Tesla Slides on Downgrades, Meta Rises, Warner Bros to Split

On this episode of Stock Movers:

- Tesla (TSLA) shares fell after the EV-maker was hit with a pair of downgrades on Monday, underscoring mounting concerns on Wall Street about the electric-vehicle maker’s outlook following last week’s clash between Chief Executive Elon Musk and President Donald Trump. Both Argus Research and Baird cut the stock to the equivalent of hold ratings, cementing Tesla’s reputation as the least-loved megacap stock among analysts. Shares fell 1.6% in premarket trading.

- Meta (META) rose on the news over the weekend that it is in talks to make a multibillion-dollar investment into artificial intelligence startup Scale AI, according to people familiar with the matter. The financing could exceed $10 billion in value, some of the people said, making it one of the largest private company funding events of all time.
The terms of the deal are not finalized and could still change, according to the people, who asked not to be identified discussing private information. Scale AI, whose customers include Microsoft Corp. and OpenAI, provides data labeling services to help companies train machine-learning models and has become a key beneficiary of the generative AI boom. The startup was last valued at about $14 billion in 2024, in a funding round that included backing from Meta and Microsoft. Earlier this year, Bloomberg reported that Scale was in talks for a tender offer that would value it at $25 billion.

- Warner Bros. Discovery (WBD) shares slid after it announced it would be splitting itself in half, unshackling its fast-growing streaming business from the struggling legacy media channels and setting up two independent companies that could pursue deals on their own. The new Global Networks business will include entertainment, sports and dozens of cable television brands such as CNN, TNT and TBS and will be headed by Chief Financial Officer Gunnar Wiedenfels. It will hold a 20% stake in the other Streaming and Studios business, headed by Chief Executive Officer David Zaslav, and use proceeds from that entity as a way to cut debt, the company said in a statement on Monday. The move unwinds much of the 2022 merger that combined AT&T Inc.’s WarnerMedia, which houses iconic film studios and TV franchises, and Discovery Inc., home to nonfiction documentaries and reality TV. The deal created a company weighed down with debt at a time when cable TV, its largest business, was hemorrhaging viewers and advertising dollars.

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