IBM confirmed it is acquiring Hashicorp today. The acquisition price is $35 per share. The price is a bit disappointing but it’s still ~50% higher than Monday’s closing price of $24.55. Congratulations to folks who bought the dip!
Back to Meta’s Q1 earnings, Meta reported Q1 earnings after market close. Revenue was $36.46B vs. $36.16B expected. EPS was $4.71 vs. $4.32 expected. It was a solid beat but META 0.00%↑ stock tanked 10+% after the report. It’s very interesting. Tesla had an awful earnings report yesterday and TSLA 0.00%↑ stock went up 10+% today. Meta had a pretty good earnings with 26% YoY top line growth. But the stock tanked. I suppose the earnings report and the price movement is only loosely correlated and the past performance doesn’t guarantee the future performance.
Another big breaking news is that TikTok divestment bill was approved by the house and senate and is signed into law this morning. This is huge. Supposedly, this is great news for Meta and Google but who knows how China is gonna retaliate. 10% of Facebook’s ad revenue is from Chinese advertisers. The CCP can turn it off overnight if they want. I do think the TikTok divestment bill makes sense. If the CCP doesn’t allow ByteDance to sell TikTok, they basically just make it clear that they are using TikTok as a propaganda machine. But if they do allow the sale (which doesn’t seem likely), then it’s not really great news for Meta or Google. TikTok has nine months to find an approved buyer and TikTok is gearing up for a legal battle. It is still up in the air what is actually going to happen but whatever works today won’t work one year from now for sure.