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Pinterest shares tanked nearly 20% on Tuesday after the company reported third-quarter financial results that missed on earnings per share and provided weak guidance.

Here’s how the company did, compared to analysts’ consensus estimates from LSEG:

  • Earnings per share: 38 cents adjusted vs. 42 cents expected
  • Revenue: $1.05 billion vs. $1.05 billion expected

Pinterest’s third-quarter sales grew 17% year over year while net income was $92.11 million, up 201% from $30.56 million a year ago during the same period.

The company said fourth-quarter revenue will come in between $1.31 billion and $1.34 billion. The midpoint of the revenue outlook, $1.325 billion, trailed Wall Street’s projections of $1.34 billion.

After the stock move in extended-trading on Tuesday, Pinterest erased its gains for the year.

Pinterest said it recorded 600 million global monthly active users in the third quarter, ahead of the 590 million that StreetAccount was projecting. In August, Pinterest reported 578 million monthly active users for the second quarter.

The company logged $306 million in third-quarter adjusted earnings before interest, taxes, depreciation and amortization, or EBIDTA. That was higher than StreetAccount’s estimates of $295 million.

Third-quarter sales in the U.S. and Canada came in at $786 million, lower than StreetAccount’s estimates of $799 million.

Pinterest’s third-quarter global average revenue per user was $1.78 and less than the $1.79 that StreetAccount was projecting.

“Our investments in AI and product innovation are paying off,” Pinterest CEO Bill Ready said in a statement. “We’ve become a leader in visual search and have effectively turned our platform into an AI-powered shopping assistant for 600 million consumers.”

Pinterest finance chief Julia Donnelly said during an earnings call that the company experienced some “pockets of moderating ad spend” in the U.S. and Canada regions during the third quarter. Donnelly attributed the sales moderation to unspecified “larger U.S. retailers” that are dealing with tariff-related issues putting pressure on their margins.

Regarding the company’s fourth-quarter guidance, Donnelly said that “we see these broader trends and market uncertainty continuing with the addition of a new tariff in Q4 impacting the home furnishing category.”

President Donald Trump said in September that the White House would impose 10% tariffs on imported timber and lumber and 25% duties on kitchen cabinets, bathroom vanities and related furniture.

Tech giants Meta, Alphabet and Amazon reported their most recent quarterly earnings last week. Those reports showed strong digital advertising sales amid their big spending for artificial intelligence infrastructure.

Meta said that its third-quarter revenue, of which 98% is derived from online ads, soared 26% year-over-year to $51.24 billion, representing the company’s strongest year-over-year sales growth since the first quarter of 2024.

Sales in Amazon’s online ad unit rose 24% year-over-year to $17.7 billion, which was a faster growth rate than the tech giant’s AWS cloud computing unit.

Alphabet reported $74.18 billion in total advertising sales for the third quarter, which was a nearly 13% increase from $65.85 billion a year ago. The company’s YouTube unit saw third-quarter online revenue jump 15% increase to $10.26 billion.

Reddit reported third-quarter earnings last Thursday and said sales ballooned 68% year-over-year to $585 million while global daily active uniques were up 19% year-over-year to 116 million, topping estimates of 114 million. 

Snap reports its quarterly results on Wednesday.

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Trump AI czar Sacks says ‘no federal bailout for AI’ after OpenAI CFO’s comments

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Trump AI czar Sacks says 'no federal bailout for AI' after OpenAI CFO's comments

David Sacks, White House AI and Crypto Czar, attends 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

Venture capitalist David Sacks, who is serving as President Donald Trump’s artificial intelligence and crypto czar, said Thursday that there will be “no federal bailout for AI.”

“The U.S. has at least 5 major frontier model companies. If one fails, others will take its place,” Sacks wrote in a post on X.

Sacks’ comments came after OpenAI CFO Sarah Friar said Wednesday that the startup wants to establish an ecosystem of private equity, banks and a federal “backstop” or “guarantee” that could help the company finance its infrastructure investments.

She softened her stance later in a LinkedIn post and said OpenAI is not seeking a government backstop for its infrastructure commitments. She said her use of the word “backstop” clouded her point.

“As the full clip of my answer shows, I was making the point that American strength in technology will come from building real industrial capacity which requires the private sector and government playing their part,” Friar wrote.

The White House did not immediately respond to CNBC’s request for comment. OpenAI directed CNBC to Friar’s LinkedIn post.

Sacks said the Trump Administration does want to make permitting and power generation easier, and that the goal is to facilitate rapid infrastructure buildouts without raising residential electricity rates.

“To give benefit of the doubt, I don’t think anyone was actually asking for a bailout. (That would be ridiculous.),” he wrote.

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Microsoft forms superintelligence team under AI chief Suleyman ‘to serve humanity’

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Microsoft forms superintelligence team under AI chief Suleyman 'to serve humanity'

Mustafa Suleyman, CEO of Microsoft AI and then CEO and co-founder of Inflection AI, speaks during the Axios BFD event in New York on Oct. 12, 2023.

Brendan Mcdermid | Reuters

Microsoft on Thursday said it’s forming a team that will be tasked with performing advanced artificial intelligence research.

Mustafa Suleyman, CEO of the Microsoft AI group that includes Bing and the Copilot assistant, announced the formation of the MAI Superintelligence Team, and said in a blog post that he’ll be leading it.

“We are doing this to solve real concrete problems and do it in such a way that it remains grounded and controllable,” Suleyman wrote. “We are not building an ill-defined and ethereal superintelligence; we are building a practical technology explicitly designed only to serve humanity.”

The decision comes months after Facebook parent Meta spent billions to hire talent for its new Meta Superintelligence Labs unit that’s working on research and products. The term superintelligence typically refers to machines deemed more intelligent than the smartest people.

Suleyman was a co-founder of AI lab DeepMind, which Google bought in 2014. After leaving Google in 2022, he co-founded and led AI startup Inflection. Microsoft hired Suleyman and several other Inflection employees last year.

Top technology companies have rushed to hire leading AI engineers and researchers, augmenting their products with generative AI capabilities. The boom started with OpenAI’s launch of ChatGPT in 2022.

Microsoft uses OpenAI models in Bing and Copilot, while OpenAI runs workloads in Microsoft’s Azure cloud. Microsoft also owns a $135 billion equity stake in OpenAI following a restructuring.

Microsoft has taken steps to reduce its dependence on OpenAI. After the Inflection deal, the software company also began drawing on models from Google and from Anthropic, which was founded by former OpenAI executives.

The new Microsoft AI research group will focus on providing useful companions for people that can help in education and other domains, Suleyman wrote in his blog post. It will also pursue narrow areas in medicine and in renewable energy production.

“We’ll have expert level performance at the full range of diagnostics, alongside highly capable planning and prediction in operational clinical settings,” Suleyman wrote.

As investors and analysts are increasingly voicing their concerns about overspending on AI without a clear path to profits, Suleyman said he wants “to make clear that we are not building a superintelligence at any cost, with no limits.”

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Doordash stock drops 15%, heads for worst day ever on spending concerns

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Doordash stock drops 15%, heads for worst day ever on spending concerns

Cheng Xin | Getty Images

Doordash‘s stock plummeted toward its worst session ever as investors rejected the company’s aggressive spending strategy.

The food delivery platform said it plans to shell out “several hundred million dollars” next year on new product initiatives like autonomous delivery and a new global tech stack.

These plans will improve its product globally, but involve “direct and opportunity costs” in the short run, Doordash said.

CEO Tony Xu defended the company’s spending decisions during the earnings call with analysts and said Doordash is running the business as it always has — to solve problems for customers in the highest quality ways.

“Our track record in investing in the areas that we currently have operating … have suggested that we’ve had some success in repeating this playbook, and we’re doing this now for future growth,” he said.

In recent months, Doordash has spent big money to open new markets and boost optionality for customers as it battles industry competitors such as Uber, and worries mount of a slowdown in consumer discretionary spending.

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This year, the California-based company purchased restaurant booking platform SevenRooms for $1.2 billion and acquired British food delivery firm Deliveroo in a deal worth $3.9 billion. Doordash also launched an autonomous robot delivery robot known as Dot in September and new DashMart fulfillment services for retailers.

The length and breadth of these investments will remain a key issue for the company’s shares, wrote Wells Fargo analyst Ken Gawrelski.

“In our view, this is one of the best operational management teams in the sector and longer duration investors are likely to remain supportive through this period,” he wrote. “However, given inconsistent disclosure, we believe patience may be required.”

Doordash’s third-quarter profit totaled 55 cents per share, falling short of the 69 cents per share forecasted by LSEG. Revenues grew 27% from a year ago to $3.45 billion, above Wall Street’s $3.36 billion estimate.

The company expects adjusted EBITDA in the fourth quarter between $710 million to $810 million, with a midpoint of $760 million. Analysts polled by FactSet expected $806.8 million.

Doordash expects Deliveroo to add $45 million to adjusted EBITDA in the fourth quarter and about $200 million in 2026.

Shares are up more than 20% this year.

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