🤖 Meta has billions riding on its Muse

Meta — one of the largest and spendiest companies in the artificial intelligence trade — is slated to report earnings today after the bell. The report comes at a time when investors are increasingly worried about the amount of debt companies are taking on to fuel their AI ambitions. 

Specifically, investors are worried that companies like Meta took on a dangerous amount of debt to create products that have not yet proven that they will generate enough revenue to pay that money back. Meta’s message to investors will likely be something along the lines of: “trust the process.” 

Meta up until recently had little to show for its AI spend, and is expected to report $41.1 billion in capital expenditures for the quarter and $9.4 billion negative free cash flows, which would mark its first cash flow negative quarter since 2012. While we're on the topic, here’s what else the Street is expecting: 

• Revenue at $63.3 million, up 23% year over year. 

• Adjusted earnings per share at $6.79, down 6.3% year over year. 

Meta unveiled Muse, its personal AI agent, on Sept 8, meaning we’ll get a peak at how the new product performed in the first few weeks. The app surpassed 5 million downloads in its first three weeks, according to Sensor Tower data cited by multiple outlets.Wall Street appeared hopeful, sending Meta rallying in the weeks after the launch. 

Muse, which has a furry mascot that’s equal parts cute and unsettling, is one of the first big consumer AI products. You give it the keys to your email and credit cards and it can do things that are the bane of our existence, like make dinner reservations or order more Tide Pods. 

That’s a bit of a different play than its peers, which have made big bets on AI as a tool for corporations eager to do more with less humans. The relationship between AI companies and corporations is starting to show cracks but its relationship with consumers over a subscription based service is still in its early innings. 

It’s ultimately unclear if Muse will be the cashcow it needs to be in order to justify the amount Meta has spent on AI. The economics of a subscription product is also very different to Meta’s lucrative advertising business. And, as my colleague Walter Hickey pointed out earlier, it takes AI competitors like Amazon being willing to play ball in order for this thing to work as advertised. 

The Takeaway:

As we wade into a big week for tech earnings, the questions on everybody’s mind is as follows:

1. How much more money are you going to spend and or borrow? 

2. When is the thing you’re working on going to make money? 

In Meta’s case, it has a shiny new product to talk about which is a better position than most of its peers. While it very well may report positive early adoption data, it still has to prove the product will be worth the many billions of dollars spent on it. 

— J. Edward Moreno

Brazil has seen a record fall in deforestation levels of the Amazon, which comes as the country prepares for a critical presidential election. 

Left-wing President Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva, who pledged to end deforestation by 2030, faces a tight run-off election on Sunday. He faces Flavio Bolsonaro, the son of right-wing former president Jair Bolsonaro, who is expected, like his father, to take a more hands-off approach to forest preservation efforts.

– Tom Jones  

• 🏛️ Congress: With under two weeks to go until the midterms, prediction markets are pricing Democrats at a 92% chance to take the House of Representatives and a 65% chance to win the Senate.

• 📊 Senate: Diving a bit deeper into that Senate figure, the most direct pathway to Senate control for the Dems is to flip North Carolina (an increasingly likely prospect given Roy Cooper’s strong polling, with markets giving him a 97% chance at flipping the seat), holding all the seats they currently have, and then flipping any three of five tossup races in Alaska (76% chance of a D flip), Texas (64%), Maine (63%), Ohio (63%) or Iowa (44%).  

*Event contracts are offered through Robinhood Derivatives, LLC — probabilities referenced or sourced from KalshiEx LLC or ForecastEx LLC.

That’s how much credit default swaps tied to bonds issued by Oracle, SpaceX, Alphabet, Amazon, Meta, Broadcom and Nvidia were traded on average each week in September, up from less than $2 billion in July, according to Morgan Stanley research cited by the Financial Times.

That comes as no surprise considering the price of CDS for AI companies — particularly CoreWeave, which has been rattled in the past week — are rising. Investors are piling into CDS, often called “default insurance,” as they seek to hedge their AI bets amid mounting worries about the mountains of debt companies big and large have taken on. 

• Meta, Tesla, IBM, and Southwest Airlines results due out after the close.