Zadad Money

Profits took a hit and missed estimates as Starbucks spent heavily on labor, store upgrades, and dealt with higher coffee costs and tariffs.

But investors are clearly focused on the bigger picture and CEO Brian Nichols backed the Starbucks strategy, which appears to be gaining traction and bringing back customers.

Starbucks stock is up around 7% this morning at the time of this recording.

Now, on the flip side, shares of Corning are dropping, and this one might seem a bit confusing at first.

See, Corning is mostly known for making the Gorilla Glass for iPhones and other Apple products, but their biggest business is now making fiber optic cables.

Just yesterday, Corning announced a massive $6 billion deal with Meta to supply fiber optic cables for Meta's AI data centers through 2030.

That news sent their stock up 16% yesterday.

but the stock is giving back some of those gains today after the company provided Q1 guidance.

Corning says they expect first quarter sales to be between $4.2 and $4.3 billion, which is technically above the Wall Street estimates, but not enough to keep yesterday's momentum going.

And that's why the stock is down around 4% this morning.

Let's wrap the show with a fun fact.

The video chat company Zoom quietly invested $51 million in the AI startup Anthropic, which is the maker of Claude, back in 2023 through their venture capital arm.

Fast forward to today and analysts estimate that stake is now worth between $2 to $4 billion depending on dilution.

And remember, Anthropic is rumored to be eyeing an IPO soon, which could push that valuation even higher.

So yeah, shout out to whoever was running Zoom's investment team in 2023.

And honestly, that might be the best move that Zoom has done since the pandemic because let's be honest, their product has not improved over the last few years.

Like I want to rage quit every time the app tries to update before a meeting.

Why does that keep happening?

At this point, I barely use Zoom anymore.

Google Meet is the way to go for me.