Meta Platforms (NASDAQ:META) reports second-quarter earnings after the bell today, with analysts expecting $7.23 per share on revenue of around $60.3 billion.
Polymarket gives the company an 85% chance of beating estimates, but the livelier action is on Kalshi, where traders are betting on which words CEO Mark Zuckerberg and his team will say.
What Kalshi Predicts Zuckerberg Will Say
“Cloud” sits at 89%. Anthropic is reportedly in early talks to lease about $10 billion of computing power from Meta over two years, an arrangement Anthropic itself pitched in June.
The compute market is tight enough that Anthropic may end up renting servers from a direct rival. Meta’s new Muse Spark 1.1 has impressed since launching this month.
Meta also hired Dave Brown this month, a nearly 19-year Amazon veteran who helped build its compute and machine learning services, to run the effort already dubbed Meta Compute. Analysts may read the hire as the starting gun on a real cloud business.
“Hiring” trades at 85%. Meta cut 8,000 jobs in May while redirecting billions toward its AI buildout, and analysts may press on whether the nine-figure packages at Superintelligence Labs are earning their keep.
“Llama” is at 41%. Muse Spark is replacing Llama across WhatsApp, Instagram, Facebook and its smart glasses, so traders are effectively betting on whether the old model gets named on its way out the door.
“Oakley” is at 49% while “Ray-Ban” and “VR” are each at 56%. Meta sells its AI smart glasses under both brands through EssilorLuxottica (OTC:ESLOY), and the eyewear giant said in its own earnings Tuesday that the Meta glasses “continue to deliver exponential growth.”
What Kalshi Predicts Zuckerberg Will Skip
“Dividend” sits at 39%. With capex guided to as much as $145 billion and reports Meta has weighed raising equity for AI infrastructure, traders think this call is about raising money, not returning it.
“Nebius” trades at just 6% despite a reported $27 billion compute agreement with Nebius Group (NASDAQ:NBIS). Meta thanks its landlords privately.
Reading The Board
Last quarter Meta beat on both revenue and earnings and the stock fell anyway, purely on the capex number. Options traders are pricing a move of about 7% in either direction tonight.
The capex question isn’t going away. What’s changed is that Zuckerberg may finally have the beginnings of an answer: a would-be cloud business, and a customer reportedly willing to pay up to $10 billion for it.
Kalshi and Benzinga have an existing data collaboration agreement.
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