Musk-Twitter deal caps off a brutal week for tech
Elon Musk officially took over Twitter Thursday and immediately started making changes. The first order of business: ousting CEO Parag Agrawal and CFO Ned Segal.
The moves marked an end to the tech industry's nightmare week, which saw giants from Amazon (AMZN) and Meta (META) to Alphabet (GOOG, GOOGL) and Microsoft (MSFT) take a wrecking ball to the teeth as each firm, one after another, reported slowing sales. Apple (AAPL) was the sole semi-winner, as its wearables and Mac businesses saved it from completely bumming out investors.
The week kicked off Tuesday with Google parent Alphabet and Microsoft releasing quarterly results that showed slowing growth in key business segments. Alphabet's earnings were objectively tougher to look at with the company missing Wall Street's expectations on the top and bottom line.
But the biggest headlines included a $400 million miss on YouTube ad revenue, a slowdown in Google Cloud Platform revenue, and net income that came up $5 billion short of last year's numbers. Shares of the search giant were down 6% on the week.
Microsoft, which also reported earnings on Tuesday, fared better than Google in the prior quarter. The company beat analysts' expectations on the top and bottom lines, but its Intelligent Cloud segment growth fell year-over-year from 31% to 20%. It's all-important Azure cloud platform growth, meanwhile, fell from 50% to 35%. The company is still, in some watchers' eyes, set up to win long-term.
“[Microsoft] is one of the strongest companies on the planet," Fitz-Gerald Group Principal Keith Fitz-Gerald told Yahoo Finance Live this week. “It’s one of the most widely held companies on the planet... Do you really want to get off a winning horse in the middle of the race? That’s what investors need to think.”
Nevertheless, this week, Microsoft just didn't look all that great to investors, and it was the company's outlook for Azure that seemed to sting the worst, with the tech giant predicting that its Azure business growth will decline another 5% in the current quarter. Microsoft shares were off 3% for the week as of mid-day Friday.
Fellow cloud computing behemoth Amazon didn't fare much better, reporting misses on revenue and Amazon Web Services (AWS) sales. Those AWS sales are vital to the company and even the slight miss — $20.5 billion actual versus $21 billion expected — was a disappointment. However, the real drag on Amazon was its Q4 guidance. In anticipation of a muted holiday season, the company guided to between $140 billion and $144 billion instead of the expected $155 billion.
Amazon's results were "really macro-related — inflation, interest rates, energy costs, the Ukraine war are impacting the consumer," Cowen Managing Director John Blackledge told Yahoo Finance Live on Friday. "They're also dealing with lingering spend issues, but they're working on it."
Amazon's shares are down about 15% as of mid-day Friday.
In a rough time, Meta stands out as perhaps the week's biggest loser. The Facebook parent reported on Wednesday that its revenue declined in Q3 and missed analysts' expectations, as the company's pivot towards the metaverse increasingly generates criticism and scrutiny from watchers.
Meta's stock went into free fall on Thursday, and its shares are still down 21% for the week as of mid-day Friday.
The one seeming bright spot for Big Tech this week came when Apple reported its Q4 earnings Thursday. While the company missed on revenue expectations for its iPhone and Services segments, it still managed to report record revenue for the quarter.
But even Apple faltered. The company admitted that it will be stung by foreign exchange headwinds and that its Q4 growth will be lower than the 8% year-over-year growth it saw in Q3. Apple didn't provide exact guidance for its holiday quarter, but a drop during what is traditionally its best sales season could be damaging to the iPhone maker.
So, Twitter might have been thrown a life raft with an anchor attached, but when looking at the rest of tech, it hasn't had the worst week. It's all relative in a bear market.
Got a tip? Email Daniel Howley at dhowley@yahoofinance.com. Follow him on Twitter at @DanielHowley.
Allie Garfinkle is a Senior Tech Reporter at Yahoo Finance. Follow her on Twitter at @agarfinks.
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