The Good Quarter

The past two weeks, I've focused on some of the bigger news coming out of this earnings season, so I thought it was only fair to recap all the results I did not get a chance to cover.

Here's a breakdown of what the magnificent 7 reported recently, minus Nvidia, which is yet to report its results. You can find my coverage of Google here.

Amazon

The ecommerce giant had a good quarter. Net sales rose 10% year over year to $148 billion while profit more than doubled to $13.5 billion from a year earlier.

Despite the spectacular results, Amazon warned that its online sales weren't growing as much because consumers were looking for deals, alluding to platforms like Temu and Shein that have severely undercut the company's prices by shipping products directly from mainland China.

Not one to be bested, Amazon has already started onboarding Chinese sellers on its website and is looking to attract small and medium-size sellers that could utilize its logistics network to export overseas.

Amazon landed #30 on HackerNoon's Tech Company Rankings page.

Apple

The maker of iPhones also had a good quarter. Revenue was up 5% year over year while profit rose close to 8% to $21.4 billion from a year ago.

Despite facing weakness in China, the company believes it can woo customers with its next iPhone launch which will come with deep AI integrations.

Perhaps anticipating this launch, Google went ahead and announced that its next Pixel lineup will be powered using AI processors, specifically the Tensor G4, to help the phone understand text, images and audio.

Would Apple's next smartphone top that? It might. Apple actually has a leg up on Google on AI processors, having invested in developing AI-integrated processors — such as the A-series and M-series — as part of a shift to edge computing i.e. have users' phones do the heavy lifting of processing instead of on the cloud or the back end.

That experience makes Apple uniquely positioned to compete against Google's hardware, especially considering that Google's proliferation in the smartphone market is negligible.

Meta

The OG social media company reported an increase in financial metrics across the board. Profit was up 73% to $13.5 billion after revenue rose 22% year over year to $39.1 billion.

"We had a strong quarter, and Meta AI is on track to be the most used AI assistant in the world by the end of the year," Mark Zuckerberg said of the results.

That latter part of his statement is interesting. Unlike ChatGPT, which requires a separate app or browser tab, Meta AI is actually integrated in ALL of Meta's offerings, chiefly Instagram, but also WhatsApp (which is used by over a billion people around the globe), and Facebook Messenger.

That means users utilizing any of Meta's apps don't need to leave it for their search queries, the way they would for ChatGPT or any other AI assistant.

Exactly how being the most used AI assistant in the world positions Meta AI against ChatGPT is yet to be seen, but all that data Meta is probably gathering could give it leverage in the long run.

Instagram ranked #1 on HackerNoon's Tech Company Rankings page.

Microsoft

ChatGPT-backer Microsoft also reported a strong quarter, with revenue rising 15% year over year to $64.7 billion while profit up 10% to $22 billion from a year ago.

Despite the results, investors couldn't help but get worried about a slowdown in the company's cloud business and the cost associated with building the company's AI infrastructure, which essentially leaves less in profit for investors or other business ventures.

Wall Street has been getting jittery on AI recently, raising questions about how soon it can make a buck on the technology. At Microsoft, the company says it could be monetized over 15 years and beyond.

I wonder where that would leave the rest.

Microsoft ranked #2 on HackerNoon's Tech Company Rankings page.

Tesla

Elon Musk's electric car maker did not fare as well as the rest, reporting a drastic drop in its profit, down 42% year over year to $1.81 billion.

Tesla's achilles heel appears to be its costs, and the company said as much when it attributed an increase in expenses on AI projects — which could include perfecting the company's autopilot mode for cars.

One would assume that Musk is laser-focused on realizing the autopilot technology but recently redirected 12,000 of Nvidia's (NVDA) widely-in-demand H100 GPUs that were slated for Tesla over to his social media company X instead.

This did not slip under the radar of an outspoken Democrat lawmaker, who recently wrote to the Tesla board suggesting that she may call on US regulators to discuss whether an intervention at the company was necessary given Musk's apparent conflicts of interest.

In her letter, Elizabeth Warren cited Musk's role in SpaceX, Neuralink, The Boring Company, and X Corp. as examples of the billionaire juggling various enterprises and said the Tesla CEO "may not be adequately addressing his competing priorities."

While Musk's other ventures are privately held, Tesla is not, and thus subject to securities law. Warren believes the Tesla board is doing a disservice to other shareholders by letting Musk run amok.

The letter comes as the United States heads into elections, with Musk publicly coming out in support of Donald Trump — even going as far as to host the former US President on his social media platform X to boost the  Republican Presidential nominee's popularity and reach.

Is Warren's letter politically motivated? One would hope not, but the intrigues of Washington and the frustration of the American public with the establishment is perhaps why Trump was able to become President in the first place.

Tesla ranked #9 on HackerNoon's Tech Company Rankings page.

In Other News.. 📰

• Goldman Sachs Holds Over $400M in Bitcoin ETFs — via CoinDesk
• Apple finally allows Spotify to show pricing info to EU users on iOS — via TechCrunch
• How Elon Musk has turned X into a pro-Trump machine — via CNN
• Decentralized AI network Sahara raises fresh capital in Samsung-backed round — via Reuters
• The chatbot wars get personal — via Axios
• Texas judge who owned Tesla stock recuses himself in Elon Musk’s X case against advertisers — via CNBC

And that's a wrap! Don't forget to share this newsletter with your family and friends! See y'all next week. PEACE! ☮️

— Sheharyar Khan, Editor, Business Tech @ HackerNoon

*All rankings are current as of Monday. To see how the rankings have changed, please visit HackerNoon's Tech Company Rankings page.

Tech, What the Heck!? is a once-weekly newsletter written by HackerNoon editors that combine HackerNoon's proprietary data with news-worthy tech stories from around the internet. Humorous and insightful, the newsletter recaps trending events that are shaping the world of tech. Subscribe here.