Wall Street Says This Is Microsoft's Big Year
When he was running Amazon.com Inc., Jeff Bezos, in no small part thanks to his background on Wall Street, had a knack of being able to talk investors into forgoing profit in favor of aggressive spending on expansion. If you weren't prepared to go after the big ideas, Bezos convinced them, then what was the point?
Today, the chief Wall Street whisperer isn't at Amazon, he's at Microsoft Corp. Against a backdrop of belt-tightening across Silicon Valley, where obsession over growth has given way to demands to cut costs, the Washington state-based company, led by slick visionary Satya Nadella, has been granted special license to go full steam ahead.
It's all thanks to the unbridled excitement around artificial intelligence, and Microsoft's perceived leadership in the field thanks to its $10 billion investment in OpenAI. “The Street recognizes AI is not just hype,” Wedbush analyst Daniel Ives told me, arguing Microsoft would get a longer leash to spend this year than its peers.
This mood has allowed Microsoft to be something of an outlier in this week's crop of Big Tech earnings, with Wall Street looking closely at the first hard numbers that could speak to what Meta Platforms Inc. CEO Mark Zuckerberg stated would be a “year of efficiency.”
The early signs show that, yes, Silicon Valley is learning to cut back. But although all four Big Tech companies that reported this week saw their shares rise, it was only Microsoft — not Meta, Amazon, nor Google-owner Alphabet Inc. — that did so on the basis of building exciting new technology rather than protecting existing successes.
Meta has seen the biggest share price gain, up an enormous 98% on the start of the year at the time of writing. It continues a rally that began in October
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