sport football: 📊 Apple Finally Wakes Up

May 10, 2026 | Read online

It’s Sunday.

This week brought a wave of major job cuts, and many were tied directly to AI.

Coinbase announced a 14% workforce reduction as part of an AI-driven restructuring.
PayPal followed with a 20% cut under its own AI transformation plan.

Then came Thursday’s triple header.

Bill Holdings announced a 30% cut, Upwork slashed 24%, and Cloudflare trimmed 20%.

Across the board, companies are framing these cuts as a push toward leaner, more automated operating models powered by AI.

Key Data Bites Over The Last Week:

Seaport shared 12 stocks unfairly punished after earnings.
Trivariate Research highlighted 9 stocks that could survive an AI selloff.
Chris Hohn dumped his $8B stake in Microsoft over AI disruption.
Trump has made a $40B paper profit on Intel investment.
OpenAI President Greg Brockman disclosed a stake worth almost $30B.
UnitedHealth Group will reduce required authorizations by 30%.
Samsung reached a $1T valuation on strong AI demand.
America will need an additional 81,000 electricians a year.
Anthropic’s CEO said the company may grow up to 80x this year.
Nvidia will invest up to $2.1B in data center firm IREN.
Anthropic committed to spending $200B on Google’s cloud and chips.
Taiwan Semi saw sales increase in April by slowest rate in 6 months.

Earnings & Guidance Updates:

Palantir achieved a remarkable 145% Rule of 40 score.
Ferrari slowed deliveries by 4.4% to 3,436 vehicles.
Super Micro saw revenue surge 123% and issued strong guidance.
Uber reached 50M Uber One members and repurchased $3B of stock.
Novo Nordisk said its Wegovy pill racked up 1.3M prescriptions.
Datadog surpassed $1B in quarterly revenue for the first time.
Celsius now has a 20.9% share of the U.S. energy drink market.
Monster topped $2B in quarterly sales after revenue jumped 27%.

In today’s newsletter:

🦜 Duolingo’s Growth Collapses
🌟 AMD’s Bright Future
🏍️ DoorDash Nears 1B Orders
🍟 McDonald’s Is Everywhere
🍎 Apple Finally Wakes Up

Let’s jump right in.

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Duolingo’s user growth just hit a wall.

The company beat revenue expectations in Q1, with sales rising 27% to $292M and daily active users (DAU) increasing 21% to 56.5M.

But monthly active user (MAU) growth tells a very different story.

MAU increased just 6% to 137.8M, well below analyst expectations of 145M.
That marked Duolingo’s slowest MAU growth in 19 quarters.

Management continues to prioritize long term user growth over near term monetization, with a goal of reaching 100M DAU by 2028.

AI is helping accelerate lesson creation, but it has not yet translated into faster user growth.

AMD sees a bright future.

The company beat expectations in Q1, with revenue rising 38% to $10.3B and data center sales jumping 57%.

That segment is now the main engine of the business, driven by demand for chips powering AI workloads.
Guidance also came in stronger than expected, with AMD projecting about $11.2B in revenue next quarter.

Management continues to be extremely confident about what comes next.

CEO Lisa Su said AMD can reach tens of billions of dollars in data center AI revenue next year.
She also expects this segment to exceed its long term growth target of more than 80% in the coming years.

And the opportunity is not just GPUs.

AMD’s CPU business is also seeing stronger demand as agentic AI reshapes compute needs.

DoorDash is closing in on a major milestone.

The company reported 933M total orders in Q1, up 27% from last year and just shy of the 1B mark.
Revenue rose 33% to $4.0B, while gross order value climbed 37% to $31.6B.

DoorDash is still spending aggressively to expand its platform, including recent deals for SevenRooms and Deliveroo, along with new investments in AI and delivery technology.

The company is also absorbing higher driver support costs from rising gas prices.

McDonald’s keeps expanding.

The company beat earnings and revenue expectations in Q1, with same-store sales rising 3.8% globally and 3.9% in the U.S.

That growth was driven by customers spending more per visit, even as low-income consumers remain pressured by inflation and higher gas prices.
Management said the environment is not improving and may be getting slightly worse.

Still, McDonald’s continues to leverage value, marketing, and new menu launches to defend traffic and gain share.

The company is also considering selling weaker company-owned U.S. restaurants to franchisees, continuing its shift toward a more franchised model.

The company ended the quarter with 45,699 total locations, including 2,027 company-operated restaurants and 43,672 franchised locations.
Long term, McDonald’s still expects to reach 50,000 restaurants by the end of 2027.

Apple’s urgency is starting to show.

For the first time in at least 30 years, R&D spending crossed 10% of revenue, reaching 10.3% in the latest quarter.
That increase came as sales rose 17%, while R&D spending climbed almost 34%.

In other words, Apple’s investment in future products is accelerating much faster than the business itself.

Unlike the hyperscalers, Apple is not pouring hundreds of billions into data centers.

Its spending is focused on products, software, custom chips, and on-device AI like Siri.

With Tim Cook preparing to step down, Apple seems to be moving with a new sense of action.

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⏎ Chip Reunion^↗ – Apple and Intel reached a preliminary deal for Intel to manufacture some chips for Apple.

✌️ Burry Exits^↗ – Michael Burry dumped his entire stake in GameStop after the company’s bid for eBay.

📋 Reporting Reform^↗ – SEC released a proposal that would allow US companies to report earnings semiannually instead of quarterly.

✅ Jamie Approves^↗ – Jamie Dimon said the trillion dollar AI CapEx boom is worth every dollar.

📟 Compute Access^↗ – Anthropic signed a deal to gain access to compute capacity from SpaceX.

Notable Companies Reporting Earnings Week of May 10th, 2026:

Major Trades Published 5/4 - 5/8. Trades may be those of family members. [Source: Capitol Trades]

Buys

April Delaney (D)
- Company: TransDigm Group ($TDG)
  - Amount Purchased: $19K - $110K

Sells

Sheldon Whitehouse (D)
- Company: JPMorgan Chase & Co ($JPM)
  - Amount Sold: $15K - $50K

Major Trades Published 5/4 - 5/8

Buys

GE HealthCare Technologies ($GEHC)
- Insider: Lawrence Culp (Director)
  - # of Shares Purchased: 80,805
  - $ Amount: $5,000,076
  - SEC Forms: [1]
Upstart Holdings ($UPST)
- Insider: Dave Girouard (Director)
  - # of Shares Purchased: 170,240
  - $ Amount: $4,999,607
  - SEC Forms: [1]

Sells

Quanta Services ($PWR)
- Insider: Earl Austin Jr. (President and CEO)
  - # of Shares Sold: 130,000
  - $ Amount: $100,184,351
  - SEC Forms: [1]
Apple ($AAPL)
- Insider: Arthur Levinson (Director)
  - # of Shares Sold: 250,000
  - $ Amount: $71,189,722
  - SEC Forms: [1]

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