Founder and CEO of Facebook Mark Zuckerberg speaks at the annual Munich Security Conference on February 15, 2020.
Kuhlmann | Munich Security Conference
Facebook on Monday announced it will begin requiring all of its employees to wear masks when on its campuses in the U.S., regardless of an employee’s vaccination status.
“The health and safety of our employees and neighbors in the community remains our top priority,” a spokeswoman for the company said in a statement. “Given the rising numbers of COVID cases, the newest data on COVID variants, and an increasing number of local requirements, we are reinstating our mask requirement in all of Facebook’s U.S. offices, regardless of an employee’s vaccination status.”
The new policy goes into effect on Wednesday and will remain in effect until further notice. The decision comes as several local governments in the San Francisco Bay Area roll out similar orders requiring all people wear masks when indoors in public places.
Facebook’s on-campus mask policy comes after the company last week announced that it will require all U.S. workers returning to its offices to be vaccinated.
The company isn’t alone in the tech industry in re-instating health safety measures as Covid-19 cases pick up again as a result of the Delta variant.
Google last week announced it will require employees on campus to be vaccinated and postponed its return to office plans until October. Apple also pushed back its return to office plans to October at the earliest, according to a report last month.
Qnity Electronics — now spun off from DuPont — moved higher in its public debut on the New York Stock Exchange on Monday. The stock quickly earned an endorsement from Jim Cramer. “We have a nice position in Qnity, but we don’t own enough,” Jim said during Monday’s Morning Meeting . The Club received 812 shares of Qnity, one for every two DuPont shares the Club already owned. Qnity’s weighting in the Charitable Trust is 2.04% as of Monday, compared to DuPont’s 1.45% weighting. With its long-awaited split from DuPont in the rearview mirror, Jim touted Qnity as a great play on growth in semiconductors due to the artificial intelligence boom. This is especially true now that the former electronics division is not getting bogged down by DuPont’s far-flung businesses — focusing on health care, water, and diversified industrials. We do, however, plan to keep our remaining DuPont shares for now. Q 5D mountain Qnity Electronics started trading on Monday, Nov. 3, 2025. Most of Qnity’s business is focused on providing solutions for the semiconductor market, with more than 65% of the company’s portfolio tied to the industry. Qnity makes the chemicals and materials used to produce semiconductors, which are utilized in powering everything from smartphones to AI data centers. Qnity forecasts the global market for semiconductors will surge to $1.3 trillion in 2030, up from $740 billion currently. A big reason for this growth is the need to build and retrofit data centers to run heavy AI workloads. Big tech companies are pouring billions upon billions of dollars into AI infrastructure, which should send more and more business to firms like Qnity. Qnity CEO Jon Kemp told CNBC on Monday that the company already derives roughly 15% of its sales from AI data centers. “We sit at the intersection of those transformative trends that are starting to transform the modern economy,” he explained, also citing other markets like high-performance computing, robotics, autonomous driving, and factory automation. Qnity already has deep partnerships with tech behemoths like fellow Club holding Nvidia , chip manufacturer Taiwan Semi , and consumer electronics giant Samsung. “We are really well-positioned to power the chips that power the modern economy,” Kemp said during a ” Squawk on the Street ” interview with Jim. Qnity plans to provide a business update after Thursday’s closing bell. Wall Street analysts like what they hear about Qnity, too. In fact, analysts at BMO Capital Markets, KeyBanc, and RBC Capital all started coverage of the stock with buy-equivalent ratings last week. Wolfe Research followed suit Monday, with a buy and a $110 price target. Put it all together, and this makes Qnity a great name to help ride the unprecedented wave of growth in generative AI and semiconductors, more broadly. “This is a very important deal for people who are looking for a new way to play all the stuff we talk about all the time,” Jim said Monday. Qnity shares closed up more than 2% in Monday’s debut to around $97 each. DuPont shares, which were adjusted lower to reflect the split, rose nearly 2%. The Club plans to put out a Qnity price target and one for the remaining DuPont in the coming days, Jeff Marks, director of portfolio analysis, wrote in Monday’s Homestretch . We will get a better idea of where things stand after DuPont reports earnings Thursday morning and Qnity updates investors Thursday evening. DD YTD mountain DuPont YTD (Jim Cramer’s Charitable Trust is long Q, DD, NVDA. See here for a full list of the stocks.) As a subscriber to the CNBC Investing Club with Jim Cramer, you will receive a trade alert before Jim makes a trade. Jim waits 45 minutes after sending a trade alert before buying or selling a stock in his charitable trust’s portfolio. If Jim has talked about a stock on CNBC TV, he waits 72 hours after issuing the trade alert before executing the trade. THE ABOVE INVESTING CLUB INFORMATION IS SUBJECT TO OUR TERMS AND CONDITIONS AND PRIVACY POLICY , TOGETHER WITH OUR DISCLAIMER . NO FIDUCIARY OBLIGATION OR DUTY EXISTS, OR IS CREATED, BY VIRTUE OF YOUR RECEIPT OF ANY INFORMATION PROVIDED IN CONNECTION WITH THE INVESTING CLUB. NO SPECIFIC OUTCOME OR PROFIT IS GUARANTEED.
Alex Karp, chief executive officer of Palantir Technologies Inc., speaks during the AIPCon conference in Palo Alto, California, US, on March 13, 2025.
David Paul Morris | Bloomberg | Getty Images
Palantir reported quarterly results that topped analysts’ estimates and issued better-than-expected guidance for the fourth quarter, attributing much of its strength to artificial intelligence. The stock rose about 1% in extended trading.
Here’s how the company did compared to LSEG estimates:
Earnings per share: 21 cents adjusted vs. 17 cents expected
Revenues: $1.18 billion vs. $1.09 billion expected
Palantir, which builds analytics tools for large companies and government agencies, said it expects revenue of about $1.33 billion for the current period, exceeding the $1.19 billion expected by analysts, according to LSEG.
The optimistic guidance comes even as the government shutdown stretches into its second calendar month, and potentially threatens some key contracts. Revenue in Palantir’s U.S. government business grew 52% in the quarter from a year ago to $486 million.
Government sales, particularly from military agencies, have been central to Palantir’s ongoing ascent. Over the years, Palantir has steadily beat out major legacy government contractors, and recently landed a deal worth up to $10 billion contract with the U.S. Army.
Palantir has also faced criticism over how its tools are being used by government agencies, including U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement.
Total revenue in the quarter jumped 63% from $725.5 million a year ago, exceeding $1 billion for the second straight quarter. Net income more than tripled to $475.6 million, or 18 cents per share, from $143.5 million, or 6 cents per share, a year earlier.
For the full year, Palantir now expects about $4.4 billion in sales, topping the $4.17 billion forecast by Wall Street. The company also bumped up its full-year free cash flow outlook to between $1.9 billion and $2.1 billion.
Palantir’s U.S. commercial business more than doubled to $397 million. Total contract value for U.S. commercial deals closed more than quadrupled to $1.31 billion. Over the last few weeks, the company has announced new partnerships with Snowflake, Lumen and Nvidia.
Retail investors have helped drive Palantir’s skyrocketing stock price to new heights. The shares have surged more than 170% this year, lifting the company’s market cap past $490 billion and cementing the company among the most valuable technology names in the world.
Analysts have raised concerns about the stock, which trades at an extreme multiple relative to technology behemoths with far more revenue. In a letter to shareholders, CEO Alex Karp called out the “detractors” who have been “left in a kind of deranged and self-destructive befuddlement.”
“The reality is that Palantir has made it possible for retail investors to achieve rates of return previously limited to the most successful venture capitalists in Palo Alto,” he wrote. “And we have done so through authentic and substantive growth.”
In an interview with CNBC’s Morgan Brennan on Monday, Karp acknowledged that there’s excess in the AI market today and that some companies are eventually going to feel the pain.
“The strong companies are going to get much stronger, and the people pretending they’re doing stuff are going to disappear very quickly,” Karp said.
Representation of Ethereum, with its native cryptocurrency ether.
Dado Ruvic | Reuters
Ether fell as much as 9% on Monday, slipping below its critical $3,600 support level, shortly after a multimillion dollar hack affected a protocol on the token’s native network.
The cryptocurrency, which is issued on Ethereum, was last down 6.6% at around $3,600, CoinMetrics data shows. That’s roughly 25% off its high of $4,885 hit on August 22.
The coin’s tumble came after Ethereum-based decentralized finance protocol Balancer on Monday lost possibly more than $100 million in a hack. The exploit marks the latest in a series of bearish events that have put digital assets investors on tenterhooks over the past few weeks.
In mid-October, U.S. President Donald Trump announced “massive” tariffs on China over its restriction of rare earth exports, kicking off investors’ flight from crypto to risk-off assets such as gold. And although the president later walked back that threat, his comments sparked a sell-off that triggered cascading liquidations of highly leveraged digital asset positions.
“These events have put investors on uneasy footing as we roll into November,” Juan Leon, senior investment strategist at Bitwise, told CNBC. “Macro volatility notwithstanding, this October’s drawdown appears to have been a healthy, albeit sharp, de-leveraging event that flushed speculative excess from the market.”
Some stocks linked to digital assets are also coming under pressure. Coinbase shares were down nearly 4%, while Bitcoin treasury firm Strategy edged down more than 1%.