Scott Olson
In a week that included a mix of earnings reports from some of the biggest names in technology, there was really only one person who could knock the likes of Apple (NASDAQ:AAPL), Facebook’s Meta Platforms (NASDAQ:META) and Microsoft (NASDAQ:MSFT) out of the Wall Street spotlight:
Elon Musk.
After six months of drama, complaints, and even a high-profile lawsuit, Musk completed his $44B acquisition of Twitter on Thursday. The deal finally came to a close, one day before a trial on what had been Musk’s efforts to back out of the deal was set to start in Delaware.
And, naturally, Musk wasted little time making his mark on the social-media company. Almost as soon as the deal was completed, Musk fired a handful of Twitter executives, including Chief Executive Parag Agrawal, and Chief Financial Officer Ned Segal, amid reports that Musk himself intends on taking on the CEO job at the company.
By Friday, Musk, who has never been shy about using Twitter to voice his opinions on just about anything, had gotten on the platform to say, “Let the good times roll.”
While the curtain came down on Twitter as a publicly traded company, Wall Street was busy sussing out the earnings reports of several tech-sector giants.
Apple (AAPL) saw its shares climb almost 8% on Friday after the iPhone maker reported better-than-expected quarterly results, and set itself up for a strong Christmas and holiday shopping season led by the new models of the iPhone 14.
Intel (INTC), meanwhile, rocketed up by more than 10% almost in spite of itself. On Thursday, the semiconductor giant turned in a weaker-than-expected third-quarter report, and also cut its sales outlook for its entire fiscal year. However, Chief Executive Pat Gelsinger said that the company was set to launch a round of cost-cutting measures that will include an indeterminate number of job cuts.
Pinterest (PINS) got on the good side of investors’ sentiment as it reported third-quarter results that included maintaining its user numbers.
Microsoft (MSFT) flexed its muscles with its fiscal first-quarter results, but Wall Street took the software giant to task over signs of possible slowing growth rates from its cloud-services offerings.
Alphabet (NASDAQ:GOOG) was also in the loser’s bracket, as the Google parent suggested that revenue from its advertising business, and especially involving ads on YouTube, declined from a year ago and also fell short of analysts’ expectations.
But few tech leaders had it as bad as Meta Platforms (META).
On Wednesday, Facebook’s parent company delivered a grim quarterly report, as its third-quarter sales fell by 4% from a year ago, and it forecast fourth-quarter revenue that could come in below analysts’ estimates. Multiple analysts responded to Meta’s (META) report and outlook by cutting their ratings on the company’s stock.
Meta’s (META) immediate post-earnings situation was so bad that the company’s shares lost as much as 25% of their value. The losses only added to what has been a brutal year for Meta’s (META), which has now lost nearly $700B in market value since the end of 2021.
