Saturday, February 28

Block mass layoffs earn Wall Street’s approval, Duolingo shares plunge


Fourth quarter earnings have slowed to a trickle after the blowout report from Nvidia (NVDA) capped results for the “Magnificent Seven” tech stocks.

With just 4% of S&P 500 companies left to report results, the index is tracking a 14.2% earnings growth rate for the quarter, which would mark the S&P 500’s fifth consecutive quarter of double-digit earnings growth.

Nvidia’s report was the marquee event this week, offering a crucial update on demand for high-tech AI chips — a big part of the hundreds of billions of dollars its Big Tech peers are spending on AI investments. Salesforce (CRM), Home Depot (HD), and Lowe’s (LOW) were among the notable companies reporting this week as well.

In the week ahead, a mix of retail companies, including Target Corporation (TGT), plus a number of others, such as CrowdStrike (CRWD), Broadcom (AVGO), Costco (COST), and Alibaba Group (BABA), will help round out the quarter.

LIVE 232 updates

  • Block stock soars after Jack Dorsey goes all-in on AI, cuts nearly half of workforce

    Block (XYZ) shares surged more than 22% in extended trading after Jack Dorsey announced the payments company would lay off nearly half of its staff as part of a major bet in artificial intelligence that came alongside the release of its fourth quarter earnings report.

    “Today we’re making one of the hardest decisions in the history of our company: we’re reducing our organization by nearly half, from over 10,000 people to just under 6,000. That means over 4,000 of you are being asked to leave or entering into consultation,” Dorsey wrote in a post on X.

    “Something has changed,” Dorsey wrote, framing the decision as a risk intended to position the company for long-term growth. He cited new artificial intelligence tools that can automate work as the reason for the shift, noting that AI is “enabling a new way of working which fundamentally changes what it means to build and run a company.”

    In the fourth quarter, Block reported adjusted earnings per share of $0.65, in line with Wall Street estimates. Revenue of $6.25 billion slightly beat expectations of $6.21 billion, according to S&P Global Market Intelligence.

    Block also raised its full-year guidance. The company, which supports the CashApp and Square platforms, said it expects gross profit growth of 18% year over year in 2026 and adjusted operating income of $3.20 billion or 26% margin.

  • Duolingo prioritizing user growth ‘above everything else,’ CEO says as stock gets smoked

    Duolingo (DUOL) stock plummeted as much as 25% on Friday after the company offered downbeat guidance for 2026 despite beating analysts’ expectations on Q4 earnings. The company said it’s shifting focus from monetizing its language-learning app to growing the subscriber base.

    While daily active users and subscriptions were up 30% and 28% year over year, respectively, that growth slowed throughout 2025 and is expected to decelerate further this year.

    CEO Luis Von Ahn told Yahoo Finance on Friday that more than 15 million people have a Duolingo streak longer than 365 days, and growing that dedicated user base is a priority. Von Ahn said artificial intelligence is a major driver of the company’s pivot to user growth.

    “We think that over the next few years, the way people learn is going to change quite significantly,” Von Ahn said, adding that “the most important thing we can do is capture as much of the market as we can, entice as many users to use Duolingo as possible … and we’re prioritizing that pretty much above everything else.”

    Duolingo reported fourth quarter revenue of $282.9 million, up 35% year over year and ahead of the $275.74 million estimated. Adjusted earnings per share came at $0.84, versus the $0.83 estimate. The company’s 2026 outlook, however, landed well short of the $1.26 billion estimated, with full-year revenue guidance of $1.20 billion-$1.22 billion.

  • Jenny McCall

    Flutter stock falls on slow NFL season, prediction-markets threat

    Flutter Entertainment’s (FLUT) stock fell 12% before the bell on Friday after reporting disappointing revenue. The sports-betting operator reported revenue of $4.74 billion last quarter, below the $4.93 billion projected by analysts.

    The Wall Street Journal reports:

    Read more here.

  • Jenny McCall

    Duolingo shares sink after issuing poor 2026 guidance

    Duolingo Inc (DUOL) shares sank 25% before the bell on Friday after reporting fourth quarter earnings, which beat analyst expectations, but issued disappointing guidance for 2026. The company said it is changing its strategy to prioritize user growth over near-term profitability.

    Investing.com reports:

    Read more here.

  • C3.ai slashes 26% of staff as CEO admits failure to deliver and ‘burning too much money’

    Yahoo Finance’s Francisco Velasquez reports:

    Read more here.

  • Intuit expects profit below estimates on higher marketing spend during US tax season

    Intuit (INTU) stock fell about 2.5% in after-hours trading as the company’s fiscal third quarter profit forecast disappointed investors.

    The third quarter is usually Intuit’s strongest, as more users turn to the company for tax help; however, the company said it expects to spend more on marketing to attract customers to its tools, such as TurboTax.

    Reuters reports:

    Read more here.

  • CoreWeave beats quarterly revenue estimates on strong AI-related demand

  • Dell forecasts fiscal 2027 revenue above estimates on rising AI server demand

    Reuters reports:

    Read more here.

  • Nutanix shares gallop higher on strong earnings, AMD investment

    Cloud computing provider Nutanix (NTNX) reported strong earnings and announced a multiyear deal with AMD (AMD) on Wednesday, sending the stock more than 15% higher in premarket trading on Thursday.

    For the fiscal second quarter, Nutanix reported adjusted earnings per share of $0.56 for the quarter on revenue of $722.8 million. Wall Street analysts were looking for earnings per share of $0.44 on $709.7 million in revenue, according to S&P Global Market Intelligence.

    For the full year, Nutanix said it expects revenue of $2.80 billion to $2.84 billion and a non-GAAP operating margin of 21% to 22%.

    Nutanix’s new multiyear partnership with AI chipmaker AMD also boosted shares on Thursday as the two companies seek to develop a platform for enterprise agentic AI. AMD said it will invest $250 million in Nutanix shares and joint R&D and go-to-market efforts, and the equity investment is expected to close in the second quarter of 2026.

    AMD stock slid 1.5% following the announcement and earnings from its rival Nvidia (NVDA).

    Read more here.

  • Jenny McCall

    Bitcoin miner tied to Trump family pummeled by crypto crash

    American Bitcoin (ABTC), which is backed by two of President Trump’s sons, reported a $59 million loss in its fourth quarter earnings on Thursday. The results have come amid a stock and crypto sell-off, wiping out almost 90% of the firm’s market value since September. The company’s stock price rose 3% before the bell today following the news.

    Bloomberg News reports:

    Read more here.

  • Celsius surges on strong fourth-quarter revenue beat

    Shares of Celsius Holdings (CELH) jumped more than 12% in premarket trading on Thursday after the energy drink maker reported better-than-expected fourth quarter earnings as its acquisitions of Rockstar Energy and Alani Nu drove momentum in the business.

    Investing.com reports:

    Read more here.

  • Stellantis reports massive $26.3 billion loss but improving second half results as turnaround slowly begins

    Yahoo Finance’s Pras Subramanian reports:

    Read more here.

  • Jenny McCall

    J.M. Smucker stock rises after Q3 earnings beat, but issues weaker full-year sales outlook

    J.M. Smucker (SJM) stock rose 7% before the bell on Thursday after third quarter earnings beat analyst expectations. The company did, however, report a weaker full-year sales outlook, citing a recent fire at one of its manufacturing facilities.

    AP reports:

    Read more here.

  • Jenny McCall

    Qnity forecasts upbeat full-year earnings as AI boom boosts demand

  • Nvidia CEO: ‘We are close’ to finalizing agreement with OpenAI

    Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang said the company is “close” to finalizing its agreement with OpenAI (OPAI.PVT)

    “We continue to work with OpenAI toward a partnership agreement, and believe we are close,” Huang said. “We are thrilled with our ongoing partnership with OpenAI, a once-in-a-generation company we’ve had the pleasure of partnering with since their first days.”

    In September 2025, Nvidia said it planned to invest $100 billion in OpenAI to support artificial intelligence infrastructure. But in early February, Huang said that the $100 billion was “never a commitment,” and a few weeks later, the Financial Times reported that the company was close to finalizing a $30 billion deal to replace the $100 billion one.

    On the earnings call, Nvidia executives touted that “just about every startup in the world is working on Nvidia’s ecosystem.” The company has also struck partnerships with rival models, including Anthropic’s Claude and Google’s Gemini.

  • Nvidia says it hasn’t sold any H200 chips to Chinese firms yet

    Nvidia’s (NVDA) CFO Colette Kress confirmed a report earlier this week that it has not yet sold any of its second-most-powerful chips to China.

    “While small amounts of H200 products for China-based customers were approved by the US government, we have yet to generate any revenue, and we do not know whether any imports will be allowed into China,” Kress said on the earnings call.

    That was in line with what a Commerce Department official said at a congressional hearing on Tuesday.

    President Trump gave Nvidia the green light to sell H200 chips to China last month. In late January, Beijing reportedly gave three of China’s largest tech companies, ByteDance, Alibaba (BABA, 9988.HK), and Tencent (0700.HK, TCEHY), approval to purchase more than ‌400,000 H200 chips.

  • Nvidia CFO calls out hyperscaler spend on earnings call

    Nvidia’s earnings call is underway. You can listen to it live here.

    CFO Colette Kress called out that the hyperscalers — Big Tech firms like Amazon (AMZN), Microsoft (MSFT), and Meta (META) that provide large-scale cloud services — continue to have a strong appetite for Nvidia’s data center chips.

    “Analysts expectations for 2026 capex across the top five cloud providers and hyperscalers, who collectively account for a little over 50% of our data center revenue, are up nearly $120 billion since the start of the year and approaching $700 billion,” Nvidia CFO Colette Kress said on the earnings call. “We continue to expect the transition of classic data center workloads to GPU-accelerated computing and the use of AI to enhance today’s hyperscale workloads and contribute toward roughly half of our long-term opportunity.”

  • Salesforce forecasts annual revenue below estimates, shares fall

  • Nvidia stock jumps after earnings beats, revenue guidance tops expectations

    Nvidia (NVDA) stock popped by more than 3% after earnings beat expectations and delivered a strong revenue outlook for the first quarter.

    Nvidia said it expects revenue of $76.44 billion to $79.56 billion in Q1, ahead of expectations of $72.78 billion, according to Bloomberg consensus estimates.

    Here’s what Nvidia reported for the fourth quarter compared to analyst estimates compiled by Bloomberg:

    Data Center compute revenue ($51.3 billion, up 58% from a year ago) and networking revenue ($11.0 billion, up 263%) both also reached record highs.

    Read the full earnings breakdown here >

  • Jenny McCall

    Shoemaker Steven Madden withholds profit forecast on tariff uncertainty

    Steve Madden’s (SHOO) stock fell 5% on Wednesday after the shoe and handbag maker withdrew its 2026 earnings forecast due to tariff uncertainty, in the first sign of chaos since the Supreme court shut down President Trump’s tariffs last week Friday.

    Reuters reports:

    Read more here.

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