Bloomberg Podcasts · Earnings Roundup: Alphabet Beats on Cloud Sales, Tesla's Profit Disappoints | Bloomberg Businessweek

1. 1. Alphabet's cloud business grew 82% to a $100 billion run rate, which Mandep Singh called a phenomenal result for a company historically focused on consumer products.
2. 2. Gemini models now process 22 billion API tokens per minute and the Gemini app has 950 million monthly active users, but Mandep Singh cautioned that high MAU numbers reflect Google's distribution advantage rather than genuine usage gains.
3. 3. Tesla's earnings missed expectations with EPS of 33 cents versus 51 cents expected, and gross margin also came in below forecasts, according to Keith Naughton.
4. 4. Tesla's negative cash flow was expected but not as negative as feared, yet the company still needs to generate revenue and profit from car sales to fund its $25 billion capex plan for robotics and AI.
5. 5. Ed Ludlow noted that investors wanted Tesla to spend more on AI and robotics, but the company's capex came in line with expectations, and the real meat of the story will come in the earnings call.
6. 6. Mandep Singh predicted that Alphabet will have negative free cash flow next year if capex rises to $300 billion, despite 24% topline growth.
7. 7. Ed Ludlow compared Alphabet's potential negative free cash flow to Oracle's experience in the late '90s, which caused a market meltdown, but noted the market is currently sanguine about such spending.
8. 8. Mandep Singh said the payoff from AI spending is already happening in the cloud business, which reached a $100 billion run rate in just 3-4 years, but he worries about Alphabet's search business and the delayed Gemini Pro 3.5 release.
9. 9. Keith Naughton said Tesla is no longer a growth story as a car company; it's contracting, and the most common trade-in is now a Toyota hybrid, indicating a shift to mass market.
10. 10. Ed Ludlow said the biggest tone shift in Tesla's earnings deck is its positioning as a 'complicated compute industrial robotics company,' but the robo taxi business plan remains unclear, especially the economics of the mixed fleet model.
11. 11. Mandep Singh said the key metrics to watch on Alphabet's earnings call are token consumption and capex guidance, as the AI world is measured in token consumption.
12. 12. Ed Ludlow said consumer AI features like AI inbox and conversational Maps don't move the needle; the battleground is the enterprise, where 90% of the Fortune 100 use Gemini enterprise.