After-hours numbers can be somewhat random and "estimates" are often sand-bagged a bit so that companies will beat them.
With Tesla, deliveries of the Model 3 look good and the company keeps increasing production capacity so if you're a believer in Tesla, they're going in the direction you want with a new plant in China, increased capacity in California, a new model on the way, and a German plant being planned. I think Tesla's earnings beat expectations, but I don't think Tesla is about making money today. Tesla today is more about scaling up production, making cars in more parts of the world, making a new Model Y, etc. And I think along those metrics Tesla is doing quite well. They're shipping a high-volume car that customers are loving, they'll have a cross-over based on that car available soon, they're proving they can open new plants, etc. If you're a believer in Tesla, they're probably hitting the metrics you're interested in and you have realistic expectations about their current earnings which they probably exceeded.
With Facebook, it could be a number of things. Their margins are going down. 2018 had 45% margins which shrank to 34% in 2019. Earnings per share are down 15%. For the quarter, net income was up 8% YoY and margin was only down 4%, but it's not the most encouraging financial numbers. Heck, Facebook increased headcount by 26%, but their daily/monthly active user base is only up 8-9% and revenue is only up 27% so they're employing more people per user and revenue is only scaling with headcount. That's not necessarily bad, but you'd hope that they'd be able to keep margins higher and maybe grow revenue or users faster than headcount.
But it might just be that after-hours numbers don't necessarily indicate what investors will think during a full trading day.
Second of all: FB has been profitable for years and is still growing its earnings at very high percentages, while TSLA is still incurring net losses. One could actually say that they didn't beat earnings-estimates but rather loss-estimates.
Add to that: TSLA's market cap is now higher than that of Ford, GM or VW. Sometimes a multiple of it. While still not making a profit.
Thus the question: Where do after-hours traders get the confidence for a 12% rise?
If I remember reading it right, 2019 was their first year they made an annual profit (small 30 some millions though). Also it's much harder to make profits for hardware (Tesla) than a software company like FB.
Wall Street is finally realizing Tesla will be first to level 5. Its upside is almost infinite. It could become bigger than Amazon. Facebook is great and all but it's a glorified PHP script (with all due respect yeah yeah I know it's 100x better than its competition). There's only so much more demand for social networking.
Fb seems like a company that’s past it’s peak. Their brand and public image is garbage and they’re just going to extract as much profits from their dwindling user base as they can on the way down.
User growth is up, even on Facebook alone. If what you say is true you might expect weekly users to be up-or-flat while daily is declining, as people are locked in to the platform but less engaged with it. But daily users are also up.
If they're not removing obvious frauds in these numbers, they'll be the target of shareholder class action lawsuits. In general, numbers published by big corporations tend to be reasonably sourced due to this reason - gotchas tend to more subtle.
Privately held company numbers on the other hand are generally much more suspect (Uber before IPO, Snap before IPO, We work, Theranos...)
But there are plenty of proxy measures that show similar growth. For example the AppAnnie "active user" measure actually measures on device usage, and shows that 4 out of the top 5 most used apps world wide (or maybe ex-China? Unclear) are Facebook-owned (WhatsApp, Facebook, FB Messenger and Instagram. WeChat is number 4).
Even if Facebook is shrinking, I don't think WhatsApp and Instagram are, and who knows what other companies Facebook may be able to buy up rather than be overtaken by.
That is just mind boggling. Literally a third of the entire earth has a Facebook account. Yes, duplicates are a thing if someone remakes an account, but most don’t.
Having tried the oculus quest, I'm quite terrified that FB will rise back as the central VR provider. They've got the best user experience as far as that goes right now, and Zuckerberg has made it clear thats going to be a future focus of the company
Social apps are like clubs, they are hot for a while and then nobody wants to go anymore. Facebook the company can beat that by building new apps (open a new club) and keep reinventing themselves that way. It's not easy because being ahead of social trends consistently is difficult, but they can just buy whoever cracks the flavor of the decade. I suspect in some incarnation or another they will be around for a while.
FB has enough money, tech, lawyers, and infra to dominate whatever business they decide to aim their cannons at. It's not really about facebook dot com anymore. If they wanted to, they could destroy Uber tomorrow. You have to look at it more like a country than a business.
With Tesla, deliveries of the Model 3 look good and the company keeps increasing production capacity so if you're a believer in Tesla, they're going in the direction you want with a new plant in China, increased capacity in California, a new model on the way, and a German plant being planned. I think Tesla's earnings beat expectations, but I don't think Tesla is about making money today. Tesla today is more about scaling up production, making cars in more parts of the world, making a new Model Y, etc. And I think along those metrics Tesla is doing quite well. They're shipping a high-volume car that customers are loving, they'll have a cross-over based on that car available soon, they're proving they can open new plants, etc. If you're a believer in Tesla, they're probably hitting the metrics you're interested in and you have realistic expectations about their current earnings which they probably exceeded.
With Facebook, it could be a number of things. Their margins are going down. 2018 had 45% margins which shrank to 34% in 2019. Earnings per share are down 15%. For the quarter, net income was up 8% YoY and margin was only down 4%, but it's not the most encouraging financial numbers. Heck, Facebook increased headcount by 26%, but their daily/monthly active user base is only up 8-9% and revenue is only up 27% so they're employing more people per user and revenue is only scaling with headcount. That's not necessarily bad, but you'd hope that they'd be able to keep margins higher and maybe grow revenue or users faster than headcount.
But it might just be that after-hours numbers don't necessarily indicate what investors will think during a full trading day.