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Alphabet CEO Sundar Pichai walks to lunch at the Allen & Co. Media and Technology Conference in Sun Valley, Idaho, on July 12, 2023.

David Paul Morris | Bloomberg | Getty Images

Alphabet is scheduled to report fourth-quarter earnings Tuesday after the market closes.

Here’s what analysts are expecting:

  • Earnings: $1.59 per share, adjusted, according to LSEG, formerly known as Refinitiv.
  • Revenue: $85.33 billion, according to LSEG.
  • Google Cloud: $8.94 billion, according to StreetAccount.
  • YouTube ads: $9.21 billion, according to Street Account.
  • Traffic acquisition costs: $14.1 billion, according to StreetAccount.

Alphabet shares climbed to a record last week, joining Microsoft and Meta in rallying to fresh highs in January. Those climbs follow dramatic cost-cutting efforts that executives put in place in 2023.

Growth is accelerating, sparked by a rebound in the digital ad market and Google’s continuing dominance in mobile ads. But expansion remains meek by the company’s historic standards.

Analysts expect to see revenue growth of just more than 12% for the period that ended Dec. 31, from $76.05 billion in the same quarter a year earlier. That would be slightly above the growth rate for the third quarter and represent the strongest year-over-year increase since the first quarter of 2022. Between 2015 and the end of 2021, revenue growth reached at least 15% in all but three quarters.

YouTube is helping lift overall results, with revenue in that unit expected to jump 16% from $7.96 billion a year earlier. Google Cloud, which competes with Amazon Web Services and Microsoft Azure, remains a growth engine, with expansion expected to reach 22% from $7.32 billion.

“Our sense is retail and travel benefited Search spend in 4Q, while YouTube benefited from a stronger brand market,” analysts at KeyBanc Capital Markets wrote in a report on Jan. 28. They have the equivalent of a buy rating on the stock and increased their target price to $165 from $153.

Across Alphabet, CEO Sundar Pichai continues to focus on investments in artificial intelligence and embedding new generative AI tools into more of Google’s key products. To get there, Pichai has said the company has to make cuts elsewhere, which means more layoffs on top of 12,000 cuts last year, equal to roughly 6% of its full-time workforce.

In a memo earlier this month, Pichai warned employees that additional downsizing is coming this year, telling them that investing in its top priorities means “we have to make tough choices.” The company cut several hundred jobs in mid-January, affecting employees in areas including hardware and central engineering.

Wall Street has shown its confidence in Alphabet’s cost-cutting strategy as well as its ability to maintain its dominant internet business, even as generative AI tools such as OpenAI’s ChatGPT present consumers with new ways to access information. The stock price dipped in late 2022 and early 2023, in part due to concern that Google users would migrate elsewhere, but shares are up more than 9% this year after rallying 58% for all of last year. They closed Monday at $153.51.

In December, Google launched the large language model called Gemini, which it considers its largest and most capable AI model to date. The company is planning to license Gemini to customers through Google Cloud for them to use in their own applications. 

Tech investors will be focused on earnings this week from most of the top companies in the industry. Microsoft reports Tuesday, alongside Alphabet. Amazon, Apple and Meta are all scheduled to release quarterly results Thursday.

— CNBC’s Jennifer Elias contributed to this report.

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Musk, Thiel, Bannon named in partially redacted Epstein documents released by Democrats

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Musk, Thiel, Bannon named in partially redacted Epstein documents released by Democrats

Charges against Jeffrey Epstein were announced on July 8, 2019 in New York City. Epstein will be charged with one count of sex trafficking of minors and one count of conspiracy to engage in sex trafficking of minors.

Stephanie Keith | Getty Images News | Getty Images

Elon Musk, Peter Thiel and former Trump White House advisor Steve Bannon are among those who appeared in partially redacted files related to the late convicted sex offender Jeffrey Epstein that were released on Friday by Democrats in the House Oversight Committee.

The committee earlier embarked on a probe to evaluate whether the federal government mishandled its case against Epstein and co-conspirator Ghislaine Maxwell, who is serving a 20-year prison sentence following a 2022 conviction for recruiting teenage girls to be sexually abused by Epstein.

President Donald Trump had promised voters on the campaign trail that he would release government documents related to Epstein, who was arrested in the summer of 2019 on sex trafficking charges and died in a New York federal prison, reportedly by suicide, before trial.

However, Trump has refused to endorse the release of any Epstein files since returning to the White House in January, and Republicans in Congress have followed his lead, keeping the documents out of the public’s view.

Democrats in the committee on Friday released redacted pages from a new batch of files they obtained through their probe without giving their Republican peers advanced notice. They were rebuked for the move.

In a statement on Friday, the committee said that the batch included 8,544 documents in response to a subpoena in August, and that, “Further review of the documents, which were redacted to protect the identity of victims, is ongoing.”

The latest batch of documents received by the committee from the Justice Department contained itineraries and notes by Epstein memorializing invitations he’d sent, trips he’d planned and meetings he’d booked with tech and business leaders.

Demonstrators gather for a press conference calling for the release of the Jeffrey Epstein files outside the United States Captiol on Wednesday September 03, 2025 in Washington, DC.

The Washington Post | The Washington Post | Getty Images

One of the itineraries indicated that Epstein expected Musk to make a trip to his private island in the U.S. Virgin Islands on Dec. 6, 2014, but then asked “is this still happening?”

Musk told Vanity Fair in 2019 that he had visited Epstein’s New York City mansion and that Epstein “tried repeatedly to get me to visit his island,” but the Tesla CEO had declined.

In June, Musk wrote in a post on X, that he thought Trump and his administration were withholding Epstein-related files from the public view in order to protect the president’s reputation.

“Time to drop the really big bomb: @realDonaldTrump is in the Epstein files,” Musk, who was in the midst of a public spat with the president, wrote at the time. “That is the real reason they have not been made public. Have a nice day, DJT!”

Trump was mentioned in previously released court documents from the Epstein case, but has not been formally accused of wrongdoing.

Musk started the year leading the Trump administration’s Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE), an effort to slash the size of the federal government and reduce the power of various regulatory agencies. He left DOGE in May, and he and the president proceeded to hurl insults at each other in public over a number of disagreements.

However, Trump and Musk remain close enough that they sat together at a memorial service for Charlie Kirk earlier this month after the right-wing activist was assassinated while speaking at a university in Utah.

The partially redacted files also indicated Epstein had breakfast with Bannon on Feb. 16, 2019, and lunch with investor Peter Thiel on Nov. 27, 2017. Bannon is a long-time Trump ally, and Thiel was a major backer of Trump ahead of the 2016 election who spoke at the Republican National Convention.

The files also mentioned that Epstein booked a “tentative breakfast party” with Microsoft founder Bill Gates, historically a supporter of Democrats, in December 2014.

Musk, Thiel, Bannon and Gates weren’t immediately available for comment.

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Trump calls for the firing of Lisa Monaco, Microsoft president of global affairs

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Trump calls for the firing of Lisa Monaco, Microsoft president of global affairs

U.S. Deputy Attorney General Lisa O. Monaco speaks as Attorney General Merrick Garland looks on after announcing an antitrust lawsuit against Live Nation Entertainment during a press conference at the Department of Justice in Washington, U.S., May 23, 2024. 

Ken Cedeno | Reuters

President Donald Trump on Friday demanded that Microsoft fire Lisa Monaco, an executive who served as deputy attorney general during the Biden administration.

The request appeared on Trump’s Truth Social account, which has 10 million followers. It comes one day after former FBI Director James Comey was indicted, days after Trump pushed to prosecute him.

“She is a menace to U.S. National Security, especially given the major contracts that Microsoft has with the United States Government,” Trump wrote in the post. “Because of Monaco’s many wrongful acts, the U.S. Government recently stripped her of all Security Clearances, took away all of her access to National Security Intelligence, and banned her from all Federal Properties.”

Microsoft declined to comment.

Parts of the U.S. government use Microsoft’s cloud infrastructure and productivity software. Earlier this month, Microsoft agreed to offer $3.1 billion in savings in one year on cloud services for agencies to use.

Earlier on Friday, Fox Business anchor Maria Bartiromo published an X post about Monaco joining Microsoft. The appointment happened in July, according to Monaco’s LinkedIn profile. The post contained a link to a July article on the University of Chicago law school’s website.

On Thursday, Microsoft said it would cut off cloud-based storage and artificial intelligence subscriptions to a unit of the Israeli military, after investigating a claim that the division had built a system to track Palestinians’ phone calls.

On Monday, Trump is set to meet with Benjamin Netanyahu, Israel’s prime minister, NBC News reported.

Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella attended a dinner alongside other technology executives at the White House earlier this month.

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Electronic Arts stock closes up 15% on report company near $50 billion deal to go private

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Electronic Arts stock closes up 15% on report company near  billion deal to go private

Dado Ruvic | Reuters

Shares of Electronic Arts closed up 15% on Friday following a report in the Wall Street Journal that the video game company is nearing a roughly $50 billion deal to go private.

Investors including Saudi Arabia’s Public Investment Fund (PIF) and Silver Lake could announce the deal as soon as next week, the report said. PIF has been pouring billions of dollars into gaming, purchasing the makers of Pokemon Go and the parent company behind Monopoly Go, for example.

Jared Kushner’s Affinity Partners is another participating investor, according to a source familiar with the matter, who asked not to be named because the discussions are private.

The deal would be the largest leveraged buyout in Wall Street history, surpassing the agreement to take TXU Energy private for about $45 billion in 2007. A leveraged buyout (LBO) is when debt is predominately used for an acquisition, a tactic traditionally used by private equity firms or activists.

EA makes popular video games including The Sims, Madden NFL, the soccer game FC, formerly known as FIFA. With Friday’s gains, the stock is up about 32% for the year.

EA did not immediately respond to CNBC’s request for comment.

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