Earnings Parade: Meta and Microsoft Slide, Alphabet Surges, Starbucks and Eli Lilly CEO 10/30/25

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David Faber (1:00)

Market insight and analysis. You're listening to the opening bell of CNBC's Squawk on the Street. Good Thursday morning. Welcome to Squawk on the Street. I'm David Faber. That is Jim Cramer. We are live from Postline at the New York Stock Exchange. Carl has the morning off. Let's give you a look at futures. As we get ready to begin trading one half hour from now, we are looking for a lower open. Our roadmap does begin with the state of mega cap tech, Meta, Microsoft, Alphabet all have earnings moving in different directions. Meta is certainly the outlier, I guess, in the sense of it is moving down.

Jim Cramer (1:36)

Long line is out for this man.

David Faber (1:37)

All right. More on that. You just heard it from Jim in a minute.

Jim Cramer (1:41)

Oh, boy.

David Faber (1:41)

Also, President Trump cuts tariffs on China. He has an agreement, at least in principle, with Premier Xi on fentanyl and rare earths. Talk about that. Investors as well, weighing what that news coupled with Chair Powell's comments about rate cuts or the lack thereof at the next Fed meeting is going to mean for the market. So plenty to digest. It is, by the way, the busiest day of earning season. Starbucks CEO Brian Niccol will join us shortly. Lilly CEO David Ricks also will be a guest in this hour. Let's start, though, with some of the biggest companies the world has ever seen. I guess Meta, speaking of the world, three and a half billion people every day. It meant nothing, it meant nothing to people. Access something having to do with Meta, whether it's Facebook, Instagram or WhatsApp or wherever you want to go, Jim, and yet you are, what, frustrated with the conference call and the earnings?

Jim Cramer (2:36)

I thought that the revenues were terrific. The reaction to the conference call is that finally we're at that point where people are spending too much and he's spending too much. People did not like Mark Zuckerberg's assurance that you have to spend.

David Faber (2:49)

Wait, wait, let's just stop there. Spending too much on the continued build out for AI.

Jim Cramer (2:54)

Yes.

David Faber (2:54)

And that number, well, it's around 75 billion for 25, but I guess it's the words in the call where they said CapEx growth will be notably larger. CapEx dollar growth will be notably larger in 26 What do we take that to mean?

Jim Cramer (3:11)

Okay, well, there's two ways to look at it. One is that at this point, he just says, I'm going to win no matter what and I'm going to spend, and this is the opposite of the year of efficiency. I'm just going to spend, which some people nearly said spend recklessly. I don't agree with that. I think the crucial moment on the conference call, which is completely being overlooked, is page 14, which is that he's got to go for very high quality good video, which is going to be fantastic for advertisers. But you only, you have to have the highest end in video to do that. Now let's remember, before we just castigate this guy too much, Hock Tans on his board, the CEO of Broadcom, you think he's got maybe, I think, the smartest, toughest investor in this particular element. And then he has himself, obviously, he's proven, proven, proven. But there's downgrades, there's price targets. It's almost as if people just said, we've been waiting for this guy to trip up and we're going after him. And then, of course, he has this charge, which was actually from the great, big, beautiful, whatever bill. David, I want to take the other side. And I'll tell you why I want to take the other side.

I've not made a lot of money betting against this man when he does these kinds of things. And if we listen to Jensen Wong, Jensen is always saying, the CEO of NVIDIA, that if you buy ours, and this is something court we would verify, if you buy ours, they don't expire. They continue to be valuable. Also, I think that, I would say, Zuckerberg has created the cheapest power, and some of that's energy. They said, Jim, don't focus too much on energy. Our power grid is better than everybody else's, but they're saying, look, we will be able to use this power. You may not think that we need all this accelerated compute, which you know, Jensen says, is just as good as AI. We're going to do it. And he's not getting any latitude. So, David, let me ask you, is this the end of spend and get rewarded? Or do we just say you have to justify it much better, which is what Alphabet did?