Microsoft Joins $4 Trillion Club (yahoo.com) 35
Microsoft has reached a $4 trillion market cap, becoming only the second company to achieve this milestone. Investors drove the stock up 4.62% following the company's fourth-quarter earnings report, which showed strong growth in cloud-computing services fueled by artificial intelligence demand. Microsoft's Azure cloud business generated $75 billion in annual revenue, representing a 34% increase from the previous fiscal year.
Nvidia became the first company to reach the $4 trillion market cap earlier this month.
Nvidia became the first company to reach the $4 trillion market cap earlier this month.
Market loves layoffs too (Score:3, Funny)
CEO is the toast. Three cheers! :(
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Nah - Microsoft (i.e. Nadella's) navigation of AI has been solid - controlling 50% of OpenAI for a measly $10B or so investment, and putting most money into growing their cloud and selling services - they are essentially the ones selling spades during the gold rush.
They do need to be careful not to be left behind, but as X.ai have shown you can go from nothing to SOTA in a couple of years if you are willing to spend the money, and this will only become easier as time goes on, employees switch companies, and
Doesn't have 2B useless 2B bubble (Score:4, Interesting)
AI is currently highly subsidized by over-eager investors with too much rich-tax-cut money. That can't last forever any more than it did during the dot-com bubble. When customers come to the point where they have to pay the real costs, they will cut back or go bargain hunting elsewhere. Open-source AI is good enough that lean or low-wage-country startups will start offering something that's 80% as good at 50% the price of the big 3. MS will get focked.
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Few I know of like MS's cloud shit. MS seems to be forcing it on customers so they can nickle and dime them. MS is trying to use AI to entice them, but a glorified Clippy is a still a yawner.
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Valuations of AI companies do seem to be in a bit of a bubble - priced on promise/dreams rather than any reasonable profit projections, but I expect the ones to be hurt when the bubble bursts will be the pure AI companies like OpenAI, Anthropic and X.ai.
Microsoft's valuation isn't derived from AI sales projections, nor is that of Google, Amazon or Meta.
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"controlling 50% of OpenAI for a measly $10B or so investment"
And how much money have they made off of that investment? Oh what's that, Microsoft won't say? Doesn't sound like they are very proud of the results. OpenAI itself has been losing money.
https://www.cnbc.com/2024/10/3... [cnbc.com]
"But OpenAI is losing bundles of cash. The company expects $5 billion in losses this year, before stock-based compensation, on $4 billion in revenue, The Information reported earlier this month, citing documents."
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Exactly - it appears that OpenAI are still losing money, yet MSFT could turn around and sell their stake in OpenAI for a 10x return on their $10B investment. So, who is managing this better?
The CEO of a public company is primarily responsible for looking after shareholder's interests, and MSFT's rapid rise to this $4T level (it was only $300B when Nadella took over) speaks for itself.
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"yet MSFT could turn around and sell their stake in OpenAI"
That they could sell their share for over 100 billion, or that they would have any intention in doing so when AI is positioned as their last great hope in more ways than one, is your own conjecture.
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Sure - I don't expect to see them do it in the short term, but I doubt they'd have much trouble finding a buyer at that price since that's the valuation that OpenAI are taking new investments at.
I'd hardly characterize AI as MSFT's "last great hope" - their cloud business is going gangbusters, Windows continues to be a cash cow, Bing/Edge/advertising is doing fine, Github/Copilot is doing well, etc. Assuming AI usage volume continues to climb, then I expect the cloud providers serving it will be one of the
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Windows is less than 10% of microsoft's revenue and stopped being their priority years ago. They have more interest now in the telemetry / spying with Recall and the information it can provide their government partners. Unlike the public, government partners will overlook their endless stream of failures, be it the crowdstrike fiasco or the current state of active exploits against self-hosted Sharepoint servers, where hostile actors could circumvent their patch as soon as it was released.
They are also backi
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Billions in stock buybacks is tenths of one percent of a multi-trillion market cap, so irrelevant.
You obviously don't like MSFT, which is fine (I'm not fond of them either, although I do admire the turnaround job Nadella has done), but you should be realistic and realize that the investors moving a trillion dollar stock are not idiots - they are fund managers backed by departments full of analysts with an infinitely greater understanding of the company's financials than you will ever have ... Like it or not
How dumb is Wall st? (Score:1)
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They just invested heavily in an overpriced, over-expensive AI garbage product that doesn't work and that nobody wants while sentiments against Windows 11 have never been publicly and loudly worse and Linux is absolutely destroying them in the portable gaming market. What about that looks good? What about that says yes, buy their stock? How stupid are these Wall st clueless non-technical fossils investing in this shit?
They've been laying off a lot of people. Layoffs / firings = Wall Street Orgasm. I don't think it's any more complicated than that.
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When people trade on the ups and downs of the market, instead of on the fundamentals of a company, you can get literally any random result possible. Why did GameStop spike? Why are Kohl's and Krispy Kreme spiking?
If you want long-term results, invest like Warren Buffet--buy and hold good, solid companies. If you want a wild ride, invest in meme stocks.
Makes sense (Score:2)
... strong growth in cloud-computing services fueled by artificial intelligence demand.
For at least the past decade Microsoft has been slowly pushing everything onto the cloud, and taking more and more power and options away from users. (Google is on that job too, but their impact in the desktop space is smaller). In short, they're trying to re-create the era of dumb terminals - but "the server" is going to be the cloud. Most computer users will be renting software, storage, and processor cycles on servers, rather than owning actual licenses and computers.
Because everything is "AI", of course users will have no choice but to use it whether they want to or not, and will pay for it in one way or another. Hell, it's already hard to avoid - I've been using uBlock to block elements on Duck Duck Go search results so I don't see AI summaries and shilling.
For most people, their future is one of renting everything, owning nothing, and having little or no control over their data and their computing experience. We're getting closer every day to a techno-feudalist dystopia ruled by broglicarchs. Arguably, we're kinda there now. As William Gibson said, "The future is already here — it's just not very evenly distributed".
Trickle down (Score:1)
I'm sure this will trickle down to the plebs any day now
Re: Trickle down (Score:2)
It is in most states.
Re: Trickle down (Score:2)
Less than $250 to file and less than $100 / year in fees.
Re: Trickle down (Score:2)
https://www.llcuniversity.com/... [llcuniversity.com]
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"Buy some stock."
This would be a pretty good joke on the lack of choice offered to the public... if you were joking.. and I doubt you were
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Even if it does, it goes back into the hand of the megacorps almost instantly.
Say you found kyubey or something and made a wish to redistribute ALL the money, instantly.
Besides having to wear a frilly dress to fight monstrosities, you would also see the things going back the way they were in less than a week because you didn't redistributed market share and everyone gave their money to the megacorporations in 1 or 2 steps.
It is even more villainous because when you have such stranglehold of the market, you
The money must flow (Score:2)
New money? (Score:2)
Where does this money come from? Was it minted just for this?
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Companies are valued based on the latest stock transactions. If I can sell one billionth of MSFT for $4,000, then MSFT is valued at $4 trillion. That's just extrapolating the company's whole value based on the latest marginal transactions.
To buy all of MSFT would take more than $4 trillion (since there would be true-believer holdouts demanding more) and if all owners were to try to sell all of MSFT they would get less than $4 trillion for it (since the owners are dumping the stock). Still, for buying and
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I see. But if we count the opportunity cost, it's not $4 trillion right?
TINA (Score:5, Insightful)
1. Bonds? They're no longer countercylical, it's become clear that governments manage their bond issuance to their own advantage. I can't blame them, but it means bond investing is like betting against the house in a casino. The house always wins.
2. Gold? You'd might as well just stash your money under a mattress. Gold is awful.
3. Crypto? Don't make me laugh.
4. Private equity? Historical returns are higher (13% vs 8 for stocks) but it's a total Russian roulette game . I saw a study recently that most PE managers have literally never had a single investment that qualified as a success. So, a tiny fraction of PE investments make gobs of money and the rest lose value.
5. Real estate is still a solid option. Buying actual properties is hard because of the logistics requirements, but REITs and the like can get around that.
Money will keep flowing into public equities and real estate in massive amounts. There is no alternative. For long-term investing, nearly everything else is substandard, and probably will stay that way for decades.
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You forgot running your own business.
I have 4 companies on the go, the oldest being 30 years old.
But it’s not for the feint of heart!
The wealth of nations (Score:2)
All because they sell Office as a subscription and shitty AI.
AI: Please dissect corporate doublespeak (Score:1)
https://www.perplexity.ai/sear... [perplexity.ai]
dissect this corporate doublespeak
https://blogs.microsoft.com/bl... [microsoft.com]
wrt corporate greed and impact to human lives in terms of stress, health impact to humans, broken homes, families and societal impact, e.g. drugs, depression, etc