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CNBC's Investing Club reported that its portfolio stocks diverged sharply from a broader market pullback driven by rising oil prices and a 10-year Treasury yield near 4.9%. Salesforce surged 21.3% on strong earnings and an AI-optimistic outlook, while Meta Platforms gained 9.9%, even as the Dow, S&P 500 and Nasdaq all declined over the past month.
Listen Labs, a voice-AI market research startup, had signed a term sheet for a $125 million Series C led by Menlo Ventures at a $1.5 billion valuation, but walked away before closing. Sources say the reversal stems from ongoing acquisition talks with Salesforce, reportedly worth around $2 billion, though no deal has been finalized.
Enterprise software firms including Salesforce and Workday reported resilient financial performance even as investors sold off their shares over fears that AI would erode their business models. The disconnect suggests markets are pricing in disruption faster than it is actually materializing in company earnings.
Satirical creator Graham Zip tested an AI-powered job interview avatar named 'Dana Whitfield' by responding with strings of random, meaningless words instead of real answers. The chatbot failed to recognize the nonsense, instead confidently paraphrasing and affirming the gibberish as if it were coherent professional experience.
Israeli-Dutch AI startup Wonderful closed a $550 million Series C round that values the company at $5 billion, more than double its valuation from roughly six months ago. Insight Partners led the round again, joined by existing backers Index Ventures, IVP, Vine Ventures, 9Yards, and Bessemer, with Salesforce joining as a new investor. The company plans to use the funds to accelerate product development and expand its forward-deployed engineering teams.
A newly published Entrepreneur op-ed identifies five recurring operational strains that emerge as small businesses expand, drawing on a Federal Reserve Small Business Credit Survey and a Robert Half hiring survey. The piece argues these pressures—hiring shortfalls, slower customer response, cash flow constraints, breaking systems, and diluted culture—consistently surface once a company moves from a small team to a larger one. It frames these not as reasons to avoid growth but as predictable hurdles that leaders can prepare for in advance.
Jim Cramer highlighted August as a recovery month for several S&P 500 stocks that had been beaten down by fears over AI disruption and slowing growth. Moderna topped the index after positive melanoma vaccine data with Merck, while enterprise software names like Palantir, Salesforce, ServiceNow and Veeva rebounded as earnings and product results eased investor doubts. Cramer noted that some of the earlier declines were worsened by a hedge fund, Situational Awareness, forced to unwind large bearish software bets in late July.
An opinion piece argues that Salesforce's strong recent earnings undercut the widely held 'SaaSpocalypse' theory, which assumed AI agents would soon replace most enterprise software. The author contends investors have wiped out roughly $2 trillion in software valuations by wrongly asking whether AI can perform a task, rather than whether a company controls data or infrastructure AI agents actually need to function.
Salesforce shares jumped nearly 23%, their best single-day performance since 2020, following a quarter that beat expectations and the announcement of a new partnership with Anthropic called Claudeforce. The rally coincided with reports that several former Salesforce employees who had left for OpenAI, including two executives, are returning to the company, with dozens more reportedly in talks to rejoin.
Jim Cramer said quarterly results from Nvidia and Salesforce released Wednesday evening dismantled two prevailing bearish narratives on Wall Street, driving Salesforce shares up 22% and Nvidia shares up 8% on Thursday. Salesforce posted its fastest sales growth in four years, low customer attrition, and doubled AI bundle bookings, while its new Claudeforce partnership with Anthropic countered fears that AI would erode software subscriptions. Cramer noted Nvidia's report similarly addressed worries about slowing hyperscaler demand, custom-chip competition, GPU depreciation and delays to its Vera Rubin platform.
Nvidia and Salesforce both posted stronger-than-expected quarterly profits, citing robust demand tied to artificial intelligence spending. The upbeat results pushed technology shares higher and helped drive broader gains across Wall Street on Thursday, with Nvidia contributing the biggest boost to the market.
Salesforce shares jumped over 20% Thursday, marking its second-best trading day ever, after the company posted stronger-than-expected second-quarter results and unveiled an expanded partnership with Anthropic. The deal includes a new plugin called Claudeforce, which lets sales teams pull data through Anthropic's Claude chatbot, and was announced by CEOs Marc Benioff and Dario Amodei during a CNBC appearance.