
Here’s what Wall Street is expecting, per LSEG estimates:
EPS: $1.77
Revenue: $102.24 billion
Analysts polled by LSEG expect Apple to guide to $132.31 billion in December quarter sales, and earnings of $2.53 per share.
Amazon is slated to post results for the third quarter after the closing bell Thursday.
Here’s what analysts polled by LSEG are looking for:
Earnings per share: $1.57
Revenue: $177.8 billion
Wall Street is also looking at other key revenue numbers:
Amazon Web Services: $32.42 billion expected
Advertising: $17.34 billion expected
AWS growth will be a major focus for investors once again, as the company faces intensifying pressure from cloud competitors Google and Microsoft, which also reported quarterly results this week.
Revenue at AWS is projected to expand 18.1% year over year, which is about the same growth rate as the second quarter. Google’s cloud revenue accelerated 34% during the third quarter, while Microsoft Azure recorded growth of 40%.
AWS stumbled last week during an extended outage that lasted more than 15 hours, taking down numerous websites as a result. Microsoft experienced outages in its Azure cloud and 365 services on Wednesday, hours before its scheduled earnings release.
The Amazon unit is also battling the perception that it’s missing out on a flurry of highly lucrative artificial intelligence deals for cloud services.
Amazon on Wednesday opened its $11 billion AI data center called Project Rainier, which was first announced last December and is intended to train and run models from Claude chatbot creator Anthropic.
Amazon, which has invested $8 billion in Anthropic, said the startup will use 1 million of its custom Trainium2 chips by the end of 2025.
During last quarter’s earnings conference call, investors grilled Amazon CEO Andy Jassy on AWS growth and AI competition.
Jassy reiterated AWS has a “pretty significant” leadership position in cloud market share, while noting that it’s still “early” days in the AI industry that remains “very top heavy” with a “small number of very large frontier models.”
Read more CNBC tech news
Amazon’s core retail business will also be top of mind for investors as the company gears up for the start of the holiday shopping period. Amazon said earlier this month it planned to hire 250,000 workers to staff up for peak season, the same number as the last two years.
Adobe Analytics recently projected that online holiday spending in the U.S. will jump 5.3% year over year to $253.4 billion, which is slower than last year, when online sales grew 8.7% over the same period.
During the third quarter, Amazon held its annual Prime Day deals event. Online spending reached $24.1 billion in the U.S. across the four-day stretch in July, according to Adobe, exceeding its estimates and representing growth of 30.3% year over year.
Jassy told investors last quarter that President Donald Trump‘s shifting tariff policies haven’t dented demand or driven up prices so far this year.
Amazon’s third-quarter sales are expected to increase 11.9% year over year, compared with growth of 13% in the second quarter.
For the fourth quarter, analysts surveyed by LSEG are projecting sales to reach $208.1 billion, representing growth of 10.8% from a year earlier.
Amazon on Tuesday initiated massive layoffs, cutting about 14,000 roles across nearly every area of the company. Executives hinted that more cuts may be on the way in the new year as the company looks to get leaner, reduce bureaucracy and invest further in AI.
Once the job reductions are complete, they’re expected to be the largest corporate cuts in Amazon’s history, CNBC previously reported. Amazon laid off more than 27,000 employees between 2022 and 2023.
Shares of Amazon have increased 4.9% so far this year, while the Nasdaq is up approximately 24% over the same stretch.