- All the tech layoffs are because AI is like ‘corporate Ozempic’—it trims the fat and you keep the fact you’re using it a secret, says marketing guru Scott Galloway Fortune
- Despite Booming Economy And Record Profits Google, Amazon, Microsoft And More Lay Off Over 42,000 So Far In 2024 Yahoo Finance
- SF layoffs continue, with Salesforce, Cisco cutting jobs | Technology San Francisco Examiner
- Tech Layoffs Keep Coming. Why Is Head Count Barely Budging? – WSJ The Wall Street Journal
- Despite tech layoffs, Silicon Valley jobs are up CalMatters
Tag Archives: corporate
Disney Sparks Backlash For Hiking Prices While Paying CEO $25 Million & Claiming It Can’t Afford To Pay Striking Actors & Writers — ‘Pure Corporate Greed’ – YourTango
- Disney Sparks Backlash For Hiking Prices While Paying CEO $25 Million & Claiming It Can’t Afford To Pay Striking Actors & Writers — ‘Pure Corporate Greed’ YourTango
- Disney to boost prices for ad-free Disney+ and Hulu services and vows crackdown on password sharing 12NewsNow
- Disney+ announces new round of price changes, password crackdown likely Film Stories
- Hulu + Live TV price hike has me ready to cancel — here’s where I’m thinking of going Tom’s Guide
- The TV streaming apps broke their promises, and now they’re jacking up prices Ars Technica
- View Full Coverage on Google News
TikTokers are flocking to the viral photo app Remini for AI-generated corporate headshots, but some say it’s editing their bodies beyond recognition – Yahoo Entertainment
- TikTokers are flocking to the viral photo app Remini for AI-generated corporate headshots, but some say it’s editing their bodies beyond recognition Yahoo Entertainment
- ‘Why Pay a Photographer?’: Generation Z Go Wild for AI-Generated Headshots PetaPixel
- Gen Zers are using apps like Remini and Canva to turn selfies into A.I.-generated professional headshots while saving big money Fortune
- People issue warning after using AI app to create professional headshots UNILAD
- How to get the viral AI Headshots filter on TikTok Dexerto
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Corporate raider Carl Icahn recovers $1 billion in his fortune as loan deal with big banks alleviates short-seller assault – Fortune
- Corporate raider Carl Icahn recovers $1 billion in his fortune as loan deal with big banks alleviates short-seller assault Fortune
- Carl Icahn Gets Breathing Room From Lenders Following Short-Seller Attack – WSJ The Wall Street Journal
- Lightning Round: Icahn Enterprises probably has another 10% higher to go, says Jim Cramer CNBC Television
- Icahn Enterprises stock surges after founder untangles loans from share price: Report Yahoo Finance
- Icahn Revises Loan Pact With Banks After Short Seller Hindenburg’s Attack Bloomberg
- View Full Coverage on Google News
‘Succession’ Star Matthew Macfadyen on Shiv’s Motivations and Tom’s Future: ‘It’s Just Another Move in a Corporate Nightmare’ – Variety
- ‘Succession’ Star Matthew Macfadyen on Shiv’s Motivations and Tom’s Future: ‘It’s Just Another Move in a Corporate Nightmare’ Variety
- ‘Succession’ Creator Jesse Armstrong Reveals What Happens to the Characters Post-Finale Yahoo Life
- ‘Succession’: Matthew Macfadyen and Nicholas Braun Discuss the Finale The New York Times
- ‘Succession’ and ‘Barry’: A Tale of Two HBO Finales The Ringer
- ‘Succession’ Series Finale: Matthew Macfadyen on Tom and Greg’s Future Collider
- View Full Coverage on Google News
Stock futures are slightly down as investors parse corporate earnings: Live updates – CNBC
- Stock futures are slightly down as investors parse corporate earnings: Live updates CNBC
- Dow Jones Futures: Tesla Falls As Margins Dive; Why Elon Musk Is Willing To Go For Zero Profit | Investor’s Business Daily Investor’s Business Daily
- Netflix earnings breakdown, United Airlines predicts strong travel season, bank earnings takeaways Yahoo Finance
- Stocks making the biggest moves premarket: United Airlines, Netflix, Morgan Stanley and more CNBC
- LIVE STOCK MARKET UPDATES: Morgan Stanley, Ally Financial, Citizens, and other banks report earnings Fox Business
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Meta stock spikes despite earnings miss, as Facebook hits 2 billion users for first time and sales guidance quells fears
Meta Platforms Inc. shares soared in after-hours trading Wednesday despite an earnings miss, as the Facebook parent company guided for potentially more revenue than Wall Street expected in the new year and promised more share repurchases amid cost cuts.
Meta
META,
+2.79%
said it hauled in $32.17 billion in fourth-quarter revenue, down from $33.67 billion a year ago but stronger than expectations. Earnings were $4.65 billion, or $1.76 a share, compared with $10.3 billion, or $3.67 a share, last year.
Analysts polled by FactSet expected Meta to post fourth-quarter revenue of $31.55 billion on earnings of $2.26 a share, and the beat on sales coincided with a revenue forecast that also met or exceeded expectations. Facebook Chief Financial Officer Susan Li projected first-quarter sales of $26 billion to $28.5 billion, while analysts on average were projecting first-quarter sales of $27.2 billion.
Shares jumped more than 18% in after-hours trading immediately following the release of the results, after closing with a 2.8% gain at $153.12.
Alphabet Inc.’s
GOOGL,
+1.61%
GOOG,
+1.56%
Google and Pinterest Inc.
PINS,
+1.56%
benefited from Meta’s results, with shares for each company rising 4% in extended trading Wednesday.
“Our community continues to grow and I’m pleased with the strong engagement across our apps. Facebook just reached the milestone of 2 billion daily actives,” Meta Chief Executive Mark Zuckerberg said in a statement announcing the results. “The progress we’re making on our AI discovery engine and Reels are major drivers of this. Beyond this, our management theme for 2023 is the ‘Year of Efficiency’ and we’re focused on becoming a stronger and more nimble organization.”
Read more: Snap suffers worst sales growth yet in holiday quarter, stock plunges after earnings miss
Facebook’s 2 billion-user milestone was slightly better than analysts expected for user growth on Meta’s core social network. Daily active users across all of Facebook’s apps neared, but did not crest, another round number, reaching 2.96 billion, up 5% from a year ago.
Meta has been navigating choppy ad waters as it copes with increasing competition from TikTok and fallout from changes in Apple Inc.’s
AAPL,
+0.79%
ad-tracking system in 2021 that punitively harmed Meta, costing it potentially billions of dollars in advertising sales. Meta has invested heavily in artificial-intelligence tools to rev up its ad-targeting systems and making better recommendations for users of its short-video product Reels, but it laid off thousands of workers after profit and revenue shrunk in recent quarters.
The cost cuts seemed to pay off Wednesday. While Facebook missed on its earnings, it noted that the costs of its layoffs and other restructuring totaled $4.2 billion and reduced the number by roughly $1.24 a share.
Meta executives said they now expect operating expenses to be $89 billion to $95 billion this year, down from previous guidance for $94 billion to $100 billion. Capital expenditures are expected to be $30 billion to $33 billion, down from previous guidance of $34 billion to $37 billion, as Meta cancels multiple data-center projects.
In a conference call with analysts late Wednesday, Zuckerberg called 2023 the “year of efficiency.”
“The reduced outlook reflects our updated plans for lower data-center construction spend in 2023 as we shift to a new data-center architecture that is more cost efficient and can support both AI and non-AI workloads,” Li said in her outlook commentary included in the release.
Meta expects to increase its spending on its own stock. The company’s board approved a $40 billion increase in its share-repurchase authorization; Meta spent nearly $28 billion on its own shares in 2022, and still had nearly $11 billion available for buybacks before that increase.
“Investors are cheering Meta’s plans to return more capital to shareholders despite worries over rising costs related to its metaverse spending,” said Jesse Cohen, senior analyst at Investing.com.
The results came a day after Snap Inc.
SNAP,
-10.29%
posted fourth-quarter revenue of $1.3 billion, flat from a year ago and the worst year-over-year sales growth Snap has ever reported. But they also arrived on the same day Facebook scored a major win in a California court. The company successfully fended off the Federal Trade Commission bid to win a preliminary injunction to block Meta’s planned acquisition of VR startup Within Unlimited.
Read more: Meta wins bid to buy VR startup Within Unlimited, beating U.S. FTC in court: report
Meta shares have plunged 53% over the past 12 months, while the broader S&P 500 index
SPX,
+1.05%
has tumbled 10% the past year.
Airbus Revives Order From Qatar Airways Following Paint-Dispute Settlement
LONDON—
Airbus
EADSY 2.36%
SE agreed to revive orders for close to 75 aircraft from Qatar Airways after reaching a settlement with the Middle East airline over a long-running dispute about chipping paint on its A350 wide-body models.
A spokesman for Airbus said it would now go ahead with delivering 50 A321 narrow-bodies and 23 remaining A350 twin-aisles previously ordered by Qatar.
The orders had been scrapped as part of an escalating, multibillion-dollar legal battle over the paint issue, which the airline had claimed could pose a safety concern. Airbus repeatedly denied the claims.
Airbus and Qatar Airways earlier Wednesday said in a joint statement that they had reached an “amicable and mutually agreeable settlement” in relation to the legal dispute. The companies didn’t disclose the details of the settlement other than to say the agreement didn’t amount to an admission of liability from either party. A program to repair the degradation on Qatar’s current fleet is under way, the companies added.
Qatar Airways had previously grounded 29 of its A350 jets and refused new deliveries over the issue, reducing its capacity amid a surge in travel to Doha for the 2022 FIFA World Cup. The airline has said the peeling paint was exposing the meshed copper foil that is designed to protect the aircraft from lightning strikes.
That led Qatar Airways to initiate legal proceedings against Airbus in London, in which the carrier had sought damages partly based on the impact on its operations from not being able to use the aircraft. A possible trial had been scheduled for later this year.
While the paint issue has also affected other A350s in service at other Airbus customers, only Qatar Airways had taken the step to unilaterally ground the aircraft. Airbus and the European Union Aviation Safety Agency, which oversees the Toulouse, France-based plane maker, have insisted that the issue is only cosmetic.
The situation had led to a broad fallout between Airbus and one of its biggest customers. In August, Airbus ended all new business with Qatar Airways, canceling contracts valued at more than $13 billion according to the latest available list prices and before the hefty discounts plane makers typically give to customers.
After Airbus canceled a deal to sell Qatar Airways 50 of its A321 jets, the Gulf carrier ordered up to 50 of rival
Boeing Co.
’s 737 MAX 10 single-aisle jets within two weeks. Qatar Airways had previously canceled most of an existing MAX order in 2020 after receiving five of the planes.
Airbus lawyers alleged that Qatar Airways had exaggerated concerns about the issue in an attempt to claim compensation and refuse delivery of aircraft that it didn’t need as the pandemic hit demand for air travel. The plane maker complained in court that the airline and its regulator, the Qatar Civil Aviation Authority, had failed to provide documentation that showed the technical justifications behind grounding the aircraft.
Qatar Airways has said it provided images of the damage, which it purported showed the scale of the issue and the potential safety risk.
Qatar Airways Chief Executive
Akbar Al Baker
has long had a reputation as a tough customer, publicly lashing out at both Airbus and Boeing when he perceives delivery or quality issues.
Write to Benjamin Katz at ben.katz@wsj.com
Copyright ©2022 Dow Jones & Company, Inc. All Rights Reserved. 87990cbe856818d5eddac44c7b1cdeb8
Despite ban, China nuclear-weapons lab has bought U.S. chips for years
SINGAPORE — China’s top nuclear-weapons research institute has bought sophisticated U.S. computer chips at least a dozen times in the past two and half years, circumventing decades-old American export restrictions meant to curb such sales.
A Wall Street Journal review of procurement documents found that the state-run China Academy of Engineering Physics has managed to obtain the semiconductors made by U.S. companies such as Intel Corp.
INTC,
-6.41%
and Nvidia Corp.
NVDA,
+2.84%
since 2020 despite its placement on a U.S. export blacklist in 1997.
The chips, which are widely used in data centers and personal computers, were acquired from resellers in China. Some were procured as components for computing systems, with many bought by the institute’s laboratory studying computational fluid dynamics, a broad scientific field that includes the modeling of nuclear explosions.
Such purchases defy longstanding restrictions imposed by the U.S. that aim to prevent the use of any U.S. products for atomic-weapons research by foreign powers. The academy, known as CAEP, was one of the first Chinese institutions put on the U.S. blacklist, known as the entity list, because of its nuclear work.
A Journal review of research papers published by CAEP found that at least 34 over the past decade referenced using American semiconductors in the research. They were used in a range of ways, including analyzing data and generating algorithms. Nuclear experts said that in at least seven of them, the research can have applications to maintaining nuclear stockpiles. CAEP didn’t respond to requests for comment.
The findings underline the challenge facing the Biden administration as it seeks to more aggressively counter the use of American technology by China’s military. In October, the U.S. expanded the scope of export regulations to prevent China from obtaining the most advanced American chips and chip-manufacturing tools that power artificial intelligence and supercomputers, which are increasingly important to modern warfare.
An expanded version of this report appears on WSJ.com.
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DOJ Seeks to Ban Sam Bankman-Fried From Contacting FTX Employees
The Justice Department on Friday asked a federal judge to bar FTX founder
Sam Bankman-Fried
from communicating with current and former employees of the collapsed crypto exchange without a lawyer present after prosecutors alleged he recently contacted a potential witness in his criminal case.
Mr. Bankman-Fried, who faces federal charges related to the implosion of FTX, reached out to the general counsel of the company’s U.S. operation through an encrypted messaging application earlier this month, federal prosecutors said in a filing. Prosecutors said Mr. Bankman-Fried has also contacted other current and former FTX employees and are concerned that the communications could lead to witness tampering.
Prosecutors also requested the judge prohibit Mr. Bankman-Fried from communicating through encrypted messaging applications like Slack and Signal, saying that when he headed FTX he directed employees of the company and his crypto-investment firm Alameda Research to set their communications on these platforms to auto-delete after 30 days. That policy has impeded the government’s investigation, prosecutors said.
“Potential witnesses have described relevant and incriminating conversations with the defendant that took place on Slack and Signal that have already been autodeleted because of settings implemented at the defendant’s direction,” prosecutors said in the filing.
Lawyers for Mr. Bankman-Fried in a letter to the judge said the government was mischaracterizing innocuous conduct by their client in “an apparent effort to portray our client in the worst possible light.” They said the government’s request was overbroad and unnecessary, proposing instead that Mr. Bankman-Fried be prohibited from contacting certain limited witnesses, not all of FTX’s current and former employees.
FTX’s U.S. general counsel, Ryne Miller, couldn’t immediately be reached.
The Manhattan U.S. attorney’s office charged Mr. Bankman-Fried last month with stealing billions of dollars from FTX customers while misleading lenders and investors. He pleaded not guilty and is currently under court-ordered confinement in his parents’ Palo Alto, Calif., home while he awaits trial.
Mr. Bankman-Fried sent a Jan. 15 Signal message to the general counsel in which prosecutors allege he said he “would really love to reconnect and see if there’s a way for us to have a constructive relationship, use each other as resources when possible, or at least vet things with each other.”
Prosecutors didn’t identify the other employees that Mr. Bankman-Fried has allegedly tried to contact but called the communications to the general counsel and others troubling.
“Were the defendant to ‘vet’ his version of relevant events with potential witnesses, that might have the effect of discouraging witnesses from testifying in a manner contrary to the defendant’s narrative,” the Justice Department said in the filing.
Mr. Bankman-Fried’s lawyers said the message to Mr. Miller was more reasonably read as an attempt by Mr. Bankman-Fried to offer his assistance to FTX, not a “sinister attempt” to influence testimony at trial.
Write to James Fanelli at james.fanelli@wsj.com
Copyright ©2022 Dow Jones & Company, Inc. All Rights Reserved. 87990cbe856818d5eddac44c7b1cdeb8