This is The Takeaway from today’s Morning Brief, which you can sign up to receive in your inbox every morning along with:
The moment has arrived.
Yahoo Finance’s 11th annual Company of the Year award winner (Walmart (WMT) won last year) will be revealed live on the Opening Bid Unfiltered podcast on Monday at 7:30 am ET. You can listen to it on Spotify, Amazon, and Apple Music. Or watch live on YouTube and here.
It won’t be me in front of a large black mic in casual clothes and a giant pair of cushioned headphones. I’ll be one-on-one with one of the most influential people in the tech industry today — that’s how we roll here.
And that’s all I can say for now, my friends! But I will toss you these teensy bones.
The battle to secure our top newsroom award is down to two: Jensen Huang-led Nvidia (NVDA) and Sam Altman’s OpenAI (OPAI.PVT).
If Nvidia wins, it will be the first time a company has won our award twice — we gave the award to the then mostly gaming chip company back in 2016. If OpenAI wins, it will be the first time we have given this award to a private company.
So, the stakes are high! I am eager to hear who you think won and why. Hit me up on X at @BrianSozzi or on LinkedIn.
Both of these companies are at the very center of the AI trade this year. (Sorry, it’s not you, Oracle (ORCL), despite what you pitched on the earnings call this week.) And each could easily be viewed as the winner.
Each company has undeniably led the market narrative for investors in 2025 — sometimes at the same time. When these companies announced big deals or their celebrity CEOs made bullish comments on AI, stocks popped. When they said or did something cautionary, stocks got hit.
Second, both companies secured scores of new, transformational deals with large public companies. Nvidia took a stake in Intel (INTC)! This is still wild to me, although former Intel CEO Pat Gelsinger tells me it’s not as crazy as you would think. OpenAI seemingly did giant deals each week, including one that may make it a major shareholder in Advanced Micro Devices (AMD).
The Yahoo Finance team is excited to bring you this special day of awards coverage on Monday. I promise you won’t be disappointed.
Brian Sozzi is Yahoo Finance’s Executive Editor and a member of Yahoo Finance’s editorial leadership team. Follow Sozzi on X @BrianSozzi, Instagram, and LinkedIn. Tips on stories? Email brian.sozzi@yahoofinance.com.
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