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All right, let us move on to the other company coming out right now. The other big one, meta, third quarter earnings, they're crossing the wire in the past few moments. Let's run through here. A third quarter revenue there at 40.6 billion dollars. About 40.3 billion is what analysts had been anticipating. Add revenue. There was some nervousness around add revenue because it wasn't necessarily quite as strong at Google. Add revenue they're coming in at 39.9 billion, 39.7 billion dollars is what analysts had been anticipating, and a big beat on earnings per share, $6.03. 525 is what analysts had been looking for. And then lastly, the company does come out with a revenue forecast in its release. 45 to 48 billion dollars is what it's anticipating in fourth quarter revenue of 46.1 or so billion is what analysts had been anticipating. And we get Josh Shafer's favorite, the CAPEX forecast. Their full-year CAPEX, capital expenditures is going to be 38 to 40 billion dollars. They raised the lower end of that. It had been 37 billion dollars. So it looks like that they are spending at minimum a little bit more than they had anticipated spending. I don't know if that's why the shares are down. I should mention the shares closed at record today from up 70%. Yeah, up 70% this year. This has been, besides Nvidia, the big winner of this year. So maybe that's a little bit of the context.

It felt to me like CAPEX was what drove this stock. I believe the stock fell after earnings last quarter and it felt like it was really on them boosting that CAPEX forecast. You brought that up, Julie. Not a major move up there moving up your low end by a billion when we're talking about 38 to 40 billion. Not a large percentage move there. But they did also come out and say in 2025, they plan to keep ramping up capital expenditures. I don't think there's been fully clear vision into what exactly that means from a numerical standpoint yet. So maybe there's some questions there. But I think the flip side of that is, meta just keeps beating on EPS, right? This EPS number keeps going up. We're now two years removed from Zuck talking about that year of efficiency. Clearly all of that has come to fruition for the company. So to me, it kind of makes sense if they're able to keep saying that AI is helping areas of the company like reels, they're building out, of course they're going to keep spending on it at some point.

Yeah. So interesting how the company still sees significant capital expenditures growth in 2025. I mean, they are spending on AI and hardware. Obviously, you know, this is a company that has bet big on AI. There are analysts who come on and we'll say, listen, this is one of those, well, they'll argue, you can see the impact. You can see it. They'll emphasize and higher engagement. They'll say increase advertiser efficiency, but you'll get a lot more talk on the call. I think the hardware is really interesting too, and obviously that's the Quest AR headsets, that's the Ray-Ban smart glasses that Holly has written about. It does look that came in a bit light. Q3 reality labs revenue, that looks like it clocked in at 270 million. The street was closer to 313.

But it lost less money, a little bit less money than people were expecting. I'm I'm looking at the statement now, and I think I might have gotten to the bottom of this maybe what people are looking at. So as we said, they raised the lower end of that CAPEX forecast. Here's what's interesting they say. We continue to expect significant capital expenditures growth in 2025. So they're talking about a significant acceleration and infrastructure expense growth next year as we recognize higher growth and depreciation and operating expenses of our expanded infrastructure fleet. In other words, there's no slowing down, and in fact, there is accelerating potentially in that CAPEX next year. So that's something to just keep in mind here. Um the company also says, is sort of an anodyne statement here, we continue to monitor an active regulatory landscape. Yeah. So that's something also that they say could have an effect.

And I think with meta to some extent, context is important, right? This is a company that has dove into other areas. We just brought up reality labs and how much they spent there, right? And I think there is perhaps a looming investor question here of, okay, they're going to delve even further in and spend more money. They've gone down that road before, and it didn't go like they got over their skis a little bit. And so I think that's the looming question is, yes, things are going well now, but how far is it going to go and at what point as an investor, we just mentioned the stock's up 70% this year. At what point have I had enough and I don't want to see how well, how far they're going to go down that well, right? Maybe that's another.

Right. Well, it depends on how the core business is doing too. And by the way, they do stay in this statement as well, they expect they continue to expect reality labs operating losses this year to increase meaningfully. So you know, they're still committed to that area of the business.