Mark Zuckerberg, CEO of Meta, attends a U.S. Senate bipartisan Artificial Intelligence Insight Forum at the U.S. Capitol in Washington, D.C., Sept. 13, 2023.
Stefani Reynolds | AFP | Getty Images
Meta is set to report third-quarter earnings after the bell Wednesday.
Here are the key numbers Wall Street will be watching:
Earnings: $3.63 per share expected by analysts, according to LESG, formerly known as Refinitiv
Revenue: $33.56 billion expected by analysts, according to LESG
Investors will also be focused on user numbers:
Daily active users (DAUs): 2.07 billion expected, according to StreetAccount
Monthly active users (MAUs): 3.05 billion expected, according to StreetAccount
Average revenue per user (ARPU): $11.05 expected, according to StreetAccount
Following a brutal 2022 for Meta, during which year-over-year ad revenue shrank for three consecutive quarters, growth is finally returning. The company is expected to show growth of 21% in the third quarter after sales increased 11% in the prior period.
So far in 2023, Meta has weathered the challenging digital advertising market better than smaller social media rivals like Snap, X (formerly known as Twitter) and Pinterest. Meta’s stock price has jumped about 160% this year after plunging by almost two-thirds in 2022.
Along with its ad-based competitors, Meta is still trying to recover from Apple’s 2021 iOS privacy update, which made it more difficult for companies to track users across the internet, hurting their online advertising businesses.
Meta appears to be the furthest along in terms of improving the effectiveness of its online ad platform following Apple’s changes. The company has pointed to its hefty investments in artificial intelligence as a key technology that’s helped Meta land retailers looking to serve customers targeted promotions.
But Meta’s continuing turnaround faces multiple hurdles. In particular, on Tuesday a bipartisan group of 42 attorneys general sued the company over allegations that its products harm the mental well-being of children and teenagers.
Susan Li, Meta’s chief financial officer, said last quarter that the company continues “to see increasing legal and regulatory headwinds in the EU and the U.S. that could significantly impact our business and our financial results.” Newly enacted legislation called the Digital Services Act from the European Commission, the executive body of the EU, could result in fines totaling as much as 6% of annual sales.
Meta, X and others must adhere to the DSA by removing illegal content and detailing how they’re doing it. That’s a point the European Commission recently reiterated due to the deluge of misinformation and violent content that’s been spreading tied to the escalation of the Middle East conflict.
Investors are also concerned that the Israel-Hamas war could lead to another pullback in advertising spending, similar to how businesses froze some promotions after Russia invaded Ukraine.
Snap said in its third-quarter earnings report that it has “observed pauses in spending from a large number of primarily brand-oriented advertising campaigns immediately following the onset of the war in the Middle East.”
Another persistent challenge for Meta is the amount of money it’s burning to build out the metaverse, which CEO Mark Zuckerberg has said will be the company’s future. Reality Labs, the division that houses the company’s virtual reality headsets and metaverse software, has lost more than $21 billion since the start of last year, and analysts are expecting an operating loss in the third quarter of $3.9 billion.
Artificial intelligence startup Cursor on Thursday announced it has closed a $2.3 billion funding round at a $29.3 billion post-money valuation, nearly triple what it was worth as of its last raise in June.
Tune in at 4:30 p.m. ET as Cursor CEO Michael Truell joins “Closing Bell: Overtime” to discuss the funding round. Watch in real time on CNBC+ or the CNBC Pro stream.
Cursor built a popular AI coding tool that helps software developers generate, edit and review code. Its parent company, Anysphere, is an applied research lab that was founded in 2022.
Cursor is one of just a handful of AI startups, including OpenAI, Anthropic, xAI, Safe Superintelligence and Thinking Machines, that are valued at over $10 billion.
Investors including Accel, Thrive Capital, Andreessen Horowitz, DST Global, Coatue, Nvidia and Google participated in its latest funding round, according to a blog post.
“This funding will allow us to invest deeply in our research and build Cursor’s next magical moments,” Cursor said.
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Since the tool first launched in 2023, Cursor said it has crossed $1 billion in annualized revenue and swelled to more than 300 employees.
Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang called the company his “favorite enterprise AI service” in an interview on CNBC’s “Squawk Box” in October.
The company said its in-house models generate more code than “almost” any other large language models in the world.
The coding tool market has grown more crowded in recent months as it’s proved to be a lucrative AI use case. Cursor competes with companies like OpenAI, Anthropic and Cognition, which acquired the AI coding startup Windsurf in July.
OpenAI approached Anysphere earlier this year about potentially purchasing Cursor, but the deal failed to gain traction, as CNBC previously reported. OpenAI was also briefly in talks to acquire Windsurf before ultimately introducing its own coding tool called Codex in May.
In September, Anthropic said its coding tool Claude Code has already generated more than $500 million in run-rate revenue for the company since its full launch in May. As of July, Windsurf was generating $82 million in annual recurring revenue, Cognition said in a blog post at the time.
“Internally, we often talk about how high the ceiling is for how great Cursor can become, and how much work still remains to get there,” Cursor said.
Verizon chairman Mark Bertolini said Thursday that the company’s new CEO, former PayPal boss Dan Schulman, is working to revive Verizon from its period of share losses under former CEO Hans Vestberg.
Bertolini, who is also the Oscar Health CEO and who was named Verizon chairman last month, told CNBC’s Becky Quick on “Squawk Box” that the company needs to “do something different” as it undergoes its leadership change.
“Verizon has gone from number one in market cap, bond ratings and market share to number three. And the network isn’t as differentiated as it used to be, in large part because everybody’s been spending money to put these 5G networks in place,” Bertolini said. “So losing 30% share over the last eight years is an issue, and we have to do something different.”
In October, the company announced Schulman would be replacing Vestberg, who had led the company since 2018. In a statement at the time, Schulman said Verizon was at a “critical juncture” and that he believed the company had a “clear opportunity to redefine our trajectory.”
Schulman previously led PayPal through significant revenue growth and has served on Verizon’s board of directors since 2018.
Vestberg is remaining on the the board of directors until the 2026 annual meeting and serving as a special advisor through Oct. 4, 2026.
Bertolini said Thursday that Schulman is evaluating underlying cost structures and other aspects of the company to ensure its success.
“We believe that once we have that plan in place, we’ll have a good story,” Bertolini said. “The Street reacted early on that there’s going to be a price war; I think it’s less about price war than the value of what we’re offering to people through the product.”
Bertolini added that Schulman will be revealing his plan for turning around the company “sooner rather than later.”
“The board needed to act, and we acted,” Bertolini said.
Elon Musk announced his new company xAI, which he says has the goal to understand the true nature of the universe.
Jaap Arriens | Nurphoto | Getty Images
Elon Musk‘s artificial intelligence company xAI has raised $15 billion from investors, sources familiar with the matter told CNBC’s David Faber.
The funding adds another $5 billion to the $10 billion round CNBC reported on in September that valued the startup at $200 billion. Sources told CNBC that a lot of the money will fund graphic processing units that underpin large language models.
Artificial intelligence startups have reached sky high valuations in recent months as they raise massive amounts of capital to power seemingly endless demand for foundational models.
Last last week, Tesla shareholders voted to approve Musk’s massive pay package worth nearly $1 trillion, and voted on a proposal for the company to invest in xAI.
Brandon Ehrhart, general counsel at Tesla, said there were more votes for than against, but noted the abstentions and said the company is considering next steps on the issue.
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