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Twilio CEO Khozema Shipchandler speaks at Twilio’s Signal event in Sao Paulo on Aug. 14, 2024.

Courtesy: Twilio

Twilio shares soared more than 20% on Friday and headed for their biggest gain since the early days of the Covid pandemic after the cloud communications software vendor issued an uplifting profit forecast for the coming years.

The stock jumped to $140.12 as of midday trading, which would be its highest close since 2022.

Twilio revealed its new guidance at an investor event Thursday, a little over a year after the company named Khozema Shipchandler as CEO. Shipchandler, who had been Twilio’s president and before that spent 22 years at GE, replaced co-founder Jeff Lawson after a battle with activist investors.

Twilio now sees its adjusted operating margin widening to between 21% and 22% in 2027 as part of a three-year framework for guidance. That’s higher than Visible Alpha’s 19.68% consensus. Twilio’s adjusted operating margin in the most recent quarter was 16.1%.

At Thursday’s event, company executives committed to generating $3 billion in free cash flow over the next three years, compared with approximately $692 million in free cash flow for 2022, 2023 and 2024. The Visible Alpha consensus for Twilio’s 2025 through 2027 was $2.76 billion.

“If we execute well in 2025, I think we write our own story from 2026 on,” Shipchandler told CNBC ahead of the investor gathering.

Twilio, which sends text messages and emails for customers, did not issue a revenue growth target for 2027 at its Thursday event.

But Shipchandler did tell analysts at the investor event that “we’re orienting the company to deliver against double-digit growth over time.”

For 2025, the company said it expects $825 million to $850 million in free cash flow and the same amount in adjusted operating income, with 7% to 8% revenue growth year over year. The Visible Alpha consensus was $814 million in adjusted operating income and about $808 million in free cash flow. The 2025 revenue forecast was in line with LSEG consensus.

Twilio went public in 2016 as a high-growth software company taking advantage of the transition to the cloud. It was one of the big early beneficiaries of the Covid remote work boom as more companies relied on mobile communications to keep in touch with employees and clients. The stock surged more than 240% in 2020.

But in 2022, the stock lost more than 80% of its value as investor focus shifted to profit over growth to reckon with rising interest rates and soaring inflation. Twilio cut 17% of its workforce in early 2023, and activist investors Anson Funds and Legion Partners Asset Management agitated for a sale of Twilio or one of its business units, CNBC reported.

Since activist firm Sachem Head Capital Management won a Twilio board seat in April, the company’s stock has jumped about 81%, as revenue growth has accelerated and losses have narrowed.

By expanding into new areas, such as conversational artificial intelligence, Twilio says it can sell into a $158 billion total addressable market by 2028, compared with $119 billion when only focusing on the communications and customer data platform categories.

Twilio’s preliminary results for the fourth quarter show 11% revenue growth, with adjusted operating income that exceeds the top end of the $185 million to $195 million range that the company issued in October. Analysts surveyed by LSEG had expected 7.9% revenue growth and, according to Visible Alpha, the adjusted operating income consensus was about $190 million.

Baird analysts William Power and Yanni Samoilis upgraded their stock to the equivalent of buy from the equivalent of hold in a Friday note to clients, raising their price target to $160 from $115. The analysts said they “expect a potential beat-and-raise cadence to continue to push shares higher, particularly with the strengthening profitability, cash flow, and capital returns.”

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Alphabet becomes fourth company to reach $3 trillion market cap

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Alphabet becomes fourth company to reach  trillion market cap

Google CEO Sundar Pichai gestures to the crowd during Google’s annual I/O developers conference in Mountain View, California on May 20, 2025.

Camille Cohen | Afp | Getty Images

Alphabet has joined the $3 trillion club.

Shares of the search giant jumped more than 4% on Monday, pushing the company into territory occupied only by Nvidia, Microsoft and Apple.

The stock got a big lift in early September from an antitrust ruling by a judge, whose penalties came in lighter than shareholders feared. The U.S. Department of Justice wanted Google to be forced to divest its Chrome browser, and last year a district court ruled that the company held an illegal monopoly in search and related advertising.

But Judge Amit Mehta decided against the most severe consequences proposed by the DOJ, which sent shares soaring to a record. After the big rally, President Donald Trump congratulated the company and called it “a very good day.”

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Alphabet shares are now up more than 30% this year, compared to the 15% gain for the Nasdaq.

The $3 trillion milestone comes roughly 20 years after Google’s IPO and a little more than 10 years after the creation of Alphabet as a holding company, with Google its prime subsidiary.

CEO Sundar Pichai was named CEO of Alphabet in 2019, replacing co-founder Larry Page. Pichai’s latest challenge has been the surge of new competition due to the rise of artificial intelligence, which the company has had to manage through while also fending off an aggressive set of regulators in the U.S. and Europe.

The rise of Perplexity and OpenAI ended up helping Google land the recent favorable antitrust ruling. The company’s hopes of becoming a major AI player largely ride with Gemini, Google’s flagship suite of AI models.

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EU fines Google almost $3 billion over AdTech practices, reports say

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Bessent: TikTok deal ‘framework’ reached with China, Trump and Xi will finalize it Friday

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Bessent: TikTok deal 'framework' reached with China, Trump and Xi will finalize it Friday

Samuel Boivin | Nurphoto | Getty Images

The U.S. and China have reached a ‘framework’ deal for social media platform TikTok, Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent said Monday.

“It’s between two private parties, but the commercial terms have been agreed upon,” he said from U.S.-China talks in Madrid.

Both President Donald Trump and Chinese President Xi Jinping will meet Friday to discuss the terms. Trump also said in a Truth Social post Monday that a deal was reached “on a ‘certain’ company that young people in our Country very much wanted to save.”

Bessent indicated that the framework could pivot the platform to U.S.-controlled ownership.

TikTok did not immediately respond to a request for comment.

The comments came during the latest round of trade discussions between the U.S. and China. Relations have soured between the two countries in recent months from Trump’s tariffs and other trade restrictions.

At the same time, TikTok parent company ByteDance faces a Sept. 17 deadline to divest the platform’s U.S. business or face being shut down in the country.

U.S. Trade Representative Jamieson Greer said Monday that the deadline may need to be pushed back to get the deal signed, but there won’t be ongoing extensions.

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Congress passed a law last year prohibiting app store operators like Apple and Google from distributing TikTok in the U.S. due to its “foreign adversary-controlled application” status.

But Trump postponed the shutdown in January, signing an executive order in January that gave ByteDance 75 more days to make a deal. Further extensions came by way of executive orders in April and in June.

Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick said in July that TikTok would shutter for Americans if China doesn’t give the U.S. more autonomy over the popular short-form video app.

As for who controls the platform, Trump told Fox News in June that he had a group of “very wealthy people” ready to buy the app and could reveal their identities in two weeks. The reveal never came.

He has previously said he’d be open to Oracle Chairman Larry Ellison or Tesla CEO Elon Musk buying TikTok in the U.S. Artificial intelligence startup Perplexity has submitted a bid for an acquisition, as has businessman Frank McCourt’s Project Liberty internet advocacy group, CNBC reported in January.

Trump told CNBC in an interview last year that he believed the platform was a national security threat, although the White House started a TikTok account in August.

White House launches TikTok account

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Why is Sam Altman losing sleep? OpenAI CEO addresses controversies in sweeping interview

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Why is Sam Altman losing sleep? OpenAI CEO addresses controversies in sweeping interview

Sam Altman, CEO of OpenAI, and Lisa Su, CEO of Advanced Micro Devices, testify during the Senate Commerce, Science and Transportation Committee hearing titled “Winning the AI Race: Strengthening U.S. Capabilities in Computing and Innovation,” in Hart building on Thursday, May 8, 2025.

Tom Williams | CQ-Roll Call, Inc. | Getty Images

In a sweeping interview last week, OpenAI CEO Sam Altman addressed a plethora of moral and ethical questions regarding his company and the popular ChatGPT AI model.  

“Look, I don’t sleep that well at night. There’s a lot of stuff that I feel a lot of weight on, but probably nothing more than the fact that every day, hundreds of millions of people talk to our model,” Altman told former Fox News host Tucker Carlson in a nearly hour-long interview. 

“I don’t actually worry about us getting the big moral decisions wrong,” Altman said, though he admitted “maybe we will get those wrong too.” 

Rather, he said he loses the most sleep over the “very small decisions” on model behavior, which can ultimately have big repercussions.

These decisions tend to center around the ethics that inform ChatGPT, and what questions the chatbot does and doesn’t answer. Here’s an outline of some of those moral and ethical dilemmas that appear to be keeping Altman awake at night.

How does ChatGPT address suicide?

According to Altman, the most difficult issue the company is grappling with recently is how ChatGPT approaches suicide, in light of a lawsuit from a family who blamed the chatbot for their teenage son’s suicide.

The CEO said that out of the thousands of people who commit suicide each week, many of them could possibly have been talking to ChatGPT in the lead-up.

“They probably talked about [suicide], and we probably didn’t save their lives,” Altman said candidly. “Maybe we could have said something better. Maybe we could have been more proactive. Maybe we could have provided a little bit better advice about, hey, you need to get this help.” 

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Last month, the parents of Adam Raine filed a product liability and wrongful death suit against OpenAI after their son died by suicide at age 16. In the lawsuit, the family said that “ChatGPT actively helped Adam explore suicide methods.”

Soon after, in a blog post titled “Helping people when they need it most,” OpenAI detailed plans to address ChatGPT’s shortcomings when handling “sensitive situations,” and said it would keep improving its technology to protect people who are at their most vulnerable. 

How are ChatGPT’s ethics determined?

Another large topic broached in the sit-down interview was the ethics and morals that inform ChatGPT and its stewards. 

While Altman described the base model of ChatGPT as trained on the collective experience, knowledge and learnings of humanity, he said that OpenAI must then align certain behaviors of the chatbot and decide what questions it won’t answer. 

“This is a really hard problem. We have a lot of users now, and they come from very different life perspectives… But on the whole, I have been pleasantly surprised with the model’s ability to learn and apply a moral framework.” 

When pressed on how certain model specifications are decided, Altman said the company had consulted “hundreds of moral philosophers and people who thought about ethics of technology and systems.”

An example he gave of a model specification made was that ChatGPT will avoid answering questions on how to make biological weapons if prompted by users.

“There are clear examples of where society has an interest that is in significant tension with user freedom,” Altman said, though he added the company “won’t get everything right, and also needs the input of the world” to help make these decisions.

How private is ChatGPT?

Another big discussion topic was the concept of user privacy regarding chatbots, with Carlson arguing that generative AI could be used for “totalitarian control.”

In response, Altman said one piece of policy he has been pushing for in Washington is “AI privilege,” which refers to the idea that anything a user says to a chatbot should be completely confidential. 

“When you talk to a doctor about your health or a lawyer about your legal problems, the government cannot get that information, right?… I think we should have the same concept for AI.” 

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According to Altman, that would allow users to consult AI chatbots about their medical history and legal problems, among other things. Currently, U.S. officials can subpoena the company for user data, he added.

“I think I feel optimistic that we can get the government to understand the importance of this,” he said. 

Will ChatGPT be used in military operations?

Just how powerful is OpenAI?

Carlson, in his interview, predicted that on its current trajectory, generative AI and by extension, Sam Altman, could amass more power than any other person, going so far as to call ChatGPT a “religion.”

In response, Altman said he used to worry a lot about the concentration of power that could result from generative AI, but he now believes that AI will result in “a huge up leveling” of all people. 

“What’s happening now is tons of people use ChatGPT and other chatbots, and they’re all more capable. They’re all kind of doing more. They’re all able to achieve more, start new businesses, come up with new knowledge, and that feels pretty good.”

However, the CEO said he thinks AI will eliminate many jobs that exist today, especially in the short-term.

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