Below is a roundup of last week’s notable industry news, with summaries and our opinions. Q4 earnings are HERE! Some are bad and some are good…

Meta (👍): Q4 revenue was up 24% to $59.89B, beating estimates; 2025 revenue was up 22% to $200.97B. Meta will spend up to $135B on AI in 2026. Investors shrugged. Q1 guidance topped estimates, pushing shares 10% higher in after-hours trading. 

Microsoft (👎): Quarterly revenue was up 16.7% to $81.3B, beating estimates. Microsoft Cloud revenue was up 26% to $51.5B, and Azure revenue was up 39%. Microsoft spent $37.5B on AI. Investors worry about AI spending, its OpenAI investment, and light margin guidance. Shares fell 10%, wiping out $357B in market value!

Apple (👍): Revenue was up 16% to $143.8B, beating estimates. iPhone revenue was up 23% to $85.27B, driven by iPhone 17 demand. Services revenue, which includes advertising, was up 14% to $30.01B. Current quarter guidance topped estimates. Shares rose more than 1% in extended trading.

Comcast (👎): Revenue was up 1.2% to $32.31B, missing estimates. Broadband and cable are hurting, so Comcast is leaning into its growing mobile business. Peacock added 3M paid subscribers to 44M, but lost $552M. NBA rights helped boost ad revenue by 1.5%. Shares fell 4%.

Disney (👎): Revenue was up 5% to $25.98B, beating estimates. Experiences (theme parks, resorts) crossed $10B in quarterly revenue for the first time. Streaming revenue was up 11% to $5.35B. ESPN ad revenue grew on higher rates, but costly sports rights hurt operating income. Disney named a new CEO. Current quarter guidance was modest. Shares fell 7%.

Publicis (👎): Quarterly organic revenue was up 5.9%, beating expectations. Full-year 2025 organic growth was 5.6%, driven by AI and data services. The agency holding company predicts 4-5% organic growth for 2026, the same target it had set for 2025 but kept raising. Investors wanted more. Shares fell 8%, the biggest 1-day percentage drop since 2020.

Opinion: As in past earnings seasons, the story you tell about tomorrow matters more than the numbers you post today. Everyone except Comcast beat revenue estimates, but only Meta and Apple saw share prices rise. The difference? Strong forward-looking guidance, driven by AI.

AI spending scrutiny is real. Meta's $135B AI spend for 2026 got a pass because investors can connect it directly to revenue growth. But Microsoft's $37.5B AI spend wiped out $357B in market cap because of their increasingly complicated partnership with OpenAI; a company that is facing tons of pressure from all angles.

We’ll watch this dynamic closely in the upcoming Alphabet and Amazon earnings. Alphabet needs to prove that AI search monetization can outgrow any declines in their high-margin, traditional search business. Amazon needs to show AWS can keep its lead as customers increasingly pick cloud providers based on AI capabilities.

Publicis’ earnings tell us something important about 2026, too. They delivered great 2025 results, crushed every other agency holdco, but got hammered for not raising their 2026 outlook. In the AI era, investors want to see faster growth, even from traditional services businesses. 

AI giveth, but more so, AI taketh. Let’s see how the rest of Q4 earnings play out…

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