What made you confident that you could do something that hadn't been done before? I have no fear of failure. Trailblazing women changing the game. One of my favorite pieces of advice, think about what your boss's boss needs. Leadership can look in many, many different forms. It really does come down to just trusting yourself. Life is short and you just got to think big to accomplish big things. Julia Borsten hosts CNBC Changemakers and Power Players. New episodes every Tuesday, wherever you get your podcasts. My mission is simple, to make you money. I'm here to level the playing field for all investors. There's always a bone market somewhere, and I promise to help you find it. Mad Money starts now. Hey, I'm Kramer. Welcome to Mad Money. Welcome to Kramer. Other people, my friends, I'm just trying to make you some money. My job is not just to educate, do some teaching, but also to entertain. So call me at 1-800-743-CBC. Tweet me at Jim Cramer. This market keeps going up and up on the same old stuff. News about semiconductors, even old news about semiconductors, regretted news about semiconductors, even pure conjecture about semiconductors. Anything remotely positive moves that group higher. Anything remotely negative about any other group is considered catastrophic. You know what? They tend to cancel each other out when you look at the average. That's why the Dow Jones is up just 12 points. But the S&P gained 0.84% and the NASDAQ, where there's little to be canceled out, surged 1.71%. It's where the semis hang out. But the same storage and memory stocks keep flying. It's a micron up 15.5% today. Today, Sandus up 16.6%. All in one day, regardless of the on-again, off-again nature of the war with Iran or the on-again, off-again possibility of guessing about a rate cut. Okay, you want me to guess? Let's just guess. Ask me how much money I'm going to make for you right now. Maybe, maybe, maybe it'll be a Fed. Maybe not. The Fed is as much a distraction as an abstraction when it comes to the business of making money. It's exciting. It is. It really is. And I think you should own one or two or even three of the companies linked in the data center, semi-compacts that I talk about all the time, even if they can't be your entire portfolio. And I don't want them to be. We're coming around to the idea that these data center stocks are what's known as foundational and must be owned. Ideally, I tell you to buy them on down days, and there are down days occasionally, but if you don't have the patience to wait, it's better to pay up than to not own them at all. Still, though, we need to take everything into account, right? Which means it's not man's, this show's not man's semiconductors, which means we need a game plan for next week. And I happen to have one right on this wall. Look at this. The week starts with an energy supplier that's no stranger to tech. It's Constellation Energy. That's the nuclear heavy power generator that the big tech companies want to use. They want to use it to power the data centers because nuclear is carbon free. The earnings have been fine. It's the zeitgeist that matters there. Tuesday. All right. Starts with the Consumer Price Index CPI. If you're banking on a rate cut this year, you probably hope this inflation gauge comes in weak. We got a strong set of employment numbers today, albeit with weaker wage growth. Nirvana for the Fed, by the way. Now we just need a softer CPI. It'll be much easier for the incoming Fed chief to convince the rest of the open market committee members to do some cutting. Searching for an unharled semiconductor play, I got one here. It's called CUNITY. Yes, CUNITY Electronics reports Tuesday morning. This spinoff from DuPont makes materials that are integral to all kinds of semiconductors. The stock's had a big run, but I think we're still going to get a strong set of numbers that might justify the move. What the heck is wrong with this stock of this venture global? One of the best ways to invest in America's worldwide edge on natural gas. Even though the stock's still up huge for the year, it's pulled back about 20% over the past month, I guess, because people feel peace is bad for them. I'm not so sure about that. $11 seems right to me. At the same time, we get earnings from not one, but two sports apparel plays, On Holding and Under Armour. Now, I'm worried about On. Some very quick management turnover there without a lot of explanation. But Under Armour, I think the turnaround is here. And you can still get in before CEO Kevin Plank really fires up the engine. Too many people still wear that distinctive Under Armour insignia all over the place, decorating a hat or a shirt for me to write this guy off. Wednesday. Wednesday, we hear from a company called Nebius. And that's a company that NVIDIA poured $2 billion into because they want Nebius to help develop knowledge factories. This is a big deal for this relatively unknown AI company. And it's part of a constellation that NVIDIA has put together to ensure that clients can take advantage of NVIDIA's best chips. Now, Cisco reports this night, I got to tell you, it's stocks galloping like 1999. Cisco's just moving like this because it's one of only a handful of networking companies that are dominant in the data center, Aristen, Ciena, the other two. My gut says you may be a little late to buy Cisco without a pullback because this has been a monster move. Well, my brain says the stock sells for just 23 times forward earnings, so it isn't all that expensive. Nothing's ever perfect with Cisco, though, so please be careful. The future is bright for the data center part of the business. Let's find out about the rest. Thursday, we're going to get the latest from Figma. Okay, now this is an eclectic design distributor that's made life difficult for Adobe, which at one point had to feel it all to itself. I don't know if the company can deliver terrific earnings, but I do know that you probably don't want to own Adobe on the day Figma reports. Remember, just a few years back, Adobe tried to buy Figma for about $20 billion. The bid drew too much regulatory scrutiny to go forward. Figma's only worth $10 billion now. Now, one reason we've seen such incredible runs in the plate old semiconductor stocks is that there simply aren't enough machines out there to help boost production. To understand the concept, very easy. Go to the Applied Materials Conference School on Thursday afternoon, along with their deck, for a refresher. They'll tell you that they simply can't produce enough semiconductor capital equipment to make the semis. Competitors, Land Research and KLA, are in the same position. This confluence of lackluster supply and insatiable demand makes me feel like you can still buy those stocks, too. Not much of note on Friday, all right? We get in that period where things slow down towards the end of the week. We always search for analogs in this business, and I've never seen anything like what's happening with these semiconductor stocks. And I never thought that I'd say that, given the great run I had trading them at Grand Central Station. When a brokerage house placed a machine there, you were allowed to hit up five quotes. It was the summer of 1984. I bought five STEMIs. I would go endlessly after my bar exam prep and watch them fly. They were one-direction stocks back then. So you'd look at Motorola, Texas, and you thought you were just getting rich because the whole country was going digital. Now the country is going toward an agentic world where thinking machines can do all sorts of heavy lifting that we can't do. Some doubt this whole movement. They're skeptical because so many data center-related stocks are going parabolic here, and that usually doesn't end well. And I agree with that. But the bottom line, I look at it another way. When I talk about how amazing what is happening right now and how this time is really different, the cynics, and that's most people, heckle me and warn me that my thinking is dangerous to the wallet. I say this is still a gigantic opportunity. And I am also telling you right now, it is not too late to buy. We will get dips. There will be inevitably negative stories by a greedy press. There was one yesterday that was just totally made up. It gave a great opportunity to buy a stock. I'm not going to go into it because that would make fun of someone. But that's when you have to pounce because these stocks don't have much quit in them, even for a day. Let's go to Steve in South Carolina. Steve. Hey, Jim. Booyah. It's Friday. How are we doing? Great. I'm doing well. Booyah. What's going on? Hey, UPS. Stock's down about 20% year to date. Their earnings per share first quarter wasn't pretty. And now Amazon's getting into logistics. What do you think going forward with the stock price? Well, I don't, you know, look, it's got the 68% yield, but I don't buy stocks for yield. I buy stocks for growth, and therefore I buy FedEx because that is the winner. Raj Shubhamanian doing a remarkable job. I want to go to Vincent in Texas. Vincent. Oh, yeah. Vincent from Houston, Texas with my wife, Tony, my dog, Wubba, and my daughter, Veronica. He's about to turn one this Sunday on Mother's Day. Happy birthday. I love you. And happy Mother's Day to all moms. I salute that. With U.S.-Iran tensions, U.S.-Iran tensions are unpredictable. Is Valero Energy a buy here or would you wait for more clarity? Thank you, Jim. Valero? I like Valero. I mean, Valero's got that. Look, as long as we've got this spread that they've got right now between the price of gasoline and what they buy the oil for, you are just going to print money, and Valero will print money for you. Hey, how about we go to Bob in Florida? Bob. Hey, Mr. Kramer, thank you for taking my phone call. Of course, Bob. What's going on? Oh, not a whole lot. I had a quick question on waste management. I started a small position at the beginning of the year, and then it was looking like it was getting ready to break out. So I bought some more. But the past two months, the stock's been a dog in my portfolio. Do you think I should hold, buy more, or sell this position? You know, I saw somebody say some negative things about waste management today, and it's been going down pretty consistently for the last, like, four or five days. I think rather than just say it's time to buy, let me do this. Let me do some work on what they said at the May 7th. Opco conference. Let me do some work about who's driving the stock lower because someone is, and it's a darn good company. Maybe we should get involved. I will do the work, I promise. All right. It's not too late to buy some of these red hot data center stocks, including Micron, which is the one that I think is, by the way, the cheapest, even after this run. We're earlier in this phase than you think. May I have any time? Affirm is down for the year, but its latest earnings, they were really good. So it's now time to take a look at this one. They got that buy now, pay later stuff. I'm finding out with the CEO. Then RBI's earnings were boosted by a Whopper quarter from Burger King. So what's next for the fast food stock? I'm going to find out what the company's top risk. And specialty chemicals company, Element Solutions, sounds boring, but it is anything but. So you better pay attention. I'm learning more when I sit down with the CEO. Stay with Kramer. Don't miss a second of Mad Money. Follow at Jim Kramer on X. Have a question? Tweet Kramer. Hashtag Mad Mentions. Send Jim an email to madmoneyatcnbc.com or give us a call at 1-800-743-CNBC. Miss something? Head to madmoney.cnbc.com. What made you confident that you could do something that hadn't been done before? I have no fear of failure. Trailblazing women changing the game. One of my favorite pieces of advice. Think about what your boss's boss needs. Leadership can look in many, many different forms. It really does come down to just trusting yourself. Life is short and you just got to think big to accomplish big things. Julia Boorstin hosts CNBC Changemakers and Power Players. New episodes every Tuesday, wherever you get your podcasts. All right, what do we make of these numbers from Affirm Holdings, the king of buy now, pay later? This stock's been mooring that it'll be up about 30% since its early April lows, but it's still down 13% for the year, and it got hit today, all 5%. Why? Okay, last night, Affirm reported, well, I thought it was a terrific quarter. This is now a very profitable business and Affirm network has gotten a lot more powerful Earlier today we spoke with Max Levchin the founder and CEO of Affirm Holdings to learn more I think you getting a great opportunity here Take a look This is your left. Welcome back to Mad Money. Great to be here. Good to see you. All right, Max. This was really a terrific quarter. Gross personalized value, 35%. Revenue, 33%. Net income, gigantic. Should we be thinking this? I felt that, yes, indeed. I know you view yourself as a startup, But these are the kinds of numbers I expect from a really, really good merchant, good lender. And that is really what I think of you now at Affirm. Thank you. That is the place we're at. You know, I tell everyone who asks, are we still a startup? We are. We're still inventing new things, breaking new ground, trying to come up with cool new unexpected ideas. But we are of real going concern. These aren't small numbers by any stretch of my age. We've generated an enormous amount of cash flow, which is something we really don't talk about. But it's time to pay attention to that. And Affirm is a real business. It's almost 15 years in. It's time to generate some real numbers. And it's exciting to be here. But at the same time, you've been low key. I mean, when you have your meetings, you have a meeting coming up soon. And it's about nothing. When I read the time soon, it's like it's about nothing. How can that be? um we we have this uh i mean a lot of affirm is about having fun while doing what we think is really important work and the the big nothing is no exception it's a name of our shopping event so it's a second one so you know it's too early to say how many times per year we'll do it but it's the first one this year and it's pretty amazing you know you and i share views on sort of what the lending industry at large does wrong. And that's, you know, it hides the fine print. It charges, you know, unforgivable fees from my point of view. So big nothing is kind of the counterweight to it all. It's an event where pretty much everyone gets a 0% deal where they pay no interest, nothing. And there's no asterisk. It's not a joke. It's not a trick. You are not going to pay any interest if you participate in a transaction during these big nothing days. and we have thousands of merchants that are super excited to basically pay interest for you because they would love to have your business. They would love to sell you whatever it is that they're selling. So we are, it's coming up next week. I'm super excited. We ran the first one last year. It was a huge success. It drove 20, 30% increases overnight for the participating merchants. And obviously we made it our business to let everyone know. And sure enough, there's a lot of demand for the next one. Well, as my subros attempt to be able to make everybody know, because I think it's radical. It's a radical thing you're doing. It's great. We are a radical business. Now, another thing. I agree. Speaking of radical, another thing you do, I mean, I regard most credit card companies as companies that charge a lot of interest and they spend a lot of money to market. And the marketing doesn't really talk about the interest. I looked at your marketing budget. It's really not that much, is it? It's essentially nothing. I mean, we occasionally spend money to pay for some of the interest that consumers would have paid ourselves. But even that is the tiniest amount and going down because the merchants have realized that this is a great investment of their marketing budget. And so that is what they do now with these big nothing days and similar promos. But yeah, you're exactly right. Actually, I never thought of it. But marketing from the traditional lenders is all about not interest while we take great pride in being over disclosive. overdisclosive. If there's interest to pay, we put it right in front of you, make sure you understand what we're getting into. And most of the time, we just try to make sure you don't pay a penny more than you absolutely must. Well, it seems like you're such a good underwriter. The default level, it's almost, look, you'd think that the economy is just as strong as it was last year, right? I mean, the numbers are really remarkable. You know, we kept it very steady, And that is absolutely the outcome of our extraordinary, if I do say so myself, AI machine learning team. We've been investing in building the best underwriting engine in the world, we think, for 15 years. And it really shows. We employ some unbelievably brilliant people that are as good or better, I would argue, than some of the frontier AI labs have. And they're motivated by the mission. They really want to make sure we only lend money when the person on the other side can and will pay us back, which allows us to reduce costs on everyone, us, but also the consumers and the capital markets providers that we work with. And it shows, and you can see it in numbers every quarter. I thought that one of the things that I really loved about your conference call was you made it clear that you are not in the slash and burn mode. Some people are saying, yes, you know what? We have AI. We can fire as many people. You are more from the Jensen-Wang mode, which is that we old people are even more productive, which theoretically you can just keep adding people, become more and more productive. It's a positive flywheel. And you made a point that you think that it's that you can get more more out of each person. And people actually obviously love being more productive. 100 percent that that's exactly where I am. I don't really understand this strange sort of idea sweeping the industry where people are using AI as kind of a fig leaf. You know, if you must conduct a layoff, it's it's no fun. And, you know, every one of us had had to do it at some point or another. There's no need to blame AI for it, just own that part of it. Right now, our engineering team is standardizing on this notion that everyone has to be a 10x engineer. These tools are that good and they're getting better. But the list of things we want to get done is not 10x. It's like 100x of what we could do last year. We're not going to fire people and do fewer things. We'll just do more things sooner. And it's exciting. and a lot of the parts that were considered drudgery, quote unquote, are gone because AI is that good. It'll do that part for you. You still have to be creative. You still have to be intelligent. You still have to have taste. You still have to decide what the right product is for the moment for the end customer. All of that is human work and AI is in no danger of taking that away from you. So if you love what you do, you're more productive, full stop. Just, you know, produce more things in less time. Well, you also seem to have fun. I mean, at one point you said, listen, we were trying to figure out what to do. We did not, not sure. So we had a hackathon. Now, I mean, literally, I've seen hackathons. They are, for creative people, a great moment. So you guys are just creating. You're creating an atmosphere where if someone has a really good idea, it goes right to you, and it might be done very quickly. You took the words out of my mouth. So we literally just wrapped up a hackathon, another one. I mean, we do a lot of these. In fact, at the end of this one, I said, maybe we should just switch our entire company to a permanent hackathon mode. This is so much fun, and people are so excited to be here. So we had over 100 people just in our product team come together. They produced 37 shippable products in the span of two days. And like the only thing I had to deal with was this complete sensory overload where I was trying to decide what goes first, because these were all great ideas, beautifully made by very small teams of people who were just excited to be there. Like they're changing the world and doing it 10 times faster than they did last year. So it's amazing. It's an amazing time to be a software engineer. It's an amazing time to be a product manager. It's just so much fun. I always wanted to ask you, if there weren't such things as credit cards, you had been first. When people start and take a credit card knowing that, well, you could work with a firm and try to be really good about your money, or you could end up being stuck the rest of your life paying debt. I mean, I would never have let a credit card be issued if a firm had been first. you know it's the sort of a b test you can only uh you can only run one side of it unfortunately we don't get to find out what the the past would look like what the future would look like uh you know obviously i'm extremely biased and the entire company i i would hope is extremely biased we we're very mission driven we believe that we're doing is profoundly important for the health of american consumer at this point beyond america we're you know we're alive in a bunch of countries and going to more. I do think there's the right and the wrong way. And, you know, we're not apologetic about how we conduct our business. We think it's about transparency. We think it's about being smart about using your money, stretching it, making sure that you get the most out of it you can and not paying more than you must and not finding yourself in debt that you can't explain or can't get out of. And it's, you know, that is what motivates us. And every day I get emails from our consumers and from our employees saying, it's amazing that a firm exists. It's so great that we started this thing. Well, you do have a great panoply of merchants. I know that your defaults are very low, but are the number of transactions holding up? I mean, I keep reading it that, you know, in this K economy, people are just buying less and doing less, but you've got a good view of things. Are the actual traffic and transactions lower? It is not. If anything, the remarkable thing about this moment in time is that while the vibe is undoubtedly, you know, Concerned is probably the right word. There's a lot of things macroeconomically that are, you know, we wake up to news from all sorts of parts of the world that are not necessarily heartwarming. American consumer is unbelievably resilient. We printed another increase in transactions per average user this quarter going up again. Every metric I could look at suggested U.S. consumers resilient. They're shopping. They're paying their bills on time. They are, generally speaking, just as shopping first as they were this time last year, three months ago, six months ago, etc. Different categories. Travel is a little bit more expensive, but we think of travel and ticketing as a single category. We saw a huge rise in travel and ticketing this quarter. I was trying to figure out why, and I realized there's a lot of concerts coming up in the summer. People are financing, you know, tickets are not cheap, and we're there to help people get to their favorite band and, you know, watch them. We saw a really nice rise in homewares, which for a few quarters was a laggard in our portfolio of categories. And I think it's kind of, it ebbs and flows. People decide, hey, you know what, it's time to refresh my living room. So generally speaking, no, we're not seeing any decline either in financial health or in interest in shopping. Well, we're going to leave it at that, but that's terrific. and everyone should read their documents and understand this is a different kind of financial company. All right. It's not really a finance company. It's a company to try to help people buy things and not get in trouble for buying them. I really like that. That's Max Lebschen, CEO of a firm. Thanks for doing it differently, Max. Thank you. It's always a pleasure to see you. Thank you. Mad Money's back here for the break. Coming up, Burger King's latest quarter suggests It's not just the customers having it their way. So has the company flipped to the top of the fast food pile? Kramer's digging in with the top brass next. What made you confident that you could do something that hadn't been done before? I have no fear of failure. Trailblazing women changing the game. One of my favorite pieces of advice, think about what your boss's boss needs. Leadership can look in many, many different forms. it really does come down to just trusting yourself. Life is short and you just gotta think big to accomplish big things. Julia Boorstin hosts CNBC Changemakers and Power Players New episodes every Tuesday wherever you get your podcasts Oh boy, it's been a tough earning season for the fast food space. We've heard some incredibly dispiriting things from Shake Shack. Even McDonald's seems to be getting dragged down by the poor state of the consumer. But when we heard from Restaurant Brands International earlier this week, That's the parent company of Burger King, Tim Hortons. They reported a pretty solid quarter. More importantly, they told us that Burger King's American business is taking share and taking names. I was astonished. 5.8% same store sales growth. A lot of guys have double-digit declines. Burger King has spent years working to turn itself around, improving restaurant operations, modernizing the store, offering better menu items. And according to management, this is not an outlier. It's the new normal. Do not take it from me. Let's check in with Tom Curtis. He's the president of Burger King. to get a better read on things, how things are going. Mr. Curtis, welcome to Mad Money. Hi, Jim. Great to be here, and thanks for having me. All right, so, Tom, I love the changes at Burger King. I was aware of them mostly because Pat Doyle's an old friend from Domino's. But I like things, even the things where you're elevating the Whopper. I love the Whopper. I didn't know it could be better. You did. Why did you bother to do that? How did you know that it was time for revamp? Well, we've been listening to our guests a lot lately. So I've taken over seven, our team's taken over 7,000 calls. I've personally taken 1,800 from the guests and we've got over 70,000 incoming calls. We can aggregate all of that. And what we've learned is that people love the Whopper, but sometimes they think it gets smushed and sometimes they didn't quite like the bun that it was presented on. So we knew exactly where to go. Well, I mean, how did you know that people want that kind of bun? I mean, I would be afraid that there were people who loved the Whopper so much that it wouldn't want change. Well, that's why we had to be really nuanced with the changes. We've been looking at changes to the Whopper for over two years, and some of the early ideas that we had were pretty sweeping. But one thing that we heard loud and clear was that people loved the Whopper. just needed to be a couple of small changes, and packaging was frankly the biggest one of them that could make it actually better without changing the profile of the taste. Now, you've also historically under-indexed with families, but these new King Jr. Meals, SpongeBob-featured, family-oriented promotions, it's working, isn't it? Well, that's working, and also what's working is what you mentioned a few minutes earlier, which is upgrading the restaurants and improving the experience. When you bring your family to a restaurant, you're really entrusting that experience to a team and to what kind of facility they're visiting. So it has to be a better experience. That's important as well. But we're now up 40% on our kids' meals from where we were six months ago just because of all these efforts. Well, also, roughly 60% of the Burger Kings are now modern, so you still got another lift coming, don't you? And that's what we're most excited about. We feel like we're in the early innings of this transformation. And if this is the result that we're seeing after the work that we've done, we feel like we have years of runway ahead of us where we're going to continue to grow this brand. I love the fact that that Pat, executive chairman, when he said at the end of the last conference, he said there are others in the industry where things are really clearly getting worse and they are losing share. Our teams are obsessed with being on the right side. And that's about Burger King. That's a high compliment from someone who does who has a great attention to detail. So they're noticing it within the organization, too. Correct. Absolutely. You know, Patrick Doyle sits right next to me in the office, so I get plenty of solicited and unsolicited advice, all of which I appreciate. But just listening to him, getting his counsel and advice every day. And, you know, we were both at Domino's for many years and we learned a lot there. We're putting that learning to work here and it's obviously starting to make a huge difference. Well, you're right about listening to guests. That was another thing that I know that I'm saying too much about Pat. and not you, but Pat has been on the show a number of times. But I called him from a Burger King. I love to go to Burger King. From a Burger King in Germany. I don't need to be more specific. And I didn't like what I saw. And he said it was fixed the next day. I mean, because when he hears from a guest, a guest is his boss. That's kind of the attitude I see from your company now. And just think of what that means when you're getting 71,000 incoming calls. How many opportunities is that to actually change the experience for the guest? And boy, when they actually see that change happen themselves, boy, it ignites an incredible love for the brand because the brand's listening, the brand's acting on their feedback. Now, of course, I saved this for last, but the pricing, the value without a value war, the pricing is rather extraordinary. You're well under a lot of other organizations. Yeah, when we contemplated these changes to the Whopper, for example, we knew that would add costs, and that was actually a cost of $4,000 of additional pressure on the P&L for our franchisees. They all locked arms with us and agreed they were not going to change the pricing. It is a value-oriented economy out there. We have to be cognizant of that. So we have to be there with value, and we have to be there with good prices on our core products. All of that is necessary right now in this economy. Now, Texas Roadhouse said last night, you know, I'm sure you and I both know, great operator, that they saw for the first time actual substitution. People just said, I can't afford beef. I'm switching to chicken and pork. Have you seen anybody move over? This will be your whole chain. It may not be fair to ask you, but have you seen demand destruction? No, because once again, if you're able to offer quality beef product, a great Whopper, and you don't take price, you actually become more attractive in the burger universe because as burgers are getting either smaller or more expensive elsewhere, we're holding serve and that's attractive to guests. And that's why you see what you saw in quarter one. And that's why you'll see, that's why there was even an acceleration throughout the quarter. And we're hopeful that that sticks for quarters to come. Now, do you think there's any hope that beef comes down? You guys would not see it necessarily because you don't have the demand destruction, but everyone keeps telling me until the herd gets bigger, we're just stuck. I've always felt that either maybe because they bring in beef from overseas or because people just get away from because it's too expensive, that it can come down. But it has been the stickiest of every single commodity. Well, it's always most painful when the prices are high for beef. But I will tell you that we've seen this over many, many decades. It's about a 14-year cycle from peak to trough. We know we're at the peak. I think the question now is, when does it turn? When does it start to come down? And how fast is that deceleration in prices of beef? Well, let's hope it happens. A lot of Americans, it's still a staple, and we need protein as it is. Well, Tom, I want to thank you. It was great to talk to you. And I, you know, tell Patrick we said hi. And I love what all the other stocks in the group, they haven't done that well. So thanks for making money for shareholders. All right. Thank you, Jim. Love being here. Oh, it's great. That's Tom Kersey's Burger King president. Everybody's back after the break. Coming up, has Element Solutions got the right formula to continue its explosive start to 2026? Kramer is inquiring with the CEO next. Near the end of March, I had to do some homework on a name called Element Solutions. I gave the stock my enthusiastic endorsement and really felt it was terrific. It's the kind of chemical company that can make fortunes, as long as Horan's blockading the entire Persian Gulf or many other reasons. Six weeks later, Elements up a quick 34%. What a call! Last week, these guys reported a terrific beat and raise quarter, and even after this incredible run, with the stock up 73% year to date, and still trading just under 24 times this year's earnings estimates. Can it keep climbing? Let's take a closer look with Ben Glicklich. He's the CEO of Element Solutions to find out. Mr. Glicklich, welcome to MedMoney. Great to be here. Thanks for having me. Well, we didn't know about your company. We knew about Sir Martin Franklin, the predecessor. The collection of chemicals you have put together is rather amazing. Now, you have a bit of a banker by background. Tell us, did you see these things coming? Because you're in the sweet spot. Yeah, we've got a great collection of assets. We built this portfolio starting back with platform specialty product. We split that company in half, sold our ag chem businesses, and have been really focusing on electronics materials and industrial solutions. The portfolio is excellent. It's really well positioned. We've done a bunch of work to improve it. And we're reaping the benefit of that today. Okay, so tell me some of the areas that you're investing in, because it seems like you've got the right... When people think about all these stocks are going right, you're right in the mix of it. Yeah, so we're benefiting from the AI build-out, data center intensity. Well, explain that a little more to people, because people don't know. You're close to it, and they would love to know. Absolutely. So 70% of our portfolio is electronics, and our portfolio speaks to all the places an electron goes in electronics hardware. So it's one of the biggest electronics materials businesses in the world, and it's also the most cogent portfolio. So what we do sits next to each other in terms of our customers' manufacturing footprints. We can bring to the market a really broad-based, exceptional set of solutions, and it's a market that is demanding innovation, right? The technical requirements, the performance requirements for data center and high-performance computing, they're changing radically, and we're a thought partner and a solutions provider to them. Now, when you say flow part, would it be to the semiconductor companies or the Taiwan semis or the land researchers? Where are you in the food chain? Everything we sell is consumable and stays on the chip or the circuit board. Okay. The business skews towards printed circuit boards and electronics assembly. So we sell into semiconductor fabs. We sell into semiconductor assemblies, assemblers and OSATs. But most of the business is in the printed circuit board market, which is becoming increasingly important, which is to say that historically innovation and quality was perceived to be really in that front end semiconductor foundry. But with Moore's law breaking down, innovation is moving into packaging and the circuit board market value and volume growth has outstripped MSI for the past several years and is expected to continue to. Well, people have to understand, it's very unusual to see the following. For instance, assembly is 12% organic growth, circuitry is 17% organic growth, Semiconductor, 18% organic growth. And then you have energy, 15%. This is highly unusual to have that many chemicals under one roof that are growing at that pace. Yeah, we're very fortunate with the portfolio construction, with the people in the business who are delivering real value to a supply chain that needs it. What's happening in high-performance computing in the data center market, it lifting up the whole electronics ecosystem today And we benefiting from that See I think that you see it because you got the orders I spend a huge amount of time trying to explain to people that this is all real what happening And I know we see Mike Grownup 100 in people's hour. It's all short squeeze. The actual demand is real. And the need for what you make is real. It's not like you're drumming up or sitting in some inventory somewhere. As soon as you put something on, it goes. Oh, absolutely. I mean, capacity constraint is the biggest issue that we see. Food chain. Throughout the food chain. I was in Asia earlier this year, and the level of activity on the ground at these factories, it's frenzied. It's unlike anything we'd seen before. And what we're selling today is linked to investment decisions that were made over a year ago. And if you know, if you followed last year, the ramp and the increase in data center investment only, you know, grew over the course of the year. And so we see durable, long-term demand here. Now, the company's always been on the move. Are you looking at things all the time saying this could be, maybe we want to add this, Maybe I don't want to be in this part of the economy right now doing that kind of stuff. Yeah. So the model is operational excellence and prudent capital allocation. Businesses generate a lot of capital and our customers are always looking for new, interesting value propositions. So our focus is running our business as well, deploying their cash flow smart, prudently behind our businesses into things our customers are asking us for. So we are always looking. And we've made some really smart tuck-in acquisitions, both technologies and new geographies over the past several years. We'll continue to do that. Yeah, I follow a lot of companies. And I remember when the chemical companies were really the last bastion of old, stodgy, old 1% growth, really satisfied them. You're obviously not content to do low single digit of anything, right? No, absolutely not. We're fortunate. Some of this was deliberate. Some of it was luck, right? Deliberate portfolio construction, luck to be in these really great markets. And it's up to us to make these businesses better more days than not. And we've been doing a decent job of that so far. And we know the company from Sir Martin Franklin, who's a very old friend, I mean, 30 years. But did you just cold call him to get started with Martin? That's how I ended up in the seat. I sought him out because I admired what he built. Sure. And he said, I'm starting a chemicals company. Come help me build it. And that was 12 years ago. And here we are today. Now, he just retired. But he was a great influence. And he's doing great, I hope, because we want him to tell us. Please tell him we said hi. Absolutely. So he stepped off the board as of the annual meeting, which was last week, just because he was on so many other boards. Sure. And he's happy with what we're doing. Is he still doing those marathon runs, that gentleman? He's unstoppable. Well, he really is. And I know that he convinced me about the kind of work he does and the ethic he has. And it's really extraordinary. And I should have recognized Element Solutions for Platform because what a company you've built. Thank you. Absolutely. That's Ben Glicklitz. He's the CEO of Element Solutions. Now, look, guys, it's ESI. You probably hadn't heard of it before when we mentioned it. But these are the kinds of companies that are really making money in this new economy. And it's a real economy. May money's back after the break. Coming up, you've got questions, Kramer's got the answers. Get charged up for a fast-fire lightning round. Next. It is time! It's time for the lightning round, Kramer. What is that about? What's that about? Of course, I don't know. I don't know. I don't know. I don't know. Buy, buy, buy. It's also sell by step-first. The grandfrog is going to buy. We're playing to sell. And then the lightning round is over. Are you ready? He's kidding. Guys, how do you light around? I'm going to start with Fred. In part of Fred. Hey, Jim. This is Fred from the Sunshine State. Love the show. The stock I'm calling about is Digi Power X. Oh, man. That thing has just been straight up. I'm not there for that. The ones that are straight up, they're not making money. I say pass. Let's go to Neil in New Hampshire. Neil. Hey, thanks, Jim, for taking my call. Of course. I've held this stock for five years. Do I hold or switch Steel Dynamics or something else? Steel Dynamics is a great company. Why would you do anything other than... Okay, let's go to Joseph in New York. Joseph. Hey, how you doing, Jim? This is Josie from New York, NYC. It's good to have you. Good to have you on the show, Josie. Yeah, nice to meet you, Jim. Pleasure. I was talking about ASML. Well, geez, you know, this is the great problem right now. That stock's been straight up ever since it had a great quarter, and people didn't understand. I, Joe, am going to say after the $75 move today, let's just hope for a down day and get in. I don't want a top ticket. That's what I fear, but I think you got a great one. Let's go to Cole in Illinois. Cole. Hi, Jim. Thanks for helping us out. My son Cole has a question for you. Sure, let's put him on. Hey, Mr. Kramer. Yeah, Cole. I read a Morgan Stanley article on the stock a year ago I bought the stock after doing my own research I was wondering if you think I should hold it long term or sell The stock's Bloom Energy Listen to me Cole, you should buy it, okay? You get your dad to front you or something, I don't know, I'll front you You want to be in this Bloom Energy, this is non-combustible power You know how hard it is to find that? All the data centers are going crazy for it Kid's good, he stays in the picture, Cole stays Send him some, alright? Send him some, it's National Ice Cream Day Send us some ice cream. All right. Bill in Iowa. Bill. Hey, Jimmy C. How are you? I'm doing well. What's up, partner? Hey, first time caller, a long time listener. Jimmy, thank you for helping this small investor make some bank, baby. Love it. What's going on? Okay, Jim, with Corning Glass sucking up all the oxygen in the room, is Amphenol, ticker symbol APH. I like Amphenol. I like Amphenol. I think you've got a good one. It's actually come down a little, for heaven's sake. I thought it was never going to come in. And that, ladies and gentlemen, is the conclusion of the Lightning Round. The Lightning Round is sponsored by Charles Schwab. Coming up, as we wrap up another busy week, Kramer has some final thoughts. Don't miss his No Huddle next. Booyah, Jim Kramer. I'm a first-time caller. a happy club member. I want to thank you for being the biggest champion of investing. Thank you for helping me become a millionaire. People keep comparing this market to the later stages of the dot-com era before things fell apart in 2000. But I lived through that period. I traded through that period. No comparison. Back then, people got rich quick by buying every dot-com that came public and then flipping them. Sell, sell, sell. Not owning them. This came work from the end of 1998 through the end of 1999. Why flip them? Why not invest in them? Because most of these companies, if you can even call them that, were deeply unprofitable. Very few were real businesses. These days, the big winners are the memory and data storage stocks. Microns up 777% over the past 12 months alone. Sands is up 4,162%. Western Digitals gained 984%. CK jumps 712% over the same period. But these are real companies that make real things. And right now, they're practically just printing money simply because there's so much demand and so little supply. Believe it or not, but they may all be undervalued because of this fourth industrial revolution that I keep trying to get, keep trying to tell you about. Now, look, I am tremendously jealous of people who own nothing but these storage stocks, just as I was insanely jealous of those who plowed their money into the newly minted dot-com IPOs, give you a 50 or 100% pop right out of the gate. You could ring the register and make forties, but you always did have to ring the register. The initial gains were the only gains, ephemeral. Most of the junk you were making money in was truly worth just a fraction of where it started trading. You had to get an only offering for the street.com at $19, the company I started, then flip it in the 60s the day it opened. You'd sell some at the opening price and then dump the rest a couple hours later, get maybe a couple, let's say, $45 by the end of the day, quick payday. But if you stuck around, you'd watch the stock drift down to $2. I warned people to sell the street.com at those insanely high levels. I couldn't believe it was up there. But because I'd founded the company, I decided to tough it out and watch my gains evaporate. What can I say? The cabin's supposed to go down on a ship, right? Now it's a very different situation. The discipline this time isn't to sell, it's to hold. Why? Because stocks like Micron, Seagate, and Sanders traded incredibly low price journeys ratios. Earlier this week, I told you that some stocks are galloping higher because they have to go where they have to go. It sounded like circular reasoning. I understand that. We keep seeing it happen, though. Micron rallied another 15% today, $746. Why? $746? Why? Because it's going to $1,000. It needs to go through the 700s and 800s and 900s to get there. Even after $1,000, the stock would still be pretty darn cheap on an earnings basis. Micron can keep running because there's endless demand for its chips from the data center companies and not enough supply. So pricing just gets better and better and better. Right now, the stock sells from just six times earnings. Same exercise with Sandus. In fact, it could be even cheaper than Micron, despite already rallying a lot harder. So what do you do? Unlike the old days when we were flipping the dot-com IPOs. You got to pick some of these moonshots and stick with them. I spent hours and hours and hours analyzing these, and we bought some of the best, I think, for the charitable trust. As long as you have some cash on the sidelines and your portfolio, some diversification, you have my blessing to buy these red hot stocks, even if you missed them, even if you missed a lot, even if you're just getting in on Monday. If you have nothing but the memory plays and someone comes up with a better mousetrap, well, you're going to lose a lot of money, hence the need to diversify among the plays. But of all the people I've talked to in the business, nobody knows of anyone who's even trying to tackle a memory shortage. So these stocks keep running and running. And it's not too late to buy them here because the price journeys multiples are simply too low. If you don't understand what they are, get the book, okay? Price journeys multiples is about 50 pages in the book. And you know what? These things are for real and they still haven't gone to where they're going to go. So pick one or two or three, just not all of them, please, and strap yourself to the mast. It's been a wild ride and it's going to stay that way, but it is one worth taking. I like to say this as always, Bull Market Summer, Pound's Fan, just for you or your own money. I'm Jim Cramer. See you Monday. All opinions expressed by Jim Cramer on this podcast are solely Cramer's opinions and do not reflect the opinions of CNBC or its 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 Cramer as a specific inducement to make a particular investment or follow a particular strategy, but only as an expression of his opinion. Kramer'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 Mad Money Disclaimer. What made you confident that you could do something that hadn't been done before? I have no fear of failure. Trailblazing women changing the game. One of my favorite pieces of advice, think about what your boss's boss needs. Leadership can look in many, many different forms. It really does come down to just trusting yourself. Life is short and you just got to think big to accomplish big things. Julia Boorstin hosts CNBC Changemakers and Power Players. New episodes every Tuesday, wherever you get your podcasts.
