🚩 The Earnings Number Is Fake

Apple just secretly added Starlink satellite support to iPhones through iOS 18.3.

One of the biggest potential winners? Mode Mobile.

Mode’s EarnPhone already reaches 490M+ users that have earned over $1B, and that’s before global satellite coverage. With SpaceX eliminating "dead zones," Mode's earning technology can now reach billions more in unbanked and rural populations worldwide.

Their global expansion is perfectly timed, and investors like you still have a chance to invest in their pre-IPO offering at $0.52/share.

With their recent 32,481% revenue growth and newly reserved Nasdaq ticker, Mode is one step closer to a potential IPO.

Tap into a $1T opportunity — invest now at just $0.52/share and get up to 20% bonus.

^{Please read the offering circular and related risks at invest.modemobile.com. This is a paid advertisement for Mode Mobile’s Regulation A+ Offering.}

^{Mode Mobile recently received their ticker reservation with Nasdaq ($MODE), indicating an intent to IPO in the next 24 months. An intent to IPO is no guarantee that an actual IPO will occur.}

^{The Deloitte rankings are based on submitted applications and public company database research, with winners selected based on their fiscal-year revenue growth percentage over a three-year period.}

Google is sitting on $94 billion of SpaceX stock and can barely touch any of it.

That's the headline number from Alphabet's latest 10-Q, and it just made Google's earnings report almost impossible to read.

Google disclosed $94B worth of SpaceX shares after Musk's rocket company went public last month.

The catch: $80B is locked up under short-term sale restrictions, and another $14.1B stays frozen until the third quarter of 2027.

So Google owns a fortune it mostly can't sell. Congratulations, here's a very large gift card.

For context on the IPO itself: SpaceX sold 555.5M shares at $135 each, raising $75B. With the underwriter over-allotment, the total came to just over $85.7B.

Here's where it gets a bit silly.

Google reported $9.11 in earnings per share on a GAAP basis. Looks incredible. But it's mostly not real.

Other income and expense for the quarter came in at $98B. Of that, $99B was net gains from equity securities, including SpaceX and a "private company" that everyone’s guessing is Anthropic.

GAAP rules force companies to book unrealized gains as if the money already landed. Paper wealth, counted like cash.

Strip it out and Google earned $2.85 per share on an adjusted basis. That's the number that reflects the actual business.

Same company. Same quarter. Two figures that differ by more than 3x depending on which accounting rulebook you open.

Investors weren't fooled. Google shares dropped more than 5% in premarket trading after the results and guidance landed. And ended the day down nearly 7%.

Which tells you something useful: a $99B accounting gain doesn't impress anyone when the underlying business guidance disappoints.

Mega-cap tech balance sheets now carry huge stakes in private and newly public companies. And those positions swing quarterly earnings by billions without a single dollar changing hands.

That makes headline EPS numbers noisy and harder to trust for these names. When a company's "profit" moves because someone else's stock price moved, the GAAP figure stops describing the operating business.

Worth knowing which number a headline is quoting before you react to it.

And the lockup timeline matters too. Restricted shares eventually unlock, and what a company does with a stake that size becomes its own story in 2027.

Ready to transform artificial intelligence from a buzzword into your personal revenue generator?

HubSpot’s groundbreaking guide "200+ AI-Powered Income Ideas" is your gateway to financial innovation in the digital age.

Inside you'll discover:

Download your guide today and unlock a future where artificial intelligence powers your success. Your next income stream is waiting.

Get Your Guide

Intel $INTC ( ▼ 2.33% ) just doubled Wall Street's earnings estimate.

Analysts wanted $0.21 a share. Intel delivered $0.42.

The stock popped 7.5% after hours, and for once nobody had to squint at the numbers to find the good news.

Revenue hit $16.13B, up 25% year-over-year. Wall Street was penciling in $14.43B.

That 25% growth? Intel's best in over fifteen years. This is a company that spent the last decade getting lapped by everyone with a fab and a dream.

The breakdown looks like:

Adjusted gross margin came in at 41.8% versus the 39.2% analysts modelled. Margins beating estimates is the tell that this wasn't bought with discounts.

Everyone spent two years deciding AI was a GPU story. Nvidia sells the shovels, everyone else sells the buckets.

Turns out those GPUs still need CPUs sitting next to them, orchestrating the whole thing. Data Center and AI revenue up 59% is what that looks like on a P&L.

CEO Lip-Bu Tan credited AI demand plus "greater speed, accountability, and customer focus," which is CEO for "we stopped tripping over ourselves."

The rising tide even lifted the competition. AMD $AMD ( ▼ 2.29% ) and Nvidia $NVDA ( ▼ 1.56% ) both moved higher on the print.

Beats are nice. Guidance is what actually moves stocks.

Intel sees Q3 revenue of $15.8B to $16.8B. Midpoint of $16.3B against a $15.06B consensus. That tells me Intel are pretty confident the quarter we just saw wasn't a fluke.

EPS guide: $0.38 versus $0.27 expected. Margin guide: 42% versus 40.2%.

Intel has been the sector's designated disappointment for years, which means expectations were buried somewhere near the Earth's core. Easy bar to clear.

The open question is whether one quarter fixes a decade-long story, or whether this is a cyclical CPU refresh dressed up in an AI costume.

Watch the Foundry number next quarter. That's the business Intel bet the company on, and $5.77B doesn't yet tell you if it's working.

Elon Musk got asked about merging Tesla and SpaceX. He didn't say no.

On a live earnings call, with analysts listening, the most litigated CEO in America chose "we can't talk about that here" over a flat denial.

Musk pointed to the overlap between the two companies, calling out Terafab as "a gigantic project." Then came the line everyone clipped:

"But obviously, we can't talk about combining companies and that kind of thing on an earnings call. It's got to be done with the appropriate process."

"Appropriate process" is corporate for there is a process, and it is not this call.

Tesla general counsel Brandon Ehrhart played it straight, calling SpaceX a great partner with numerous beneficial transactions between the two.

Musk kept listing the plumbing: Grok riding shotgun in Tesla cars, Starlink baked into the vehicles.

Gene Munster of Deepwater Asset Management had this at an 80% chance the two combine within a few years.

After the call? He bumped it to 90%.

Sounds like everyones taking that non answer as a big fat “YES”

Tesla shareholders currently own a car company that increasingly rents SpaceX's best toys. A merger would flip that: you'd own the rocket company, the satellite network, and the AI, all in one ticker.

But nobody has said what a combination would even look like. Who buys who, whether it's stock or cash, what premium gets paid. Those are the details that decide whether you win or get diluted, and none of them exist yet.

You've got is an analyst at 90% and a CEO who wouldn't say no.

And nobody made it any clearer on the call.