John Authers, Columnist

AI Euphoria Saves Big Tech From So-So Earnings

When you buy a company’s stock, you buy its future earnings. It’s still amazing how much can be taken on trust.

Big Tech gets the benefit of the doubt on AI dreams

Photographer: Andrey Rudakov/Bloomberg
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Wednesday’s earnings from the Magnificent Three — Microsoft Corp., Tesla Inc. and Meta Platforms Inc. — were always going to be a big deal. A rather bland meeting by the Federal Reserve helped confirm that. Then the asteroid hit of DeepSeek’s shoestring-budget artificial intelligence chatbot, which has inflicted massive damage on some US tech stocks, raised the stakes even further. The tech megacaps have sky-high multiples; that’s nothing new. Can they really justify them?