Emily Flippen

Welcome back to Motley Fool Money.

Earnings season has begun, especially in big tech.

Meta and Microsoft are two of the big companies that reported this week.

They're heading in opposite directions, Emily.

I think this was fascinating.

What did you take from Meta and Microsoft?

Because investors liked what they saw from Meta, not so much from Microsoft.

It's fascinating.

Exactly.

Emily, do you think that the market is looking at meta a little bit differently because there is a little bit more of a direct line to, okay, you're spending this money on AI, but we're seeing growth in engagement.

You have growth in the amount that people are using these apps.

But there's not only that.

They're more engaged in ads, clicking on ads more, and you're getting more money out of each one of those ads.

So there's kind of a direct tie to where the financial payoff is.

We could fudge whether that is a good return on investment in a traditional sense or not, but you can kind of see that's either.

Whereas Microsoft, it's a little bit fuzzier.

I was a little bit surprised that it wasn't higher, though.

Emily, I think you'll love this stat I heard this morning that Meta is going to spend more on CapEx in 2026 than they have lost in Reality Labs in the entire history of Reality Labs.

Has Mark Zuckerberg earned the right to say, because one of the things from the conference call was, you know what, hey, this ROI from ads is going great, but we're going to build this other stuff that we're not going to tell you exactly what it is yet.

You got to just kind of trust me.