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Netflix added millions more subscribers in the fourth quarter than Wall Street expected, helping to send shares of the streamer up after the bell despite a big earnings miss.
The company also disclosed that co-CEO Reed Hastings would be stepping down from his position and transitioning to the post of executive chairman. Greg Peters, the company’s chief operating officer has been promoted to co-CEO alongside the already established Ted Sarandos.
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Here are the results:
EPS: 12 cents vs 45 cents per share, according to Refinitiv.
Revenue: $7.85 billion $7.85 billion, according to Refinitiv survey.
Global paid net subscribers: 7.66 million adds, compared to 4.57 million subscribers expected, according to StreetAccount estimates.
Netflix’s EPS missed largely due to a loss related to euro-denominated debt, but its margins of 7% still topped Wall Street’s expectations. The depreciation of the U.S. dollar compared to the euro during the fourth quarter isn’t an operational loss.
This is the first quarter that Netflix’s new ad-supported service is included in its earnings results. The company launched this cheaper tier in November, but has not disclosed what portion of the new subscriptions are from users who have opted for this service.
During the company’s prerecorded earnings call, Netflix said that it has seen comparable engagement from its new ad tier members as it has seen with its regular consumers. Additionally, it noted that it has not seen a significant number of people switching plans. So, those who subscribe to its premium and more expensive offerings are rarely bumping down to the cheaper ad-supported model.
“We wouldn’t be getting into this business if it couldn’t be a meaningful portion of our business,” said Spencer Neumann, the company’s chief financial officer, during the call. “We’re over $30 billion in revenue, almost $32 billion in revenue, in 2022 and we wouldn’t get into a business like this if we didn’t believe it could be bigger than at least 10% of our revenue.”
Last quarter, the streamer said it was “very optimistic” about its new advertising business. Going forward, Netflix will no longer give subscriber guidance, although it will still report those numbers in future earnings reports. The rationale is that the company is growing its focus on revenue as its primary top line metric instead of membership growth.
“2022 was a tough year, with a bumpy start but a brighter finish,” the company said in a statement. “We believe we have a clear path to reaccelerate our revenue growth: continuing to improve all aspects of Netflix, launching paid sharing and building our ads offering. As always, our north stars remain pleasing our members and building even greater profitability over time.”
Netflix touted new releases like the television series “Wednesday,” the docuseries “Harry and Meghan” as well as Rian Johnson’s film “Glass Onion” as popular content during the quarter.
The company predicts that revenue growth in the first quarter 2023 will rise 4%, higher than the 3.7% Wall Street is currently projecting. Netflix says this growth will be driven by more paid memberships and more money per paid membership.
Additionally, the first quarter will mark Netflix’s preliminary roll out of its paid sharing program, which aims to make money from users who previously shared passwords with people outside their own homes.
The company said it expects some users who were borrowing accounts to stop watching programming on the platform, because they are not added as extra members to existing accounts or do not convert to paid members.
“However, we believe the pattern will be similar to what we’ve seen in Latin America, with engagement growing over time as we continue to deliver a great slate of programming and borrowers sign-up for their own accounts,” the company said.
Amazon made plenty of news this week — from advances in the cloud business to questions about its partnership with the U.S. Postal Service — leaving investors with a lot to digest. The flurry of headlines comes at the end of a challenging year. The e-commerce and cloud giant’s stock is up 4.6%, compared to the broad market S & P 500’s 16.4%, and well behind all of its Magnificent Seven peers. Despite the company showing reaccelerating growth in AWS and enhancements to its dominant Prime e-commerce ecosystem, investors remain concerned that it is losing ground in the AI race and could face margin pressure from tariffs. We believe the company has turned a corner. “A better year is ahead as management continues to prove out its AI strategy and expand operating margins,” Jeff Marks, portfolio director for Club, wrote in a report on Thursday, highlighting stocks that are set up for a bounce back in 2026. Here’s how this week’s news fits into that investment thesis: Upbeat updates at cloud event News: During Amazon ‘s annual re:Invent 2025 conference in Las Vegas, Amazon Web Services CEO Matt Garman unveiled Trainium3 , the latest version of the company’s in-house custom chip. It delivers four times the compute performance, energy efficiency, and memory bandwidth of previous generations. AWS also announced that it is already working on Trainium4. The company also revealed a series of cloud products, including advanced AI-driven platforms and agents that help customers automate workloads. Our take: We were pleased to hear that AWS continues to innovate its chip offerings to diversify its reliance on Nvidia , the industry leader in graphics processing units (GPUs). However, most of the investor focus is on bringing data center capacity online. Amazon needs to buy more Nvidia chips to catch up in AI. Also, Jim Cramer interviewed AWS CEO Matt Garman on “Mad Money” earlier this week, who was upbeat about the future growth of the cloud business. USPS ties tested News: According to a Washington Post report, Amazon could sever its relationship with the USPS when its contract expires in October 2026. Amazon likely considered the move, as it already has a shadow postal service, Amazon Logistics, that handles billions of packages annually. By removing USPS as the middleman, Amazon would have complete financial and operational control. Amazon refuted the report . Our take: For years, the e-commerce and cloud giant invested billions of dollars to build a vast logistics network that is now delivering more packages in the U.S. than UPS and FedEx . It still uses the USPS for delivery of small, low-weight packages, especially those from third-party Amazon sellers. USPS is also helpful for “last-mile delivery” in difficult-to-serve geographic areas. If the company were to eliminate the Postal Service as a middleman, it could further reduce its cost to serve, thereby improving margins. Possible IPO payday News: Anthropic, the AI startup behind the Claude chatbot, is reportedly in talks to launch one of the biggest IPOs ever in early 2026, according to the Financial Times. Anthropic responded that it had no immediate plans for an IPO and instead is “keeping our options open,” Anthropic chief communications officer Sasha de Marigny said at an Axios event in New York City on Thursday. Our take: An Anthropic public offering could be a massive payday for Amazon, which has invested about $8 billion in Anthropic. As part of that investment, Anthropic partnered with AWS as its primary cloud provider and training partner to run its massive AI training and inference workloads. An Anthropic IPO would elevate the AI startup and thereby enhance AWS’s dominance as the best-in-class cloud provider. Ultra-fast grocery delivery News: Amazon said it is testing an ultra-fast delivery service for fresh groceries, everyday essentials, and popular items, available in as little as 30 minutes, starting in Seattle and Philadelphia. Amazon Prime members get discounted delivery fees starting at $3.99 per order, compared with $13.99 for non-Prime customers. Club take: Amazon has continued to expand into online grocery and essentials, as customers increasingly opt to shop for daily essentials with the online retailer. While the retail business comes with thin margins, Amazon continues to operate it with an eye on reducing its cost to serve, which should help improve margins over time. Amazon is already second in line as the top U.S. retailer, right behind Walmart in terms of U.S. online grocery sales. As it continues to make headway in the industry, Amazon should be able to capitalize on this significant growth opportunity, especially as it harnesses its advanced AI capabilities for optimal inventory placement and demand forecasting. (Jim Cramer’s Charitable Trust is long AMZN, NVDA. See here for a full list of the stocks.) As a subscriber to the CNBC Investing Club with Jim Cramer, you will receive a trade alert before Jim makes a trade. Jim waits 45 minutes after sending a trade alert before buying or selling a stock in his charitable trust’s portfolio. If Jim has talked about a stock on CNBC TV, he waits 72 hours after issuing the trade alert before executing the trade. THE ABOVE INVESTING CLUB INFORMATION IS SUBJECT TO OUR TERMS AND CONDITIONS AND PRIVACY POLICY , TOGETHER WITH OUR DISCLAIMER . NO FIDUCIARY OBLIGATION OR DUTY EXISTS, OR IS CREATED, BY VIRTUE OF YOUR RECEIPT OF ANY INFORMATION PROVIDED IN CONNECTION WITH THE INVESTING CLUB. NO SPECIFIC OUTCOME OR PROFIT IS GUARANTEED.
Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg wears the Meta Ray-Ban Display glasses, as he delivers a speech presenting the new line of smart glasses, during the Meta Connect event at the company’s headquarters in Menlo Park, California, U.S., Sept. 17, 2025.
“We’re excited that Limitless will be joining Meta to help accelerate our work to build AI-enabled wearables,” a Meta spokesperson said in a statement.
Limitless makes a small, AI-powered pendant that can record conversations and generate summaries.
Limitless CEO Dan Siroker revealed the deal on Friday via a corporate blog post but did not disclose the financial terms.
“Meta recently announced a new vision to bring personal superintelligence to everyone and a key part of that vision is building incredible AI-enabled wearables,” Siroker said in the post and an accompanying video. “We share this vision and we’ll be joining Meta to help bring our shared vision to life.”
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The world of AI wearables has been slowly growing this year, but no company has landed a standout product.
Meta’s Ray-Ban smartglasses, which have been a surprise hit, have a sprinkling of AI flavor with the inclusion of the company’s AI digital assistant.
There are several wearable devices available that are similar to Limitless.
Friend offers a pendant-style device, Plaud comes in a small card shape or pill that can be clipped on or worn around your neck or on your wrist, and Bee, which is worn on a wristband and was scooped up by Amazon in July.
Amazon also runs AI through its Alexa+ line of Echo Speakers, while Google‘s Pixel 10 phones have the Gemini assistant built in.
Salesforce shares popped 5% on Friday after the company posted better-than-expected third-quarter earnings on Wednesday despite falling short of Wall Street’s revenue estimates.
The stock, which is up 13% over the past five days, is aiming for its best week since 2023.
The company reported adjusted earnings per share of $3.25, topping Wall Street’s estimates of $2.86 per share. Revenue increased 8.6% year over year to $10.26 billion but just missed analyst projections of $10.27 billion.
Although the artificial intelligence boom has pushed several tech companies into record surges, cloud software firms have seen a rocky year as investors wonder whether AI will render the industry obsolete.
Salesforce is hoping to persuade Wall Street that AI will be able to bolster its products rather than replace them.
Investors “somehow think software companies are under arrest from AI, when the opposite is true,” Salesforce CEO Marc Benioff told CNBC’s Jim Cramer on Thursday.
During the third quarter, the company acquired startups Regrello and Waii, which uses AI to generate code with natural language instructions.
Despite Salesforce’s shares being down 21% year to date, compared with the Nasdaq’s 22% gain, analysts are more optimistic for 2026.
“CRM [Salesforce] continues to be levered to digital transformation, and we expect the company to grow at a solid rate going forward,” Mizuho analysts wrote. “At the same time, we believe CRM will remain fiscally disciplined and that it can continue to drive higher operating and FCF margins.”
Analysts highlighted Salesforce’s AI platform Agentforce, which builds agents that automate business tasks and streamline workflow.
Despite initial investor skepticism over the platform, Cantor analysts were encouraged by its strong adoption in the customer service space.
“We think CRM is starting to formalize and mature the strategy, which should make it easier for customers to understand, and therefore adopt, Agentforce,” the Cantor analysts wrote.
Annual recurring revenue of Agentforce jumped 330% year over year to $540 million.
“Why everyone is so excited about Agentforce is because this is what AI was meant to be,” Benioff said. “It brings together humans and data and AI and apps, and delivers an incredible experience for companies.”