Meta 2Q25 Earnings, Meta Durability, Thoughts on AI Researcher Poaching
Hello everyone. We have gotten through about half of my “to do” topics that existed at the start of last week. The other half of the list included various 2Q25 earnings reports from relevant companies. For today, we will focus on Meta. The company reported earnings back when Apple reported earnings. Starting off with Meta’s results, there will be a natural lead-in to then talk about a hot topic at least on social media regarding AI researcher poaching.
For this week’s Above Avalon Review – a quick look at what was published elsewhere in the Above Avalon ecosystem this past week - we have three items:
AVALON Podcast. This week’s episode, “No One Got Fired for Hiring Jimmy Fallon,” covered Google’s Pixel event in NYC last week, why Google doesn’t have taste, and the reasons for Google ending its first-party hardware endeavor. There were a few additional non-Google topics that rounded out the episode.
Last week’s AVALON podcast episode, "Flying Under the Radar," went over my thoughts on how Apple is officially flying under the radar and how the next 12 to 18 months will demonstrate this.
Inside Orchard. The newest essay, “Content’s Long Tail Is Being Weaponized,” was focused on how algorithm-powered content feeds are causing us to engage less with content's long tail which historically has been where much of our imagination is nurtured. This is leading to structural decline in content mediums ranging from music and long-form video to books and even blogs.
Let’s jump into today’s update.
Meta 2Q25 Earnings
Back on July 30th, Meta reported the strongest CY2Q25 revenue growth out of Big Tech (AAPL, MSFT, GOOG, META, AMZN). Revenue of $47.5B (up 22%) came in $2B above management’s guidance in what looked to be some quarterly sandbagging. This is when management teams provide quarterly guidance that it knows it has very good odds of beating. At the same time, it looks like some Wall Street analysts are not adjusting their estimates enough to reflect the sandbagging, resulting in quarterly beats to consensus. For what it’s worth, Meta executives claimed they were a bit cautious with 2Q25 revenue guidance given "macroeconomic uncertainty” as some Asia-based online commerce advertisers “had pulled back on their U.S. spend” in the beginning of the quarter.
At a basic level, there are two factors coming together to give Meta very strong core business results:
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