What We Heard From Tech CEO Calls This Week

Phew, what a week! We got a blizzard of quarterly earnings updates from tech firms, most of them followed by investor calls that were full of artificial intelligence talk. Much of that was corporate blather, of course, but there were a few moments when actual information was transmitted. Not all of that was relevant to the subject at hand, to be sure. For instance, as Elon Musk was explaining layoffs at Tesla, he pivoted for a moment to discuss the human organism. “Humans are around 35 trillion cells.…You’re basically a walking cell colony of roughly 35 trillion, depending on your body mass, and about 3x that number in bacteria,” he said. Tell us more!

When it comes to acknowledging uncomfortable truths, Meta Platforms CEO Mark Zuckerberg outdoes many of his counterparts (admittedly that bar is so low it’s below ground). Here is a crucial comment he made this week about Meta’s heavy AI investments: “Realistically, even with shifting many of our existing resources to focus on AI, we’ll still grow our investment envelope meaningfully before we make much revenue from some of these new products. I think it’s worth calling that out that we’ve historically seen a lot of volatility in our stock during this phase of our product playbook.” Volatility, in this context, means a stock dropping like a rock. That’s of course what happened with Meta’s stock, which finished the week down about 10%.