Monologue: We Live Inside A Dream, But Who Is The Dreamer?
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Hello and welcome to this week's Better Offline Monologue, I'm your host Ed Zitron.
It's been a weird week, I'm recording this on Thursday the 30th of July, so we've only had Microsoft and Meta report earnings so far. So let's start with Meta, who saw its stock get hammered today after missing on earnings per share, narrowing, by which I mean increasing by another word, its capital expenditures guidance for the year to a range of about $135 billion to $145 billion, and guiding, as in projecting, $61 billion to $64 billion of revenue in Q3, which was below estimates. Cash flow also deteriorated to a little under $800 million. And I must be clear how strange it is watching these companies do this. Meta used to just print money. They used to have tons of free cash flow. But this dedication to AI is questionable and wasteful.
And the market is pissed, mostly because Meta is yet to show any proof that spending over $200 billion in capex did anything for the company. Conversely, Microsoft's stock is ripping because it beat on analyst estimates across the board, with its Azure cloud platform hitting $100 billion in revenue for the fiscal year that just ended. And to be clear, Microsoft's fiscal year, 2026, started on July 1st, 2025. Annoying, so annoying, I hate it, but that's the ballgame. What's funny is that neither company actually proved that AI is paying off, outside of brainless analysts and captured business and tech media reading between the lines and saying, ooh, AI is paying off big time. Last quarter, Microsoft disclosed its AI run rate, month times 12, which was $37 billion, about $3 billion a month, and then simply chose not to report the figure at all.
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Chapters
5 chapters
1
What is the main topic discussed in this episode?
0:00–10:06
2
What earnings context does Ed Zitron set at the start of the monologue?
10:06–12:16
3
How did Meta's recent earnings and capex guidance influence the market reaction?
12:16–16:20
4
Why does Ed argue Microsoft's Azure growth is misleadingly credited to AI?
16:20–20:13
5
How does OpenAI's spending relationship with Microsoft affect cloud revenue claims?
20:13–21:28