Marc Benioff, co-founder and CEO of Salesforce, speaks at an Economic Club of Washington luncheon in Washington, DC, on Oct. 18, 2019.
Nicholas Kamm | AFP | Getty Images
Salesforce shares surged 12% on Thursday and headed for their biggest single-day rally since August 2020, after the cloud software vendor issued earnings and guidance that trounced analysts’ estimates.
The results show the company, led by co-founder Marc Benioff, is making concessions to activist investors who have built stakes in the business and have raised concerns lately about the company’s revenue and income performance.
After the close of regular trading on Wednesday, Salesforce reported fiscal fourth-quarter adjusted earnings of $1.68 per share, 23% higher than the consensus among analysts polled by Refinitiv. Its earnings forecast for the 2024 fiscal year was 22% higher than expected.
In addition, finance chief Amy Weaver told analysts on a conference call that Salesforce sees a 27% adjusted operating margin for the 2024 fiscal year, meaning the company is two years ahead of schedule with its profitability improvement.
Alongside the earnings report, Salesforce said it’s working with Bain on a business review, and the company announced the elimination of the board’s committee on mergers and acquisitions. That prompted praise from prominent activist Elliott Management, which announced a stake in the company in January.
Activists have been ramping up pressure on Benioff to bolster margins as revenue growth slows and the company reckons with dilution from high-priced acquisitions like Tableau and Slack.
“These steps are consistent with our recommendations, and we believe they will help restore value at Salesforce,” Elliott’s Jesse Cohn and Jason Genrich said in a statement.
Salesforce also beat on fourth-quarter revenue, reporting 14% year-over-year growth to $8.38 billion, topping the average analyst estimate of $7.99 billion, according to Refinitiv.
“Wow, what an amazing end of the fiscal year,” Kash Rangan, a Goldman Sachs analyst, said on Wednesday’s earnings call, before before asking his question. “Congratulations to the team. Much, much, much, much better than expected. Brighter days ahead.”
Rangan, who recommends buying the stock, raised his 12-month price target for the second time in a week after the report. More than two dozen other analysts increased their targets as well. The new average price target, at $213.02, is about 15% higher than where the stock was trading on Thursday.
Evercore’s Kirk Materne, one of the analysts who raised their target, wrote “there has always been plenty of optionality for CRM around margins, but until now, it has been a trickle, not a step function move.” Materne has a buy rating on the stock.
Needham analysts led by Scott Berg upgraded the shares to a buy from hold.
“Six years on the sidelines is a long time in our universe but here we are, upgrading CRM to Buy as we believe its FY24 profitability guidance better aligns its cost structure with its intermediate term growth outlook,” they wrote.
After plunging 48% last year amid the tumble in the cloud software sector, Salesforce is now up 41% in 2023 and is trading at its highest level since August.
OpenAI CEO Sam Altman walks on the day of a meeting of the White House Task Force on Artificial Intelligence (AI) Education in the East Room at the White House in Washington, D.C., U.S., September 4, 2025.
Brian Snyder | Reuters
OpenAI on Tuesday announced it will launch a dedicated ChatGPT experience with parental controls for users under 18 years old as the artificial intelligence company works to enhance safety protections for teenagers.
When OpenAI identifies that a user is a minor, they will automatically be directed to an age-appropriate ChatGPT experience that blocks graphic and sexual content and can involve law enforcement in rare cases of acute distress, the company said.
OpenAI is also developing a technology to better predict a user’s age, but ChatGPT will default to the under-18 experience if there is uncertainty or incomplete information.
The startup’s safety updates come after the Federal Trade Commission recently launched an inquiry into several tech companies, including OpenAI, over how AI chatbots like ChatGPT potentially negatively affect children and teenagers.
The agency said it wants to understand what steps these companies have taken to “evaluate the safety of these chatbots when acting as companions,” according to a release.
OpenAI also shared how ChatGPT will handle “sensitive situations” last month after a lawsuit from a family blamed the chatbot for their teenage son’s death by suicide.
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“We prioritize safety ahead of privacy and freedom for teens; this is a new and powerful technology, and we believe minors need significant protection,” OpenAI CEO Sam Altman wrote in a blog post on Tuesday.
In August, OpenAI said it would release parental controls to help them understand and shape how their teens are using ChatGPT. OpenAI shared more details about those parental controls on Tuesday, and it said they will be available at the end of the month.
The company’s upcoming controls will allow parents to link their ChatGPT account with their teen’s via email, set blackout hours for when their teen can’t use the chatbot, manage which features to disable, guide how the chatbot responds and receive notifications if the teen is in acute distress.
ChatGPT is intended for users who are ages 13 and up, OpenAI said.
“These are difficult decisions, but after talking with experts, this is what we think is best and want to be transparent in our intentions,” Altman wrote.
If you are having suicidal thoughts or are in distress, contact the Suicide & Crisis Lifeline at 988 for support and assistance from a trained counselor
A Youtube podcast microphone is seen at the Variety Podcasting Brunch Presented By YouTube at Austin Proper Hotel in Austin, Texas, on March 8, 2025.
Mat Hayward | Variety | Getty Images
YouTube said on Tuesday it has paid out over $100 billion to creators, artists and media companies since 2021.
The surge has been fueled in part by growing viewership on connected TVs. The number of channels making more than $100,000 from TV screens jumped 45% year over year, the company said.
YouTube Chief Product Officer Johanna Voolich praised the power of creators to “shape culture and entertainment in ways we never thought possible” in a release announcing the benchmark and a series of other new features.
The milestone comes as the Google-owned platform marks its 20th year and pushes to cement itself as one of the world’s most lucrative media businesses.
YouTube unveiled the updated payout figure and a slate of new creator tools at its annual Made on YouTube event in New York City.
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The company announced new artificial intelligence tools for YouTube Shorts, its short-form vertical video product. Creators will be able to turn raw footage into edited clips with AI and can add music, transitions and voiceover.
New features also include the ability to turn dialogue from eligible videos into a song to be used in the Short.
Google’s latest AI video generator, Veo 3, will also be integrated into Shorts, YouTube said.
Google uses a subset of YouTube videos to train Veo 3, to the surprise of many YouTube creators, CNBC reported in June.
YouTube turned 20 years old in April and announced it hosted over 20 billion videos on the platform, including music, Shorts, podcasts and more.
Last year, YouTube CEO Neal Mohan said the company had paid $70 billion to creators between 2021 and 2024.
The framework agreement for the social media platform TikTok will include new investors as well as existing investors in the platform’s Chinese parent company ByteDance, sources told CNBC’s David Faber.
The deal is expected to close in the next 30 to 45 days, according to the sources, who asked not to be named because the details of the negotiations are confidential. As part of the agreement, Oracle will keep its cloud deal with the platform, the people said.
“Where this thing is capitalized and how large it is remains to be seen,” Faber said during CNBC’s “Squawk on the Street” on Tuesday. “‘I’m hearing it’s actually going to be relatively small in terms of the actual size of the checks that are written for the entity itself, and it will not be something that is going to go public at some point.”
The White House, TikTok and Oracle did not immediately respond to CNBC’s request for comment.
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TikTok’s future in the U.S. has been uncertain since 2024, when Congress passed a bill that would ban the platform unless its Chinese owner, ByteDance, divested from it. Lawmakers had grown concerned that the Chinese government could access sensitive data from American users or manipulate content on the platform.
Deal talks have dragged, with President Donald Trumpextending the deadline three times since taking office in January.
The new details about the deal come after U.S. Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent said Monday that the U.S. and China have reached a “framework” deal for TikTok.
Bessent said Tuesday that commercial terms had been in place since March or April, but the Chinese put it on hold after Trump’s “Liberation Day” tariff blitz.
Oracle has been floated as a potential investor or buyer of TikTok for months.
Reuters reported in January that the White House picked Oracle to handle TikTok’s data collection and software updates as part of a deal.
Trump has previously said he’d be open to Oracle Chairman Larry Ellison buying TikTok in the U.S.