Finance Evening: Meta Posts Record Revenue With 2-for-1 Split; Musk Pledges SpaceX Shares to US Children

📊 Today's North American Markets

(Data: Yahoo Finance closing data)

1. Meta posts record quarterly revenue, announces 2-for-1 stock split

Source: Yahoo Finance

Meta opened Big Tech's earnings season after the closing bell on Wednesday, reporting third-quarter revenue of $64 billion, an all-time high and ahead of the $63.3 billion analysts expected. GAAP earnings per share came in at $3.83 versus expectations of $3.56. The company also announced a 2-for-1 stock split, giving each holder of a Class A share one non-voting Class C share.

The discount in the report came from legal costs: fees tied to Meta's teen mental health settlement weighed on GAAP profit, and EPS would have been $7.40 without that charge. A year earlier Meta reported EPS of $1.05 on revenue of $51.2 billion. The company raised the bottom of its capital expenditure range to $135 billion from $130 billion, keeping the top end at $145 billion.

On the call, CEO Mark Zuckerberg said 10 million people in the US and Canada have set up the Muse AI app, and the company expects more than one billion users eventually. He said Reality Labs' operating loss should narrow to around $15 billion next year and trend toward profitability from there. CFO Susan Li said global time spent per user on Instagram and on Reels hit all-time highs, while time spent on Threads rose 20% year over year. Zuckerberg will stay in California to remain close to Meta Superintelligence Labs.

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2. Musk pledges one SpaceX share to every US child

Source: Al Jazeera

Elon Musk has pledged to give one SpaceX share to every child in the United States next year, a gift worth about $10.7 billion at Friday's closing price of $146.03. About 73 million children under 18 live in the US, according to Census Bureau data. "This will be the first of many," Musk wrote on X on Monday.

President Donald Trump thanked Musk on Truth Social and said the shares would be delivered through "TRUMP ACCOUNTS", the tax-advantaged investment accounts for children. The pledge lands two weeks before the November 3 midterm elections; Musk has given more than $276 million to Republican groups since July, making him the biggest known donor in the race.

Key details remain open: Musk has not said which children qualify, when the shares will be handed over, or how. SpaceX listed on the Nasdaq in June at $135 a share and has fallen 35.3% from its post-listing peak. Musk owns 4.8 billion shares outright, rising to about 6.4 billion including unvested awards and options, or 48.4% of the company. Giving away 73 million shares would cut his outright stake by about 1.5%, while his roughly 82% voting power would slip only 0.1 percentage points. Families cannot refuse the shares for their children and generally cannot sell them for five years.

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3. Tesla starts Optimus production as quarterly profit falls 43%

Source: TechCrunch

Tesla said on Wednesday, in its shareholder letter and on its earnings call, that it has started producing its Optimus humanoid robot at its Fremont, California factory, in space once used for electric vehicles. The company called the units coming off the line its first production-quality bots, while CEO Elon Musk described it as "early production" with a slow, "somewhat bumpy" ramp. He said Tesla will be able to make 20,000 a week by the end of 2027.

The robotics milestone contrasted with soft quarterly results: revenue was $28.04 billion, just below the $28.09 billion posted a year earlier. Tesla delivered 486,532 vehicles, about 6,000 more than the prior quarter but fewer than a year earlier. Net income fell 43% to $787 million from $1.37 billion.

Spending and mix weighed on profit. Solar and energy storage revenue dropped 16% year over year to $2.8 billion, which Tesla blamed on tariff-related customer refunds. Services, including subscriptions to Full Self-Driving, grew 33% to $4.6 billion, and the "services and other" segment posted a record $734 million in gross profit. Higher AI and robotics spending, plus lower regulatory credit sales, also pressured profitability.

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4. Boeing's 737 MAX 10 wins FAA certification with 1,555 orders pending

Source: Fox Business

The Federal Aviation Administration said Tuesday it had certified Boeing's 737 MAX 10, clearing the main regulatory obstacle for deliveries of the largest jet in the MAX family. The aircraft carries 1,555 orders from more than 30 customers, about a third of Boeing's outstanding 737 MAX order book.

Certification followed nearly 1,000 test flights, more than 2,000 flight hours and 1,000 hours of ground testing. The jet includes an updated flight-control system and an enhanced angle-of-attack sensor, changes Boeing says will eventually become standard across the MAX family. The MAX 10 seats up to 230 passengers, typically 185 to 210 in a two-class layout, with a range of up to 3,100 nautical miles.

Stephanie Pope, president and CEO of Boeing Commercial Airplanes, said completing certification "clears the path for us to deliver a Boeing airplane that will set a new standard in commercial aviation." FAA Administrator Bryan Bedford said the agency will keep holding Boeing to the highest safety standards as production begins. The 737 MAX family has 7,350 orders in total, with nearly 2,500 aircraft delivered through the end of September 2026.

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5. Intel reaches Ohio fab milestone, still at least five years behind

Source: CNBC

Intel said Wednesday that crews installed the first major structural truss at its huge chip plant in New Albany, Ohio, meaning the next phase of construction can begin. The project is running at least five years behind schedule: announced in 2022 with chip output expected in 2025, it is now targeted for construction completion in 2030, with a second Ohio fab planned for 2031.

Naga Chandrasekaran, who heads Intel Foundry, called it "another significant step toward expanded U.S. leading-edge semiconductor capacity." CEO Lip-Bu Tan, who took over in 2025, has taken a more cautious approach, waiting for customer demand before pushing large projects. Intel is in high-volume production of its most advanced 18A chips in Arizona and expects operations at its next Arizona fab by the end of 2028, but it has yet to land a major external customer for those chips.

The opening comes from AI-driven capacity shortages: TSMC cannot build fast enough, and Nvidia, AMD, Apple and Broadcom are all competing for space. Dan Hutcheson of TechInsights said customers want a second source "to be able to twist TSMC's arm and keep them honest on pricing." Reports in September said SK Hynix, the leading maker of high-bandwidth memory, could lease space in Ohio to make memory chips; neither company confirmed any plans.

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6. Berkshire beats chips by 22 points, flashing a rare dot-com-era signal

Source: Yahoo Finance

For three weeks Wall Street sold the hottest trade and bought one of the oldest: chip stocks lost 15% while Warren Buffett's Berkshire Hathaway gained 7%. Berkshire's Class B stock closed at a record Tuesday, its first since May 2, 2025 — the day before Buffett said he would hand the CEO job to Greg Abel — and both share classes hit intraday records Wednesday. The wait took 17 months, a stretch in which the S&P 500 gained more than 35%.

From Oct. 6 through Tuesday, the iShares Semiconductor ETF (SOXX) fell in 10 of 11 sessions. Berkshire rose on nine of those days and posted two of its best gains of the run on chips' two worst days, Oct. 14 and Oct. 16. From Oct. 2 through Tuesday, Berkshire beat SOXX by 22 percentage points, the widest gap over any 12-session stretch since early 2010.

The rarer signal is the combination: chips down at least 14% while Berkshire gained at least 7% over 12 sessions. That last happened on Oct. 3, 2001, with earlier cases in 1995-96 and 2000-01 as the dot-com bubble burst. History is mixed: chips were higher a week later in five of six cases, but a year out they were lower in five of six, and the S&P 500 fell in four. Berkshire reports third-quarter results on Nov. 7.

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7. US mortgage rates fall for the first time in two months, demand still drops

Source: CNBC

US mortgage rates fell for the first time in two months, but demand kept deteriorating. Total mortgage application volume dropped 5.3% week over week, according to the Mortgage Bankers Association's seasonally adjusted index. The average contract rate on a 30-year fixed conforming loan of $832,750 or less fell to 7.41% from 7.50%, with points down to 0.75 from 0.83 for loans with a 20% down payment.

MBA economist Joel Kan said rates decreased for the first time in over two months, but lower rates were not enough to boost activity as both purchase and refinance applications declined. Refinance applications fell 2% week over week and were 59% below a year earlier; purchase applications fell 7% and were 18% lower year over year. With rates more than a full percentage point above year-ago levels, few borrowers can benefit from refinancing.

The adjustable-rate mortgage share held steady at 10.5%, as ARM rates remain almost a full percentage point below the 30-year fixed rate. The National Association of Realtors reported Tuesday that September pending home sales fell sharply. Matthew Graham of Mortgage News Daily cautioned against reading too much into the oil-price correlation, which he said has been "highly unreliable for more than a month."

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8. Energy Department lends heating oil from reserve to ease winter costs

Source: Fox Business

The Department of Energy said Wednesday it plans to loan up to about one-third of the US emergency heating oil reserve to ease price pressure as global conflicts constrain supplies. The department will lend up to 315,000 barrels of fuel oil from the Northeast Home Heating Oil Reserve, which holds one million barrels of ultra-low sulfur distillate at four locations in the Northeast.

Under the solicitation, companies that borrow during the 2026-27 heating season must return the same volume plus a premium to refill the reserve before the 2027-28 season. Energy Secretary Chris Wright said he acted after receiving a letter from Maine Senators Collins and King and holding extensive discussions with Collins, calling the move a temporary measure for a temporary supply disruption and urging New York and New England states to build the Constitution Pipeline.

Republican Senator Susan Collins said about half of Maine households rely on fuel oil to heat their homes, and the release represents a 13% increase in heating oil supplies in New England. Heating oil costs have risen 70% from a year ago, she noted.

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9. SpaceX offers 20% pay premium to staff who help build Memphis supercomputers

Source: Business Insider

SpaceX is offering a 20% pay increase to employees who volunteer to spend six weeks in Memphis helping build its data centers, according to an email sent in early October to all staff and seen by Business Insider. The email said the company needs "leaders — current and emerging — to guide teams and remove blockers as we bring more supercomputers online." Volunteers must be in good performance standing, with more than a year of tenure preferred, and are eligible for bonuses tied to program success.

Assignments are in Memphis, Tennessee, or Southaven, Mississippi, where SpaceX is expanding its Colossus 1 and 2 data centers. The supercomputers were originally built by xAI, which was folded into SpaceX in February.

Compute has become a major revenue source: in results published Tuesday night, SpaceX said AI revenue, including leasing compute to other companies, had soared to more than $7 billion, nearly half its quarterly revenue. On the analyst call, Musk said SpaceX was being "hounded relentlessly" by companies wanting to rent capacity and could have rented it out several times over. He said he spends much of his time in Memphis, often four days a week, targeting an extra 10 gigawatts of compute by the end of 2027.

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10. Just Eat apologises after AI-generated food images go wrong

Source: BBC

Just Eat has apologised after it was ridiculed online over AI-generated pictures of its restaurants' food. The delivery platform had been testing the technology on dishes that had no images yet, and not all of the results went to plan: AI confused "soda bread" with a fizzy drink and produced bacon and eggs floating in a glass of cola, along with chips poking out of muffins.

A spokesperson said the company was in the process of removing the incorrect images and would stop making more until the AI was further developed. The spokesperson said Just Eat works with tens of thousands of small restaurants on food imagery, including funding professional local photographers, adding that "as with any new technology, it isn't always quite right the first time."

The BBC found many of the more unusual images still on menus; pictures generated with AI carry a label saying so. Spelling mistakes on menus have added to the confusion — a misspelling of "plain" produced garlic bread shaped like a plane, and a "cheese roll" became slabs of cheese rolled into a sushi roll. One Instagram user questioned why customers would want AI images at all: "I want to see what the dish actually looks like."

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