Microsoft's Q3 Revenue Hits Record $92B as Google's AI Capex Turns Free Cash Flow Negative

Microsoft posted record Q3 revenue of $92B (+19% YoY) with net income up 32% to $37B and Azure up 48% to $33B.
Google's Q3 revenue rose 25% to $128B, but AI infrastructure capex pushed free cash flow to -$9B, its largest-ever drop.
Binance suffered an estimated $6.3B impact from an attack traced to a compromised DevOps laptop; roughly $3B was frozen on-chain.
Anthropic's potential $2T valuation could mint about 1,000 employees as $100M+ individuals, per Meb Faber's cited data.
Raoul Pal and guests see the AI boom intact but the trade shifting, with GPU rents still rising and financing pressure building.
Lyn Alden flagged a 3.4% shortfall in real private per-capita income versus pre-pandemic trend, and hot 3-month annualized core PCE at 2.9%.
Spruce Point highlighted insider selling at Nova, where a key director's stake fell from 2.26M to 430K shares.

Microsoft's Q3 revenue reached a record $92B, up 19% YoY, with net income up 32% to $37B and Azure up 48% to $33B, beating expectations. Separately, Google's Q3 revenue rose 25% to a record $128B, with operating income up 30% to $41B, though net income fell 25% to $26B on an $8B unrealized equity loss tied to SpaceX; cloud revenue rose 103% to $31B 1 2 3. Google's free cash flow turned negative at -$9B as property and equipment spending jumped 114% to $51B, its largest-ever quarterly FCF decline and second consecutive drop 4.
On the macro side, Atlanta Fed GDPNow put Q4 2026 real GDP growth at an initial +3.2%, which the account stressed is a nowcast, not a forecast. Q3 real private domestic final sales accelerated to +4.9% from +4.6%, and business investment rose +12.7%, the largest gain since Q3 2020, attributed to AI investment and related construction 1 2 3. Core PCE ran hot at +2.9% on a 3-month annualized basis versus +2.2% prior, and the personal savings rate fell to 3.8%, the first reading in the 3s since 2022 4 5 6.

Binance faced an estimated $6.3B total impact from an attack that preliminary investigation traced to a compromised DevOps engineer laptop, with the attacker entering service containers and submitting unauthorized withdrawal transactions; no private key leak was found, about $3B was frozen on-chain, and losses were absorbed by the SAFU fund and company capital 1. On bitcoin, a forwarded bearish call predicted a retest of the 57K low within 12 months citing ETF outflows and capital rotating elsewhere, while the account noted three people are willing to bet $1M that bitcoin will make a new high 2 3.
MSTR's sudden CFO resignation was flagged as almost always a major red flag, with Enron, WorldCom, and Lehman cited as examples 1. Spruce Point noted that while some Nova directors made small open-market purchases, the largest insider and finance director cut holdings from 2.26M to 430K shares since late September 2026, down from 4.3M in September 2025, timing that followed the company's pilot plant permit announcement; new CFO Thorburn holds zero shares 2.

Meb Faber cited data that Anthropic at a $2T valuation would make roughly 1,000 employees worth over $100M; with about 11,000 Americans holding $100M+ in investable assets, adding OpenAI means roughly one in every 7 to 12 such individuals would come from these two companies 1. He also relayed Bridgewater's view that change and concentration are accelerating, with Nvidia becoming the largest company relative to GDP since 1900 and nearly two years of new compute set to exceed the prior six years combined by year-end, mostly in the US; he argued value can hedge AI risk 2 3 4.
Raoul Pal and guests discussed the AI bubble on Journeyman, covering financing pressure, still-rising GPU rents, OpenAI versus Anthropic competition, and intelligence becoming a commodity; their judgment was that the boom has not broken but the trade is changing 1. Lyn Alden pushed back on the assumption that rate hikes always cure inflation, arguing some inflation conditions cannot be solved by hiking, and defended local inference for privacy-sensitive users and those analyzing content centralized providers might block 2 3. She also relayed that of 122 companies reported, 80% beat by an average 560bps, with trailing earnings up 33% versus 39% forward estimates, a narrowing 19-point gap suggesting peak earnings growth momentum 4.

Clifford Asness disputed Zucman's defense that his work was peer-reviewed, noting two QJE papers were revised and accepted within 2-3 months of submission and published within a year, unusually fast for complex empirical work, with many issues raised at the working-paper stage still unresolved; he contrasted this with Auten-Splinter's income series taking five years from 2018 submission to JPE acceptance in 2023 1. Asness also argued Piketty, Saez, and Zucman have made both major errors and many small errors that almost always point the same direction, and criticized Zucman's response to Tyler Cowen as cynical 2 3. These are the account's characterizations and remain disputed/unverified 4 5 6.
Jason relayed an interview in which Runlayer CEO Andy Berman said models already have enterprise-grade capability but companies are not ready, that LLMs lacking tools, resources, and data access are nearly useless, and that only 2-3% of companies truly use AI 1 2. Jason also said he bought Google and Nvidia on leadership and products while stressing entry price matters, and relayed WHOOP CEO Will Ahmed on the largest real-time health dataset, not selling user data, and FDA disagreement over blood pressure 3 4 5.

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