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Roblox drops after saying plans to prioritize safety impact may weigh on growth next year

The gaming platform reported its third-quarter earnings before the market opened on Thursday.

Gaming platform Roblox, one of the industry’s biggest “black holes,” reported its third-quarter earnings on Thursday morning. Shares climbed 8% as investors digested the results, before turning negative and dropping more than 9%.

Third-quarter bookings, or the amount users spend on Roblox, rose about 70% year over year to $1.92 billion, beating Wall Street’s expectations ($1.7 billion per Bloomberg-compiled data) and better than the company’s guidance range of between $1.59 billion and $1.64 billion.

Roblox boosted its full-year booking guidance of between $5.87 billion and $5.97 billion to between $6.57 billion and $6.62 billion. Analysts polled by FactSet expected about $6.2 billion on the year.

“While the path may not be entirely linear, we are increasingly bullish about our ability to capture 10% of the $180 billion global gaming content market on Roblox and, ultimately, become one of the great global consumer internet platforms,” per management.

The reason for that less-than-linear path and the stock’s premarket reversal appear to be tied to Roblox’s safety plans. The company has been the target of several child safety lawsuits. Roblox gave updates to its safety goals, saying that it plans “to require facial estimation for all users accessing communication functions, and to limit communication between adults and minors who do not know each other in real life.” According to Roblox, these new policies “may negatively impact platform engagement in the short term”:

“As we look to next year, our long-term objectives have not changed, though we recognize that tough comps and valuable new safety features will factor into reported growth in 2026. With respect to margins, we will continue to prioritize investments to support genre expansion and long-term growth. As a result, our operating margin could decline slightly year-over-year due to the combination of higher DevEx rates and the impact of infrastructure and safety related investments catching up with rapid bookings growth in the back half of 2025.”

An average of 151.5 million daily users played Roblox on the quarter, up 70% and easily beating expectations of 132.2 million users. In the same period last year, the company reported 88.9 million daily users.

Roblox paid out $427.9 million to creators in the quarter, up from $231.5 million in the same quarter last year. Through September, payouts have now reached more than $1 billion in 2025. The platform has shattered concurrent player records with popular games like “Grow a Garden” and “Steal a Brainrot” this year. Earlier this month, Morgan Stanley called Roblox a clear leader in next-gen entertainment, making parallels to YouTube.

J. Edward Moreno1h

Moderna soars after STAT reports “a buyout or a large partnership” are on the table

Moderna rose nearly 15% on Thursday after STAT reported that the company has flirted with the idea of tying up with a larger drugmaker.

The Covid vaccine-maker has talked to at least one large drugmaker on a deal "of significant scope" that could either be "a buyout or a large partnership," a source told STAT.

How Moderna, the company that helped save the world, unraveled

Luke Kawa3h

OpenAI appears to be definitively answering its doubters’ biggest question

The AI boom is power constrained. It’s chip constrained.

But it will not be capital constrained.

That’s the top takeaway from media reports from The Wall Street Journal and Reuters that OpenAI is plotting an IPO.

That message is also corroborated by anecdotal reports that the order book for Meta’s $25 billion bond offering is roughly $125 billion (!), per a source familiar with the situation.

My colleague David Crowther recently wrote that OpenAI would likely need to raise $50 billion to $75 billion to fund its spending ambitions, which are poised to drive $115 billion in cash burn through 2029.

The most common question raised by OpenAI skeptics has been, “Where is OpenAI going to get all this money?”

A mulled IPO might suggest that OpenAI’s ability to raise money from private markets is reaching its limits. But it also tells us the answer to that question is “from literally anyone who wants to.”

And in a world where SPACs are back and speculation is rampant, something we should have known all along is that people want to. The technology and the unit economics of AI will have to prove their failures, or reach a much higher level of saturation, before capital will shy away from an opportunity billed as this transformative.

Per Reuters, OpenAI is looking to raise about $60 billion at a $1 trillion valuation from the offering — significantly reducing any funding needs through 2029 in one fell swoop.

OpenAI has started work on an IPO that could value the company at $1 trillion

That message is also corroborated by anecdotal reports that the order book for Meta’s $25 billion bond offering is roughly $125 billion (!), per a source familiar with the situation.

The most common question raised by OpenAI skeptics has been, “Where is OpenAI going to get all this money?”

Per Reuters, OpenAI is looking to raise about $60 billion at a $1 trillion valuation from the offering — significantly reducing any funding needs through 2029 in one fell swoop.

Max Knoblauch4h

Bearish options flow sends Lucid lower

Shares of luxury EV maker Lucid are being dragged down by bearish options trading on Thursday morning, with a put/call ratio of 5.8 as of 11:10 a.m. ET, versus the 1.05 it’s averaged over the prior 20 days.

If sustained, this would be the most bearishly tilted options activity for a single session for Lucid since June 21, 2024.

More than 32,000 put options have changed hands as of 11:10 a.m. ET, already above Lucid’s 30,794 20-day average for a full session. Lucid shares were down about 3% on Thursday morning.

On Wednesday, Lucid and Uber announced that their planned 20,000-robotaxi fleet would begin operations in the autonomously crowded streets of San Francisco starting next year. Earlier this week, Lucid also said it’s partnering with Nvidia to build autonomous vehicles for personal use.

Luke Kawa4h

Boeing slumps as Trump-Xi meeting produces no purchase announcements, Deutsche Bank downgrades to “hold” from “buy”

Blackwell chips weren’t the only thing that US President Donald Trump and Chinese President Xi Jinping didn’t talk about that was supposed to be on the agenda.

Andrew Bishop, global head of policy research at Signum Global Advisors, flagged that “multiple previously-mentioned items were seemingly left out of the deal,” including purchases of Boeing aircraft by China.

Shares of Boeing are selling off amid the lack of a purchase agreement for the American company’s planes in the one-year deal and a downgrade by Deutsche Bank. Analyst Scott Deuschle lowered the stock to “hold” from “buy,” cutting his free cash flow estimates and writing that the company remains “constrained by the burdens of the past.” He also reduced his price target to $240 from $255.

The plane maker recently reported quarterly results, in which it booked its first quarter of positive free cash flow since its door plug blowout in January 2024.

Luke Kawa5h

Core Scientific shareholders vote against acquisition by CoreWeave

CoreWeave’s latest attempt to purchase Core Scientific has failed.

Core Scientific announced that at its special meeting held earlier today, “the Company did not receive the requisite number of votes to approve the previously announced merger agreement with CoreWeave.”

This outcome was expected by markets, given that Core Scientific’s share price was trading well in excess of the deal price heading into this meeting, and major shareholders and proxy advisory firms had voiced their opposition to the tie-up.

Shares of Core Scientific initially popped on this news before quickly erasing all of that advance (and then some), while CoreWeave retreated deeper into the red.

CoreWeave’s acquisition would have represented meaningful vertical integration for the neocloud, providing it with ownership over existing data centers and a pipeline of more to come.

CoreWeave and Core Scientific still have an ongoing business relationship, however: the latter is the former’s landlord, and CoreWeave remains on the hook for $10 billion in overhead over the next 12 years that would have been eliminated by this deal.

"We respect the views of Core Scientific stockholders and look forward to continuing our commercial partnership,” said CoreWeave co-founder, Chairman, and CEO Michael Intrator in a press release. “CoreWeave’s strategy remains unchanged. We will continue to execute with discipline against our roadmap to create long-term shareholder value, including through opportunistic and strategic M&A.”