Microsoft Earnings — Apes, welcome to peak earnings season. Yesterday and today, we have the two largest companies in the world reporting. Kicking things off with the OG of Big Tech, Microsoft.

Shares traded down going into the report and continued to do so for hours, sinking over 5%. Traders were apparently less than pleased with the company's posted earnings and revenue. The top line revenue grew 20% YoY to $51.7bn for the quarter, which was higher than anticipated but lower than the previous quarter’s annualized growth. Earnings grew 21% YoY, clocking in at $18.8bn and driving the EPS of $2.48 vs. $2.31 expected. All in all, not a bad quarter. I’ll give it a solid B+.

But, nevertheless, the Street disagrees with that last statement, at least in the short term. For the past several quarters, the only line item in the report investors have seemed to care about at all has been growth in Microsoft’s cloud business Azure. Reported as “Integrated Cloud,” this segment includes the aforementioned Azure as well as GitHub and Windows Servers, which grew 46%. While that 46% was in line with expectations, it didn’t beat expectations, leaving traders disappointed. Adding salt to the wound, this quarter ended a year-long streak of +50% growth for Integrated Cloud.

But of course, there was just a tad bit of news recently about an acquisition Microsoft is pursuing, the $68.7bn purchase of Activision Blizzard. With that, eyes turned to the firm’s existing video game services as well. Gaming makes 11% of its total revenue, but Xbox hardware revenue grew only 4% for the quarter after skyrocketing by 166% in the previous quarter. Normally, gaming captures only a small part of investors’ attention on the stock, but you can bet that won’t be true if/when the deal is done.

Other notable aspects of the report include 25% growth in Windows licenses and 19% growth in the Productivity and Businesses Processes segment, which included Office, LinkedIn, and Dynamics. Moreover — actually, just look at this CNBC graphic below. This company is worth $2.2tn. There’s way too f*ckin much to cover.

All in all, it wasn’t a bad report by any means, but traders have grown to expect Microsoft to annihilate their expectations. Don’t be surprised if shares trade even lower today. Man, the market is weird.

Send Me Your Location — Or don’t, because Google already has it — and now, that’s becoming a problem. Washington D.C., along with three actual states including Indiana, Texas, and regular Washington, filed a lawsuit claiming that the mildly popular Alphabet subsidiary known as Google is a bit of a stalker.

Big Tech and Big Law have been at each other’s throats for years now, like MMA fighters who are great at staring each other down but never actually go to blows. Everyone has been waiting for the battle to begin. While this suit isn’t a direct shot to antitrust concerns overall, it does get at the heart of one of the most sensitive related issues: location tracking.

The cohort of states alleges that Google used deceptive tactics, confusing wording, and plain ol’ lies in what appeared to be primarily user-controlled location services. The suit goes in detail to say that “complicated menus” and “visual misdirections” were employed when users sought to turn off or alter location settings. Of course, these firms are definitely tracking us and hoarding as much data as they can carry, but part of me can’t help but wonder if those “complicated menus” were actually just the result of boomer technological intuition.

Regardless, the suit will take several months to get sorted out. Google claims to now use a general area for location instead of focusing on precision. Whatever happens, I’m sure Google will be fine. They’ve got much more of our data to exploit.

Dealing Drugs from Dallas — We knew Mark Cuban had a lot of decentralized money, but this crash must really be hurting him as the billionaire has now turned to drug dealing to keep the lights on. I must’ve missed the Shark Tank episode for this one, but believe it or not, Cuban is launching a pharmacy.

Dallas Mavericks owner and notorious humble bragger Mark Cuban has been ablaze on Twitter lately, directing people to a little-known website called costplusdrugs.com. The site, as it claims, is a way for consumers to access generic drugs that carry more price transparency and less price itself. As Cuban announced on Twitter, all of the available drugs (100 offered right now) are priced at cost to make + 15% markup. Given that big pharma’s core competency is little more than raising already ridiculous prices every single year, cost savings using Cuban’s site could be significant. Just look at the figures in the image below.

After racking up billions by making Indiana basketball games available online, purchasing an NBA team, and crushing entrepreneurial dreams on reality TV, of course, starting an online pharmacy is the logical next step. Cuban seems to be leaning hard into conscious capitalism. But hey, as long as it saves me money, I’m on board.