What a difference a few days makes. SpaceX's Elon Musk certainly knows.
Earnings from companies with artificial-intelligence operations haven't been horrible, just not good enough to support the stock market -- and Friday's session backed that up.
The earnings exception was Musk's SpaceX. It set the bar high after its third-quarter earnings report.
On Oct. 20, SpaceX reported better-than-expected third-quarter earnings, sending shares up 8%, with Musk, the CEO, talking about strong AI demand and pricing his company was scrambling to meet.
Then, on Monday, Anthropic's IPO registration statement seemed to back up what SpaceX was seeing.
In a matter of days came earnings from Meta Platforms, Alphabet, Amazon.com, and Intel. Their numbers, from Wall Street's viewpoint, didn't deliver that they should have.
On Friday, SpaceX stock fell 3.8% at $138.45, just a few dollars above its initial public offering price of $135 and down 12% from the post-earnings boom. The S&P 500 and Nasdaq Composite were off 1.2% and 2.3%, respectively.
Amazon shares were down 2.4% after the company reported third-quarter earnings per share of $1.89, down from $1.95 a year ago and below analysts' consensus estimate of $1.97, according to FactSet.
Amazon Web Services, the company's cloud business, grew 39% year over year, faster than Wall Street expected. Amazon's e-commerce business, however, grew 6%, slower than expected.
Intel stock was down 29% after the company reported better-than-expected third-quarter earnings per share of 52 cents. Wall Street was looking for 41 cents. Fourth-quarter guidance was weak, however. PC demand is weakening amid high memory chip prices.
Intel and Amazon are the latest problems. Alphabet's operating profit from its search business missed Wall Street estimates, sending shares down 13% on Thursday.
Before that, Meta's plan to issue a new class of stock to finance the AI boom sent its shares down 7% on Oct. 22.
Microsoft reported strong earnings late Wednesday. The company reported adjusted earnings per share of $4.89, better than the $4.71 Wall Street projected. Still, shares fell about $1 to $530.14, unable to overcome Alphabet's plunge.
Altogether, earnings from AI-related companies have been OK, but investors wanted far better than OK.
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