Meta's $200 Billion Surge Is Biggest In Stock-Market History (yahoo.com) 37
An anonymous reader quotes a report from Bloomberg: Meta is poised to become Wall Street's top comeback kid. It was only a couple of years back the Facebook owner suffered the single biggest market value destruction in stock-market history. But the company has come a long way since then, on Thursday it dazzled shareholders with yet another impressive quarterly earnings report as the social media giant focuses on cutting back costs and shoring up billions in profits. The stock rose as much as 21% Friday, poised to add roughly $200 billion to its market capitalization. This would be the biggest single-session market value addition, eclipsing the $190 billion gains made by Apple and Amazon in 2022.
"Solid execution, faster growth, and increased capital structure efficiency improve the outlook from here," Brian Nowak, an analyst at Morgan Stanley, wrote in a note Friday. "Meta's AI pipeline for both users and advertisers is robust, with more tools set to launch and scale throughout '24," he added. Meta, which reduced headcount by 22% in 2023, unveiled plans for a $50 billion stock buyback, and announced its first quarterly dividend on Thursday, a sign to investors that it has money to spare and a reason for them to stick around. While the company is making big cost cuts, it continues to spend aggressively on artificial intelligence advancements, namely in generative AI but also on the background technologies to help feed its social media products and power its ad targeting.
"Solid execution, faster growth, and increased capital structure efficiency improve the outlook from here," Brian Nowak, an analyst at Morgan Stanley, wrote in a note Friday. "Meta's AI pipeline for both users and advertisers is robust, with more tools set to launch and scale throughout '24," he added. Meta, which reduced headcount by 22% in 2023, unveiled plans for a $50 billion stock buyback, and announced its first quarterly dividend on Thursday, a sign to investors that it has money to spare and a reason for them to stick around. While the company is making big cost cuts, it continues to spend aggressively on artificial intelligence advancements, namely in generative AI but also on the background technologies to help feed its social media products and power its ad targeting.
What goes up, (Score:3)
Unless... (Score:2)
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Re: Sinking ship (Score:2)
Lipstick on a Pig (Score:4, Insightful)
So Zuckerberg wasted *billions* of shareholder dollars on his failed VR experiment, the company hasn't done anything innovative in a decade, and when it comes to AI, what is Zuck's answer? "We'll solve it without hiring any new people, because we're open sourcing our model" ... and Wall Street is impressed with this?
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Looks like he just got shareholders to fund his failed VR experiment, at least for now.
Re:People are getting rich (Score:3)
And that’s all that matters.
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Wall Street is impressed with this?
Why wouldn't they be? Even after all those blunders, META still has a PE well under 30.
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and Wall Street is impressed with this?
Yes, they seem to think setting a strategic long term direction at the front of industry trends is more important than your inability to comprehend big numbers. For the record the $billions (sounds big and scary right?) invested in VR R&D represents a smaller fraction of R&D per revenue or R&D per net profit than many tech peers invest.
It sounds scary when someone spends $40billion. It sounds less scary when that person can find those $40bn just laying in the couch cushions because of just how f
Facebook (Score:3)
People know that's Facebook, Zuck's Website, don't they? Because it looks like they forgot.
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But it has a new hat!
When all of your products are broken... (Score:2)
Their entire business is based on stealing and selling valuable personal information to predatory organizations and that's been regulated out of existence.
Implausible deniability. They're cheating the market.
Dishwashing liquid? (Score:2)
You're invested in it (through all the major investment company flagship mutual funds).
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When I realized this the other day, I started seriously considering taking a more hands-on approach in choosing my investments.
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You will be making a whole lot less money, for your efforts. You won't lose all your money, unless you are completely greedy and clueless, but trust me, your returns will be less on your stock picks than your mutual funds.
There is something to the thought that professional money managers know more than you do, and there is something to the thought that those people know less than Mr. Market, where you should put your money in a broad-based market-index fund.
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Welcome to late stage capitalism. The entire damn economy is premised on this sort of nonsense.
The stock may be up, but... (Score:4, Insightful)
... FB is becoming increasingly useless for me
Over 90% of the stuff I see is unwanted
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Advertisers are paying because FB still has a lot of eyeballs. But mostly their revenue is up because of cost cutting measures. I find that troubling in a tech company for its prospects of long-term growth.
These last few quarters were a great time to buy META. but eventually people are going to need to get out. It's really impossible for us small fries to time the market. I can't hope to sell, sit on the cash and pick it up later. That almost always backfires. All I can do is buy less of a stock that doesn'
This Grinds My Gears (Score:5, Interesting)
I hate when huge companies lay off a ton of folks and then post record profits. I know it's well within their rights and I've been on the non-laid off side more times than not, but it still cuts. I've had friends let go only to let a month go by and then the CEO is up on stage proclaiming we made a BILLION dollars in profit last year. Those folks could have been repurposed... I can't think of a better system than capitalism but I still can be salty about the parts that I don't like.
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Well one political party has convinced it’s followers that stronger worker protections and bargaining for wages is somehow bad.
Re:This Grinds My Gears (Score:4, Interesting)
That goes both ways I suppose. I've seen people become incredibly lazy moochers when they were protected by a union. I've seen people who pilot their career so they are laid off every summer so they can collect un-employment and sit at the beach. I definitely like the idea of being part of a protected team, but I also know that can get gamed by the industriously lazy. Some people only work hard at being lazy and there's a lot of them. Enough to matter. We need a system that allows for the gamers/non-good faith people to be dealt with. IDK, but I'd like to hear stuff like this from our political leaders. They often won't even acknowledge a problem in the first place.
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I've worked with plenty of people like that. I've worked at companies where the behavior was allowed to become so extreme that business simply wasn't getting done, to the point of threatening the existence of the company.
I've also never worked with union members. Of the factors motivating and allowing people to cheat at work, that wouldn't seem to matter.
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Unionized labor and collective bargaining. I know people complain about how unions protect lazy people and are bloated and out of date, but most of that is based on considered anti-union campaigns by companies that want shareholder gains over everything else, including the workers that actually make those profits. Let's be honest, there's some lazy people in all the workplace that manage to worm their way into an organization, unions or not.
Also, unions are organized by its members and I think software engi
Re: This Grinds My Gears (Score:2)
Usually I would agree but Zuckerberg did hire a bunch of people in pursuit of this metaverse thing that was clearly a dead end. I was hoping he would continue wasting money on it because at least it created a bunch of jobs while destroying his company.
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Firing workers in order to defraud investors by faking increased profitability while in reality sabotaging the company, isn't capitalism.
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Of course it is capitalism. They're using their capital to acquire more capital, which is capitalism.
The problem is the market, or rather the lack of an open and relatively free market with some regulations so the capitalists actually have to compete, as it is the competition that benefits society, not a bunch of oligarchs. Left to themselves the successful capitalist will strive for monopoly, control of the government including the regulators and courts and siphon money into their pockets while giving a bi
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Firing workers in order to defraud investors by faking increased profitability while in reality sabotaging the company, isn't capitalism.
Except that's not remotely what is happening. Firing a couple of thousand employees doesn't show up as increased profitability in a company that makes $130bn in yearly revenue. You wouldn't even be able to register it analysing a graph of cash flows. Additionally firing employees actually represents a significant large one time expense.
Public companies are not charities. They hire people to do work. If there isn't work for them to do (strategic directional choice) then they have zero reason to keep the peop
Two schools of thought (Score:2)