*By Carlo Versano*
Twitter shares are surging Thursday after the company smashed its third-quarter earnings report, posting a nearly 30 percent increase in year-over-year revenue and a 9 percent increase in the all-important daily active user metric. The release did not disclose the actual number of DAUs.
Shortly before 10 a.m., shares were soaring more than 17 percent, despite the report also disclosing a decline in monthly active users ー from 335 million in the second quarter to 326 million. It's a drop of 4 million year-on-year. Twitter ($TWTR) said that was in part due to a mass culling of bot, troll and fake accounts. The company said there were 20 percent fewer malicious or spammy account sign-ups from the previous quarter, thanks to "decisions we have made to prioritize the health of the platform."
On the earnings call, CEO Jack Dorsey said those decisions will act as a "growth vector" long term. In a statement attached to the earnings release, he said:
"This quarter’s strong results prove we can prioritize the long-term health of Twitter while growing the number of people who participate in public conversation.”
He added: "We're also continuing to introduce improvements that make it easier for people to follow events, topics and interests on Twitter, like adding support for US TV shows in our new event infrastructure."
After years of burning cash, this marks Twitter's fourth consecutive quarter of showing profitability.
Twitter posted adjusted earnings of 21 cents a share on revenue of $758 million. It was the company's fourth straight quarter of profit.
Shares posted their biggest gains in a year.
Tesla reported a surprise increase in sales in the third quarter as the electric car maker likely benefited from a rush by consumers to take advantage of a $7,500 credit before it expired on Sept. 30. The company reported Thursday that sales in the three months through September rose 7% compared to the same period a year ago. The gain follows two quarters of steep declines as people turned off by CEO Elon Musk’s foray into right-wing politics avoided buying his company’s cars and even protested at some dealerships. Sales rose to 497,099 vehicles, compared with 462,890 in the same period last year.
OpenAI could now be the world’s most valuable startup, ahead of Elon Musk’s SpaceX and TikTok parent company ByteDance, after a secondary stock sale designed to retain employees at the ChatGPT maker. Current and former OpenAI employees sold $6.6 billion in shares to a group of investors, pushing the privately held artificial intelligence company’s valuation to $500 billion, according to a source with knowledge of the deal who was not authorized to discuss it publicly. The valuation reflects high expectations for the future of AI technology and continues OpenAI’s remarkable trajectory from its start as a nonprofit research lab in 2015.
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