Welcome to "#SocialStocks," The Fly's weekly recap of Wall Street's reactions to social media stock news.
FACEBOOK COO SAYS BREAK-UP WON’T SOLVE ISSUES: On Friday, May 17, Facebook (FB) COO Sheryl Sandberg said in an interview on CNBC that she doesn't believe a break-up of the company would solve any issues, and added that the company will keep doing "what's right" to protect people and fix problems at the company.
On Wednesday, May 22, Business Insider's Troy Wolverton reported that Alex Stamos, the former security chief at Facebook, suggested Mark Zuckerberg should hire someone to replace him as CEO and said Microsoft (MSFT) president Brad Smith seems like a good candidate. "There is a legitimate argument that he has too much power," Stamos said. "He needs to give up some of that power. And if I was him, I would go hire a new CEO for the company."
INSTAGRAM INFLUENCER DATA EXPOSED: On Monday, May 20, TechCrunch’s Zack Whittaker wrote that security researcher Anurag Sen discovered a database hosted by Amazon Web Services (AMZN) that was left exposed and without a password that contained the contact information of millions of Instagram celebrities.
SNAP ANNOUNCES NEW EXECUTIVE APPOINTMENTS: On Monday, May 20, Snap (SNAP) announced the appointment of Derek Andersen, currently Snap's Vice President of Finance, as CFO. Andersen will take over the responsibilities of interim CFO Lara Sweet and report to CEO Evan Spiegel. Snap also announced the appointment of Lara Sweet as Chief People Officer. In this new role, Sweet will oversee Snap's global talent acquisition and management strategies and processes, human resource functions, and the overall team experience. She will report to Spiegel in this capacity, and continue as Chief Accounting Officer until a replacement is named. Both appointments were effective immediately.
PINTEREST REPORTS FIRST QUARTERLY RESULTS AFTER IPO: On Thursday, May 16, Pinterest (PINS) reported its first quarter results and its first quarterly report as a publicly-traded company. Pinterest reported Q1 earnings per share of (22c) and revenue of $201.9M, against analyst expectations of (11c) and $200.61M, respectively. The company also reported Q1 global monthly active user growth of 22% at 291M.
In this past weekend’s edition of Barron’s, Al Root wrote that in giving weak guidance, Pinterest "violated a cardinal rule" of earnings conference-call management. Root added that a company always blow out the first quarter after an initial public offering or a big merger. "If you can't impress Wall Street out of the gate, then the Street will assume something ominous is brewing," he said. Overall, Root believes Pinterest does not look like a broken stock and a pullback of some kind was probably inevitable. The author would not be surprised to see Pinterest trade back above $30 a share, where it was before the earnings release.
Ticker changed to META
+0.45 (+0.24%)
Microsoft
+0.53 (+0.42%)
Amazon.com
+0.89 (+0.05%)
Snap
-0.3 (-2.60%)
-1.1 (-4.33%)