The Everything Recap — Thirteen Companies, One Monster Week
AI infrastructure demand held firm, consumer platforms kept growing, and restructuring shockwaves arrived alongside the beats. Here is everything worth mentioning from the week's earnings.
The Week in Review
Five Days. Thirteen Reports. Beats Everywhere — and the Market Shrugged.
The week of May 4–8 produced one of the most powerful earnings slates of 2026. Thirteen notable companies reported, and the results were, by almost any historical standard, exceptional. Palantir posted 85% revenue growth — its fastest since going public. AMD’s data center segment grew 57% year-over-year. AppLovin sustained 59% top-line growth for another quarter. Fortinet’s billings surged 31%. McDonald’s same-store sales rose 3.8%. Uber reported record operating income. Disney’s streaming division generated $582 million in profit, up 88% year-over-year. By any prior standard, this would have been an all-time-highs week.
It wasn’t. The reason lies not in the numbers themselves but in what surrounds them: valuation, expectations, and the market’s punishing new standard for guidance. Shopify beat estimates by wide margins on every metric and fell 7.3%. ARM beat both EPS and revenue and fell 7%. Arista raised its full-year guidance and still dipped post-earnings. The market has calibrated itself to expect perpetual acceleration from AI-adjacent names — and when management teams offer “in-line” guidance instead of “above,” the stock reacts as if the company missed. This is not irrational, exactly. It reflects the premium priced into these stocks. But it creates a dangerous asymmetry for investors holding at stretched multiples.
The week’s most structural story is Cloudflare: the company beat on both revenue and EPS, raised full-year guidance, and simultaneously announced it was laying off 20% of its workforce — roughly 1,100 people — calling AI the “biggest tailwind in Cloudflare’s history.” Beat, guide up, cut headcount. This is the template for what AI-driven productivity looks like in practice, and it will not be the last time we see it.
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