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Spotify Hosts a "Now Playing" Creator Day at its Los Angeles Campus
Daniel Ek, cofounder and CEO of Spotify (Presley Ann/Getty Images)

Profits tripled, paid subscribers up 12%, and record Q1 free cash flow — so why is Spotify sinking?

Spotify’s earnings had a lot to like, but near-term “noise” might be dampening investors’ appetite for the music streaming stock.

This morning, Spotify reported that it had 678 million monthly active users at the end of Q1, making 1 in 12 people on earth a user of the green streaming machine.

Paid subscribers to the music platform also rose 12% to some 268 million, helping drive the company’s operating profit to €509 million — more than triple the figure notched in the same quarter a year ago, as the company’s continued focus on profitability nearly makes up for years of consistent losses.

And yet, Spotify’s stock is down sharply in early premarket trading as traders ditch SPOT after comments made by the company’s CEO and a weaker user growth forecast.

In the press release detailing the Q1 results, cofounder Daniel Ek said that “the short term may bring some noise, but we remain confident in the long-term story, and the direction we’re heading in feels clearer than ever.” That comment, coupled with a forecast for monthly active users to hit 689 million in Q2, appears to be enough to shake confidence in the growth story at Spotify. Indeed, Wall Street estimates compiled by FactSet reveal that analysts were expecting Spotify to get to ~695 million monthly active users by the end of Q2.

That may not seem like a huge difference, but Spotify’s guidance implies just 2% MAU growth relative to where things were at the end of last year — a less exciting trajectory than Wall Street had anticipated.

On Monday, Spotify announced that it had already paid out more than $100 million to creators in the first quarter of 2025. Taking a leaf out of the YouTube playbook, Spotify has been doubling down on incentivizing creators to publish on the platform with revenue-sharing agreements.

More details are expected on the earnings conference call at 8 a.m. ET.

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Alphabet gains on report that Anthropic’s committed to spending $200 billion on cloud services over the next 5 years

Shares of Google are catching a bid in postmarket trading after The Information reported that Anthropic plans to spend $200 billion on Google Cloud over the next five years, citing a person with knowledge of the situation.

That would amount to more than 40% of its $462 billion backlog as of the end of Q1, which nearly doubled from $240 billion in Q4.

The relationship between the two companies has been deepening in recent weeks, with Google reportedly planning to invest up to $40 billion in Anthropic, but this reports puts a firm price tag on how much the AI chatbot developer will be paying out to the hyperscaler.

Last year, when it was revealed that Oracle’s remaining performance obligations were dominated by OpenAI, the stock gave back some of its massive advance. Counterparty and concentration risk has been an overhang on the cloud giant ever since.

That’s a stark contrast to how traders are behaving today. It’s a sign of how Alphabet is seemingly on much more secure financial footing than Oracle (even after today’s debt offerings!), and also, probably, implies that Anthropic is a more reliable customer than OpenAI. In addition, as The Information noted, Google has more ways to make money off its relationship with Anthropic than Oracle does with OpenAI.

Anthropic has been a victim of its own success: the popularity of Claude Code and Cowork have revealed compute constraints and left users frustrated by caps. In response, the Claude developer has embarked upon a mad scramble for compute, striking or expanding deals with CoreWeave, Amazon, Google, and Broadcom.

OpenAI, on the other hand, is now billing the billions it’s burned on securing compute as a competitive advantage.

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Tempus AI drops after reporting better-than-expected Q1 results

Cancer diagnostics company and retail shareholder favorite Tempus AI reported better-than-expected Q1 adjusted EBITDA, earnings, and sales numbers late Tuesday, but the stock still slumped in the after-hours session.

The company reported:

  • Q1 revenue of $348.1 million vs. FactSet’s expectation of $345.4 million.

  • An adjusted loss per share of $0.13 vs. the $0.20 loss per share estimated.

  • Adjusted EBITDA of -$2.83 million vs. expectations for -$4.95 million, per FactSet.

Since going public nearly two years ago, Tempus has been a volatile stock that has both doubled — and cratered — on multiple occasions. That spectacle has at times captured the attention of retail traders who’ve tried to ride the waves.

The surf has been bad lately, with the shares down about 8% so far this year, and down roughly 50% from its record high on October 8, 2025.

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Advanced Micro Devices gains as CPU and GPU demand drive better-than-expected Q2 sales guidance

Advanced Micro Devices is powering higher in postmarket trading after reporting Q1 results that exceeded expectations across the board along with Q2 sales guidance higher than what Wall Street had penciled in.

In Q1, the Lisa Su-run company reported:

  • Revenue of $10.2 billion (compared to analyst estimates of $9.9 billion and guidance for $9.5 billion to $10.1 billion).

  • Adjusted earnings per share of $1.37 (estimate: $1.28).

For Q2, management projected sales in a range of $10.9 billion to $11.5 billion (estimate: $10.5 billion) with an adjusted gross margin of about 56% (estimate: 55.3%).

Customer engagement for AMD’s AI chips and racks is “strengthening,” according to CEO and Chair Lisa Su, with “leading customer forecasts exceeding our initial expectations and a growing pipeline of large-scale deployments providing us with increasing visibility into our growth trajectory.”

The chip giant is not just the No. 2 in GPUs but also CPUs, which appear to be in shortage thanks to compute demands of AI agents.

AMD was up 80% from March 30 through Tuesday’s close, and its 250% gain over the past year has left Nvidia and Broadcom’s 70% and 110% rallies, respectively, in the dust.

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Match Group earnings beat Wall Street’s expectations

Tinder is so back.

Match Group rose more than 4% in postmarket trading Tuesday after reporting Q1 earnings that beat Wall Street’s expectations. The dating app conglomerate reported:

  • Revenue of $864 million (compared to analyst estimates of $854.8 million and guidance for $850 million to $860 million).

  • Adjusted EBITDA of $343 million (estimate: $317.3 million, guidance for $315 million to $320 million).

  • Adjusted earnings per share of $0.68 (estimate: $0.61).

  • 13.5 million current paying users (estimate: 13.6 million).

The company has been seeking to diversify its user base. “Winning women is critical to us,” CEO Spencer Rascoff told the Financial Times, speaking about the app Tinder in April. “[Achieving] gender parity is very challenging, but we absolutely need to do a better job of driving outcomes for women.”

Though Match doesn’t disclose gender breakdowns, market intelligence platform Sensor Tower estimates that 75% of Tinder’s users are men.

Match also sees queer men as part of this effort to grow its user base. In April, the dating app company invested 100 million in Sniffies, a competitor to Grindr.

In its press release on Tuesday, the company noted a turnaround with Gen Z on Tinder — the dating app that makes up the bulk of its revenue — which is a clear signal that Tinder’s ecosystem is strengthening.

With Tinder’s revenue up 2% year over year, the company can breathe a sigh of relief, as it won’t have to lean as heavily on high-growth Hinge (up 28% year over year).

For Q2 2026, Match Group expects total revenue of $850 million to $860 million, in line with analyst estimates of $856 million. 

Meanwhile, the company’s competitor, Bumble, reported on Tuesday a 14% decrease in revenue year over year and a 21% decrease in paying users in the first quarter.

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Lucid reports worse-than-expected Q1 loss, revenue

Luxury EV maker Lucid reported its first-quarter earnings after markets closed on Tuesday. Its shares fell more than 2% after-hours, following a 6.5% drop at close.

For Q1, Lucid reported:

  • An adjusted loss of $2.82 per share, compared to the $2.53 loss per share expected by Wall Street analysts polled by FactSet.

  • $282.5 million in revenue, versus the $358.5 million consensus estimate.

Last month, Lucid announced that it produced 5,500 vehicles in Q1 and reaffirmed its full-year production guidance of between 25,000 and 27,000 vehicles.

The company also highlighted its upcoming midsize SUV, with “expected pricing starting under $50,000.” The vehicle is expected to launch before the end of the year and compete with Rivian’s R2 and Tesla’s Model Y.

Q1 marks the first earnings report for new CEO Silvio Napoli, who took over for interim CEO Marc Winterhoff (who’d led the company for more than a year following Peter Rawlinson’s exit). Lucid recently announced an expansion of its robotaxi partnership with Uber, which is now its second-largest shareholder after Saudi Arabia’s PIF sovereign wealth fund.

Lucid shares have had a long stretch of poor performance amid various dilutive events and a broader contraction across the EV industry. The stock is down about 80% from a recent high in July 2025 and down about 40% year to date. As of Tuesday afternoon, the company’s roughly $2.1 billion market cap is less than a quarter of the approximately $9.5 billion that Saudi Arabia’s PIF has sunk into it.

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