Connect with us

Published

on

Reddit reported first-quarter revenue on Thursday that beat Wall Street expectations, and issued better-than-expected guidance.

The stock initially soared by as much as 19% in after-hours trading, but receded to around 5% when executives discussed the shaky economy and Google search-related challenges.

Here’s how the company did compared with LSEG estimates:

  • Earnings per share: 13 cents vs. 2 cents expected
  • Revenue: $392 million vs. $370 million expected

Revenue rose 61% from $243 million a year earlier. Net income was $26.2 million, or 13 cents a share, compared to a year ago when the company recorded a net loss of $575.1 million, or $8.19 a share, due to costs associated with its IPO.

Reddit said second-quarter sales should be in the range of $410 million to $430 million, ahead of Wall Street expectations of $396 million. About the ongoing trade dispute between the U.S. and China, Reddit said in a letter to investors that it is “well-positioned to meet this moment.”

“Ever-shifting macro environments like these create both challenges and opportunities,” Reddit CEO Steve Huffman wrote. “We’ve grown through challenging times before — people need connection and information just as much in uncertain times.”

Reddit operating chief Jen Wong acknowledged the sluggish economy on the company’s earnings call, saying that while “there’s a lot of uncertainty in the market,” it has been “mostly business as usual.”

“We’re staying close to our customers to help them through the volatility by sharing insights on consumer trends that inform their strategy based on things that we’re seeing on Reddit,” Wong said.

The company’s global daily active uniques, or DAUq, jumped 31% year over year to 108.1 million in the first quarter. Analysts were expecting 107.3 million.

Reddit has been a big beneficiary from Google search changes and internal site improvements, which has led to an influx of new and returning users, or logged-out users. The company has focused on site updates and features intended to convince logged-out users to create accounts and become logged-in users, which are more valuable to advertisers.

The company’s first-quarter global logged-in DAUq rose 23% year over year to 48.7 million, while its global logged-out DAUq jumped 38% to 59.4 million.

In February, Reddit said that a Google search algorithm change temporarily impacted the company’s user growth during the fourth quarter. Search-driven traffic soon recovered in the first quarter, the company said at the time.

Huffman said on the earnings call that Reddit’s search-derived traffic “could be more bumpy than usual” in the near term, because “the search ecosystem is under heavy construction.”

He said that search-related “short-term bumps don’t affect our long-term strategy or opportunity,” and that the company is “in control of our own destiny.”

Huffman later added that the online search market is being impacted by large language models, or LLMs, that companies like OpenAI and Perplexity are using to gather and then summarize web data based on written prompts. Reddit’s own AI-powered ChatGPT-like service, dubbed Reddit Answers, now has 1 million weekly active uniques, or WAUq, the company said.

Although people may want to use LLM-powered tools to see “annotated sterile answers from AI,” Huffman said that Reddit’s unique user-created content involving “subjective, authentic, messy, multiple viewpoints” will help the company stand out.

Across the online ad sphere, companies are highlighting the potential impact of economic shifts.

Meta shares rose Thursday after the company reported first-quarter earnings that beat on the top and bottom. However, the company’s advertising sales in the Asia-Pacific region missed estimates.

Susan Li, Meta’s finance chief, said that “Asia-based e-commerce exporters” have reduced their digital ad spending likely due to the de minimis trade loophole ending Friday.

Snap said in its earnings report this week that the company “experienced headwinds to start the current quarter,” and declined to provide guidance because of macroeconomic uncertainties.

Alphabet reported first-quarter earnings last week, and said that Google Advertising sales jumped 8.5% year over year to $66.89 billion while YouTube ad sales rose 10% to $8.93 billion.

Pinterest reports earnings on May 8.

WATCH: Top chip analyst on navigating the tech trade as tariff uncertainty grows.

Continue Reading

Technology

Tesla shares climb as Musk pledges to be ‘super focused’ on companies ahead of Starship launch

Published

on

By

Tesla shares climb as Musk pledges to be 'super focused' on companies ahead of Starship launch

Elon Musk listens as reporters ask U.S. President Donald Trump and South Africa President Cyril Ramaphosa questions during a press availability in the Oval Office at the White House on May 21, 2025 in Washington, DC.

Chip Somodevilla | Getty Images

Tesla shares gained about 5% on Tuesday after CEO Elon Musk over the weekend reiterated his intent to home in on his businesses ahead of the latest SpaceX rocket launch.

The billionaire wrote in a post to his social media platform X that he needs to be “super focused” on X, artificial intelligence company xAI and Tesla as they launch “critical technologies” on the heels of a temporary outage.

“As evidenced by the uptime issues this week, major operational improvements need to be made,” he wrote, adding that he would return to “spending 24/7” at work. “The failover redundancy should have worked, but did not.”

An outage over the weekend briefly shuttered the social media platform formerly known as Twitter for thousands of users, according to DownDetector. Earlier in the week, the platform suffered a data center outage. X has suffered a series of outages since Musk purchased the platform in 2022.

Read more CNBC tech news

Musk has previously indicated plans to step away from his political work and prioritize his businesses.

During Tesla’s April earnings call he said that he would “significantly” reduce his time running President Donald Trump‘s Department of Government Efficiency.

In the last election cycle, Musk devoted time and billions of dollars to political causes and toward electing Trump in 2024. However, a story over the weekend from the Washington Post, citing sources familiar with the matter, said that Musk has grown disillusioned with politics and wants to return to managing his businesses.

Last week, Musk said in an interview at the Qatar Economic Forum that he planned to spend “a lot less” on campaign donations going forward.

The comments from Musk precede SpaceX’s Starship rocket Tuesday evening. Pressure is on for the company after two Starship rockets exploded in January and March.

Ahead of the launch, Musk announced an all hands livestream on X at 1 p.m.

Tesla is still facing fallout from Musk’s political foray, with protests at showrooms and other brand damage.

In April, Tesla sold 7,261 cars in Europe, down 49% from last year, according to the European Automobile Manufacturers’ Association.

WATCH: Elon Musk: We have seen a major rebound in demand

Elon Musk: We have seen a major rebound in demand

Continue Reading

Technology

Trump advisor Hassett says ‘we don’t want to harm’ Apple with iPhone tariffs

Published

on

By

Trump advisor Hassett says 'we don't want to harm' Apple with iPhone tariffs

NEC Director Kevin Hassett on Trump's iPhone tariff threat: In the end, we don't want to harm Apple

National Economic Council Director Kevin Hassett said Tuesday that the Trump administration does not want to “harm Apple” with tariffs.

“Everybody is trying to make it seem like it’s a catastrophe if there’s a tiny little tariff on them right now, to try to negotiate down the tariffs,” Hassett told CNBC’s “Squawk Box” on Tuesday. “In the end, we’ll see what happens, we’ll see what the update is, but we don’t want to harm Apple.”

Hassett’s comments come after President Donald Trump said in a social media post that Apple will have to pay a tariff of 25% or more for iPhones made outside the U.S. Apple has historically manufactured its products in foreign countries including China, India and Vietnam.

“I have long ago informed Tim Cook of Apple that I expect their iPhone’s that will be sold in the United States of America will be manufactured and built in the United States, not India, or anyplace else,” Trump wrote in the post. “If that is not the case, a Tariff of at least 25% must be paid by Apple to the U.S. Thank your for your attention to this matter!”

By some estimates, a U.S.-made iPhone could cost as much as $3,500.

Read more CNBC tech news

“If you think that Apple has a factory some place that’s got a set number of iPhones that it produces and it needs to sell them no matter what, then Apple will bear those tariffs, not consumers, because it’s an elastic supply,” Hassett said.

Hasset’s comments continue the administration’s push to pressure companies to shoulder the cost burden of Trump’s tariffs, instead of raising prices for consumers.

Earlier this month, Trump told retail giant Walmart to “EAT THE TARIFFS” after the company warned it would have to pass those added costs on.

Shares of Apple were up more than 1% Tuesday.

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

WATCH: NEC Director Kevin Hassett on Trump’s iPhone tariff threat: In the end, we don’t want to harm Apple

Continue Reading

Technology

Ambience announces OpenAI-powered medical coding model that outperforms physicians

Published

on

By

Ambience announces OpenAI-powered medical coding model that outperforms physicians

Dr. Priti Patel, CMIO at John Muir Health, uses Ambience before starting a patient encounter.

Courtesy of Ambience Healthcare

Artificial intelligence startup Ambience Healthcare on Tuesday announced a new medical coding model that outperforms doctors by 27%.

Ambience uses AI to draft clinical notes in real-time as doctors consensually record their visits with patients. The company used tools from OpenAI to build the new model.

The startup is part of a fiercely competitive market that has taken off as health-care executives search for solutions to help reduce staff burnout and daunting administrative workloads. 

The company’s new model can listen to patient encounters and identify ICD-10 codes, which are internationally standardized classifications for different diseases and conditions. There are about 70,000 ICD-10 codes that are regularly updated and used to facilitate billing and other reporting processes in health care. 

Ambience said its new ICD-10 model can reduce billing mistakes and help clinicians and professional coders work more efficiently. The model notched a “27% relative improvement over physician benchmarks,” according to a release on Tuesday.  

“We’re not replacing doctors or coders,” Brendan Fortuner, Ambience’s head of engineering, told CNBC in an interview. “What we’re doing is we’re liberating them from administration, and we’re fixing mistakes that help make health care better, safer, more cost-effective.”

More CNBC health coverage

Documenting ICD-10 codes has traditionally been a labor-intensive task in health care, but it’s a crucial way to track outcomes, mortalities and morbidities in a standardized way, said Dr. Will Morris, the chief medical officer of Ambience.

“If you think about it from a data perspective, it’s how you can compare and contrast clinician A to B, or health system A to B,” Morris said in an interview. “It’s the cornerstone for quality.”

Ambience’s technology is used at more than 40 health-care organizations, like Cleveland Clinic and UCSF Health. It has raised more than $100 million, according to PitchBook, from investors including Kleiner Perkins, Andreessen Horowitz and the OpenAI Startup Fund. 

The company is reportedly seeking fresh capital at a valuation of over $1 billion, according to a report from The Information. Ambience declined to comment on the report. 

Ambience trained its new AI model using OpenAI’s reinforcement fine-tuning technology. This technology allows companies to tune OpenAI’s best reasoning models for very specific domains, like health care. 

To validate the model, Ambience tested it against a “gold panel” set of labels, the company said. The labels were established by a group of expert clinicians who evaluated complex clinical cases and came to an agreement on what the right codes were. 

Ambience’s AI platform for compliant documentation, CDI, and coding.

Courtesy of Ambience Healthcare

The company then recruited 18 different board-certified doctors and compared their performance on ICD-10 coding accuracy to the model’s performance. That comparison showed the Ambience technology performed 27% better than the physician baseline. 

“It shows for the first time that an AI system can actually surpass clinician experts at a very, very important administrative task, especially in coding,” Fortuner said. 

Ambience already has similar capabilities available for other medical codes like Current Procedural Terminology (CPT) codes, and Fortuner said it’s exploring how to tackle other areas like prior authorizations, utilization management and clinical trial matching. 

The company’s new ICD-10 model will roll out to customers over the summer.

“Getting it right at the point of care is a fundamental change,” Morris said.

Continue Reading

Trending