Microsoft shares fell about 7% in extended trading on Tuesday after the company reported softer cloud revenue than expected in its fiscal first quarter and gave weak quarterly guidance.
Here’s how the company did:
Earnings: $2.35 per share, vs. $2.30 per share as expected by analysts, according to Refinitiv.
Revenue: $50.12 billion, vs. $49.61 billion as expected by analysts, according to Refinitiv.
With respect to guidance, Microsoft sees $52.35 billion to $53.35 billion in revenue for the fiscal second quarter, which implies 2% growth at the middle of the range. Analysts polled by Refinitiv had been looking for revenue of $56.05 billion. Microsoft’s implied operating margin for the fiscal second quarter was about 40%, narrower than the 42% consensus among analysts polled by StreetAccount.
In the fiscal first quarter, total revenue grew 11% year over year, according to a statement.
Cyclical trends are affecting Microsoft’s consumer business, CEO Satya Nadella said on a conference call with analysts.
Net income fell by 14% to $17.56 billion. Microsoft had a $3.3 billion tax benefit in the year-ago quarter. But the company lengthened the useful lives of servers and networking equipment to six years from four years, resulting in an $859 million bump to net income in the fiscal first quarter. Still, the company’s gross margin, at 69.2%, trailed the StreetAccount consensus estimate of 69.8%.
Microsoft’s Intelligent Cloud business segment, which includes the Azure public cloud, as well as Windows Server, SQL Server, Nuance and Enterprise Services, generated $20.33 billion in quarterly revenue. That’s up 20% and slightly less than the $20.36 billion consensus among analysts polled by StreetAccount.
Azure revenue grew 35% in the quarter, Microsoft said, compared with 40% growth in the previous quarter. Analysts polled by CNBC had expected 36.4% growth, while analysts surveyed by StreetAccount had been looking for 36.9% Azure growth. Growth in Azure consumption continued to moderate, and higher energy costs in the quarter hurt the gross margin of Azure, Amy Hood, the company’s finance chief, said on the call.
For the fiscal second quarter, Hood said Azure growth should fall sequentially by about 5% in constant currency, to about 37%. She did not provide a growth rate in dollars, and the company doesn’t disclose Azure revenue in dollars. Analysts polled by StreetAccount had expected 39.4% Azure growth in constant currency.
The Productivity and Business Processes segment that contains Microsoft 365 productivity software subscriptions (the company is in the midst of rebranding the bundle from Office 365), LinkedIn and Dynamics, posted $16.47 billion in revenue, up 9% and above the $16.13 billion StreetAccount consensus.
A majority of the Microsoft 365 bookings during the quarter came from E5, a higher-priced bundle, Hood said.
Revenue from the More Personal Computing segment totaled $13.33 billion, down slightly and higher than the $13.12 billion StreetAccount consensus. The segment includes Windows, as well as Xbox, Surface and advertising from the Bing search engine.
Revenue from sales of Windows licenses to device makers dropped 15% year over year, steeper than any quarter since 2015 and worse than the outlook Hood gave in July for a decline in the high single digits. The company said the PC market continued to deteriorate during the quarter.
That result wasn’t a complete surprise. Technology industry researcher Gartner said earlier this month that PC shipments in the quarter fell 19.5% year over year, and chipmaker AMD earlier this month issued lower-than-expected preliminary quarterly results tied to a “weaker than expected PC market and significant inventory correction actions across the PC supply chain.”
Hood said on Tuesday that the materially weaker demand for PCs seen in September will continue to affect its consumer business. She called for a percentage decline in the high 30s for Windows revenue from device makers in the fiscal second quarter.
For the first time, revenue in the quarter from the Microsoft Cloud metric, encompassing Azure, commercial Office 365 subscriptions, commercial parts of LinkedIn and Dynamics 365, exceeded 50% of overall company revenue.
During the quarter, Microsoft started rolling out the first annual update to its Windows 11 operating system since releasing the original version last year, and the company announced plans to slow down its pace of hiring said it was cutting less than 1% of employees. Microsoft also introduced Viva Engage, a portal in the Teams communication app where co-workers can share video stories.
“In this environment, we’re focused on helping our customers do more with less, while investing in secular growth areas and managing our cost structure in a disciplined way,” Nadella said in the company’s earnings statement.
Operating expense growth should moderate materially during the 2023 fiscal year as the company focuses on improving employee productivity, Hood said.
The quarterly results include small adjustments in the way that Microsoft reports revenue. Revenue from HoloLens augmented-reality devices will appear in the More Personal Computing segment instead of the Intelligent Cloud segment. Microsoft adjusted its forecast for the segments by about $100 million in connection with the change.
Notwithstanding the after-hours move, Microsoft shares have fallen about 26% so far this year, while the S&P 500 stock index is down 19% over the same period.
The co-founder and CEO of sales and customer service management software company Salesforce is well aware that investors are betting big on Palantir, which offers data management software to businesses and government agencies.
“Oh my gosh. I am so inspired by that company,” Benioff told CNBC’s Morgan Brennan in a Tuesday interview at Goldman Sachs‘ Communacopia+Technology conference in San Francisco. “I mean, not just because they have 100 times, you know, multiple on their revenue, which I would love to have that too. Maybe it’ll have 1000 times on their revenue soon.”
Salesforce, a component of the Dow Jones Industrial Average, remains 10 times larger than Palantir by revenue, with over $10 billion in revenue during the latest quarter. But Palantir is growing 48%, compared with 10% for Salesforce.
Benioff added that Palantir’s prices are “the most expensive enterprise software I’ve ever seen.”
“Maybe I’m not charging enough,” he said.
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It wasn’t Benioff’s first time talking about Palantir. Last week, Benioff referenced Palantir’s “extraordinary” prices in an interview with CNBC’s Jim Cramer, saying Salesforce offers a “very competitive product at a much lower cost.”
The next day, TBPN podcast hosts John Coogan and Jordi Hays asked for a response from Alex Karp, Palantir’s co-founder and CEO.
“We are very focused on value creation, and we ask to be modestly compensated for that value,” Karp said.
The companies sometimes compete for government deals, and Benioff touted a recent win over Palantir for a U.S. Army contract.
Palantir started in 2003, four years after Salesforce. But while Salesforce went public in 2004, Palantir arrived on the New York Stock Exchange in 2020.
Palantir’s market capitalization stands at $406 billion, while Salesforce is worth $231 billion. And as one of the most frequently traded stocks on Robinhood, Palantir is popular with retail investors.
Salesforce shares are down 27% this year, the worst performance in large-cap tech.
Gemini Co-founders Tyler Winklevoss and Cameron Winklevoss attend the company’s IPO at the Nasdaq MarketSite in New York City, U.S., Sept. 12, 2025.
Jeenah Moon | Reuters
Shares of Gemini Space Station soared more than 40% on Thursday after the exchange operator raised $425 million in an initial public offering.
The stock opened at $37.01 on the Nasdaq after its IPO priced at $28. At one point, shares traded as high as $40.71.
The New York-based company priced its IPO late Thursday above this week’s expected range of $24 to $26, and an initial range of between $17 and $19. That valued the company at some $3.3 billion before trading began.
Gemini, which primarily operates as a cryptocurrency exchange, was founded by the Winklevoss brothers in 2014 and held more than $21 billion of assets on its platform as of the end of July. Per its registration with the Securities and Exchange Commission, Gemini posted a net loss of $159 million in 2024, and in the first half of this year, it lost $283 million.
The company also offers a U.S. dollar-backed stablecoin, credit cards with a crypto-back rewards program and a custody service for institutions.
The Winklevoss brothers were among the earliest bitcoin investors and first bitcoin billionaires. They have long held that bitcoin is a superior store of value than gold. On Friday morning, they told CNBC’s “Squawk Box” they see its price reaching $1 million a decade from now.
In 2013, they were the first to apply to launch a bitcoin exchange-traded fund, more than 10 years before the first bitcoin ETFs would eventually be approved. The Securities and Exchange Commission’s rejection of the application, which cited risk of fraud and market manipulation, set the stage for the bitcoin ETF debate in the years to come.
Even in the early days, when bitcoin was notorious for its extreme volatility and anti-establishment roots and shunned by Wall Street, the Winklevoss brothers were outspoken about the need for smart regulation that would establish rules for the crypto-led financial revolution.
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(Learn the best 2026 strategies from inside the NYSE with Josh Brown and others at CNBC PRO Live. Tickets and info here.)
Opendoor co-founder and newly minted board chair Keith Rabois said remote work and a “bloated” workforce have been a drag on the company’s culture, as he vowed to slash headcount.
“There’s 1,400 employees at Opendoor. I don’t know what most of them do. We don’t need more than 200 of them,” Rabois told CNBC’s “Squawk on the Street” on Friday.
The online real-estate platform on Wednesday appointed former Shopify executive Kaz Nejatian as its new CEO after investor pressure caused his predecessor, Carrie Wheeler, to resign last month. Opendoor also named Rabois as chairman and said Eric Wu, who served as the company’s first CEO before stepping down in 2023, would return to the board.
The announcement sent Opendoor shares soaring 78% on Thursday, before the stock slid more than 12% on Friday. It is still up almost 500% this year, after an army of retail investors pushed up the stock price when hedge fund manager Eric Jackson began touting the company.
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Opendoor year-to-date stock chart.
Opendoor’s business involves using technology to buy and sell homes, pocketing the gains.
Nothing has fundamentally improved for the company since Jackson bought shares of Opendoor in July. Opendoor remains a cash-burning, low-margin business with meager near-term growth prospects.
Rabois said he has a “high level view of the strategy” that’s needed to transform Opendoor, and that the headcount reductions are necessary to resolve the company’s cash burn.
“The culture was broken,” Rabois said. “These people were working remotely. That doesn’t work. This company was founded on the principle of innovation and working together in person. We’re going to return to our roots.”
He added that Opendoor “went down this DEI path,” referring to diversity, equity and inclusion.