Meta shares dropped more than 5% on Friday after the Financial Times reported that the company could potentially raise tens of billions of dollars in a stock offering to fund its artificial intelligence investments.

The social media company is pondering the potential stock sale, the FT reported, after rival Alphabet said this week that it plans to raise $85 billion from selling equity, increasing that number from $80 billion. Alphabet has been on a tear over the past year, but the stock is down for a fourth straight week as investors worry about excessive AI spending.

Meta hasn’t hired banks and may not issue new stock, the FT noted.

A Meta spokesperson called the report “pure speculation.”

“We’ve been clear that huge opportunities lie ahead in AI, and we’ll continue focusing on raising capital in the most flexible ways to support that,” the spokesperson said in an email.

Like other tech giants, Meta and Alphabet are pouring record sums into capital expenditures as they race to build out AI infrastructure to meet what they see as insatiable demand.

In April, Meta raised its 2026 capex guidance to as high as $145 billion from a previous forecast of up to $135 billion. Alphabet said that month that it was hiking the top end of its capex guidance by $5 billion to $190 billion.

Wall Street has been treating the two companies very differently over the past year, largely because Alphabet has a prospering cloud business that helps justify its hefty spending. Alphabet’s stock is up more than 115% in the last 12 months, topping all of its megacap peers, while Meta’s stock is down 13%, the worst performer in the bunch.

WATCH: Evercore’s Mark Mahaney: Meta is one of my favorite stocks in the large cap internet space.

DoubleLine Capital CEO Jeffrey Gundlach said Tuesday that international stocks will continue to outshine U.S. equities on the back of what he believes to be the dollar’s secular downtrend.

“I think the trade is to not own U.S. stocks, but to own stocks in the rest of the world. It’s certainly working,” Gundlach said in an investor webcast. “The dollar is now in what I think is the beginning of [a] secular decline.”

Gundlach, whose firm managed about $95 billion at the end of 2024, said dollar-based investors who buy foreign stocks could enjoy “a double barreled wind” if the greenback declines against foreign currencies and international equities outperform.

The dollar has weakened in 2025 as Trump’s aggressive trade policies dented sentiment toward U.S. assets and triggered a reevaluation of the greenback’s dominant role in global commerce. The ICE U.S. Dollar Index is down about 8% this year.

“I think it’s perfectly sensible to invest in a few emerging market countries, and I would still rather choose India as the long term hold there,” Gundlach said. “But there’s nothing wrong with certain Southeast Asian countries, or perhaps even Mexico and Latin America.”

The widely-followed investor noted that foreigners invested in the United States could also be holding back committing additional capital due to heightened geopolitical tensions, and that could create another tailwind for international markets.

“If that’s reversing, then there’s a lot of selling that can happen. And this is one of the reasons that I advocate ex U.S. stocks versus U.S. stocks,” he said.

The investor has been negative on the U.S. markets and economy for some time, saying a number of recession indicators are starting to “blink red.”

Gundlach predicted that the Federal Reserve will stay put on interest rates at its policy meeting next week even as current inflation is “quite low.”

He estimated that inflation is likely to end 2025 at roughly 3%, although he acknowledged the difficulty in predicting future price pressures due to the lack of clarity in President Donald Trump’s tariff policy.

As the crypto industry celebrates the arrival of a new administration in Washington, D.C., nobody is taking quicker advantage of the coming changes than the person leading the charge: President Donald J. Trump.

On Friday night, crypto A-listers rubbed elbows with political elites and members of Trump’s inner circle at the Crypto Ball, held at the opulent Mellon Auditorium, just down the street from the White House.

Meanwhile, Trump’s net worth was about to explode from an asset that, up to that point, didn’t exist. The same night of the party, the incoming president launched $TRUMP, a meme coin built on the Solana platform. Its market cap over the weekend climbed past $14 billion. Like with other meme coins, there’s no underlying product. Trump told his followers in a social media post, “It’s time to celebrate everything we stand for: WINNING!” 

The website for $TRUMP says 80% of the coins are held by the Trump Organization and affiliates.

Inside the Crypto Ball were some of the leaders of the platforms allowing ordinary investors to buy into Trump’s newest project. They included Coinbase CEO Brian Armstrong and Kraken co-founder Jesse Powell.

Trump wasn’t done after one token.

On Sunday came the introduction of $MELANIA, named after the first lady. The coin quickly spiked more than 40%, surpassing $2 billion in value. Both the Trump and Melania coins have dropped significantly from their highs.

Then there’s World Liberty Financial, a decentralized finance project endorsed by the Trump family, which hiked its token price from 1.5 cents to 5 cents and released an additional 5 billion tokens for sale. The project, initially launched in September, has raised more than $300 million in total sales so far, according to blockchain firm Arkham Intelligence.

The Trump family gets 75% of World Liberty’s crypto coin revenue, according to the project’s founding document. On-chain data shows millions of dollars worth of token transfers to Coinbase’s institutional custody provider.

“We’re making routine movements of our crypto holdings as part of regular treasury management, payment of fees and expenses, and to address working capital requirements,” World Liberty said in a statement.

CNBC reached out to Donald and Melania Trump earlier Monday and didn’t receive a response.

“Trump needs to fire his crypto advisors, from top to bottom and replace with people who know what they are doing,” wrote Gabor Gurbacs, founder of digital asset firm Pointsville, in a post on X. “The memecoins cost the US, the presidency and his family a lot of credibility and the consequences haven’t even started.”

Mark Cuban, the billionaire former tech entrepreneur and part owner of the Dallas Mavericks, commented on the apparent lawlessness of it all. Cuban, a longtime independent who became a vocal supporter of Democratic nominee Kamala Harris, said the coins are particularly harmful to the crypto industry in its effort to prove its legitimacy.

“Hello every scam targeted at everyone and anyone who has no clue about crypto,” he wrote.

But at the pre-inauguration party, Trump’s new coin wasn’t much of a topic. Rather, the chatter centered on the broader implications of Trump’s policies, which promised to dismantle years of regulatory gridlock in the Biden administration.

“Two years ago, everyone thought crypto was dead,” said one attendee who asked not to be named in order to speak candidly on the topic. “A year ago, we were begging for help, and this weekend, we’re on top of the world.”

Crypto firms made substantial contributions to Trump’s inaugural fund, signaling their enthusiasm. Ripple donated $5 million in digital tokens, while Coinbase, Kraken, and Circle each gave $1 million. Online brokerage Robinhood contributed $2 million.

Coinbase and Kraken have both been battling the SEC in court. Robinhood received a Wells Notice in May related to its U.S. crypto business, which is typically one of the final steps before the SEC issues formal charges. Ripple has been in a years-long legal fight with SEC and outgoing Chairman Gary Gensler.

“The question now is, what do we do with this momentum?” said Ripple Chief Legal Officer Stuart Alderoty, who attended the Friday night festivities. “How do we take that momentum and move forward to really create the promise that I think this new administration has of making the U.S. the crypto capital of the world?”

Alderoty wants to see a coalition formed to discuss unified policy priorities.

“Ultimately, Congress will own the policy, and we can’t dictate to Congress what the policy should be,” Alderoty said. “It would be great if, ahead of that, in the face of the most crypto-friendly Congress we’ve ever had, there could be some alignment on what the priorities are,” Alderoty said, noting that the industry has splintered in the past when proposals have been introduced.

While Snoop Dogg performed in the main ballroom, venture capitalist Katie Haun was engrossed in conversation with Galaxy Digital’s Mike Novogratz. Other musical guests Rick Ross and Soulja Boy, who was charged by the SEC in 2023 for illegally promoting a crypto token without disclosing he was paid, kept the larger crowd entertained.

Guests were issued wristbands based on status. Black wristbands signified general admission and gold allowed entry to a VIP balcony. White bands granted the most exclusive perks. General admission cost $2,500, and some sponsors paid $1 million for access to the greenroom on the ground floor tucked behind the stage in the main ballroom.

Tightly guarded by security, Donald Trump Jr. donned custom MAGA buttons on his shirt as he swiftly made his way into the innermost chamber of the VIP section, a room barricaded by a rotating bouncer and only allowing in certain guests. Along with Sacks, and Speaker Johnson, he could be seen conversing with Fred Thiel, CEO of mining company MARA Holdings.

Thiel shared details of a blockchain initiative his company had launched earlier that day with Johnson, an effort designed to symbolize the intersection of crypto and politics.

“We minted a block on the blockchain with a portrait of President Trump, created entirely from transactions,” Thiel said.

The so-called Trump47 block embedded Trump’s headshot into the Bitcoin blockchain, creating a lasting digital tribute to the president.

“We released it Friday morning, and it went viral,” Thiel said. He added that Johnson “was so impressed” that he texted Trump a picture of it.

Tracy Hoyos-López, a former California prosecutor and one of the people credited with turning Trump pro-bitcoin, was also at the event.

“Don’t mess with crypto,” Hoyos-López, who helped to plan the evening’s celebration, told CNBC while Snoop Dogg was performing his live set. “Our event is a symbol of who we are in the world.”

WATCH: Bitcoin surges past $100,000

JPMorgan Chase has begun suing customers who allegedly stole thousands of dollars from ATMs by taking advantage of a technical glitch that allowed them to withdraw funds before a check bounced.

The bank on Monday filed lawsuits in at least three federal courts, taking aim at some of the people who withdrew the highest amounts in the so-called infinite money glitch that went viral on TikTok and other social media platforms in late August.

A Houston case involves a man who owes JPMorgan $290,939.47 after an unidentified accomplice deposited a counterfeit $335,000 check at an ATM, according to the bank.

“On August 29, 2024, a masked man deposited a check in Defendant’s Chase bank account in the amount of $335,000,” the bank said in the Texas filing. “After the check was deposited, Defendant began withdrawing the vast majority of the ill-gotten funds.”

JPMorgan, the biggest U.S. bank by assets, is investigating thousands of possible cases related to the “infinite money glitch,” though it hasn’t disclosed the scope of associated losses. Despite the waning use of paper checks as digital forms of payment gain popularity, they’re still a major avenue for fraud, resulting in $26.6 billion in losses globally last year, according to Nasdaq’s Global Financial Crime Report.

The infinite money glitch episode highlights the risk that social media can amplify vulnerabilities discovered at a financial institution. Videos began circulating in late August showing people celebrating the withdrawal of wads of cash from Chase ATMs shortly after bad checks were deposited.

Normally, banks only make available a fraction of the value of a check until it clears, which takes several days. JPMorgan says it closed the loophole a few days after it was discovered.

Almost three years into a largely dormant IPO cycle, venture capitalists are in a tough spot.

The private market is dotted with richly valued artificial intelligence startups, including some that are described as generational companies. But venture firms in need of exits aren’t going to get relief from AI anytime soon.

That’s because, unlike prior tech booms, VCs aren’t at the center of this one. Rather, the biggest companies in the industry — Microsoft, Amazon, Alphabet and Nvidia — have been pouring in billions of dollars to fuel the growth of capital-intensive companies like OpenAI, Anthropic, Scale AI and CoreWeave.

With some of the most well-capitalized companies on the planet flinging open their wallets to fund the generative AI craze, the normal pressures to go public don’t apply. And even if they did, this batch of startups is nowhere near showing off the profitability metrics that public investors need to see before taking the plunge.

Tech giants have more than money. They’re also throwing in tangible benefits like cloud credits and business partnerships, packaging the types of incentives that VCs can’t match.

“The AI startups we talk to are having no problems fundraising at robust valuations,” Melissa Incera, an analyst at S&P Global Market Intelligence, told CNBC. “Many are still reporting having too much unsolicited investor interest at the moment.”

Add it all up and venture investors are maneuvering through a deep market distortion with no clear end in sight. U.S. VC exit value this year is on track to reach $98 billion, down 86% from 2021, according to an Aug. 29 report from PitchBook, while venture-backed IPOs are expected to be at their lowest since 2016. Traditional VCs are actively trying to play in AI, but they’re mostly investing higher up the so-called stack, putting money into nascent startups building applications that require far less capital than the infrastructure businesses powering generative AI.

So far in 2024, investors have pumped $26.8 billion into 498 generative AI deals, including from strategic investors, according to PitchBook. That continues a trend from 2023, when generative AI companies raised $25.9 billion for the full year, up more than 200% from 2022.

According to Forge Global, which tracks private market transactions, AI as a percentage of total fundraising jumped from 12% in 2023 to 27% so far this year. The average round for AI companies is 140% bigger this year compared with last, the data shows, while for non-AI companies the increase is only 10%.

Chip Hazard, co-founder of early-stage firm Flybridge Capital Partners, says that investing dollars are shifting “up the stack” and that “enduring companies will be built at the application layer.”

That’s all going to take time to develop. In the meantime, startup investors continue to suffer from the fallout of the market turn that began in early 2022, when soaring inflation led the Federal Reserve to lift interest rates, pushing investors out of risky assets and into more conservative investments that finally offered yield.

Tech stocks have since bounced back, driven by Nvidia, whose chips are used in training most of the AI models, and other megacap stocks like Microsoft, Meta and Amazon. The Nasdaq hit a record in July before selling off a bit of late. But IPOs and pricey acquisitions have been few and far between, leaving venture firms with minimal returns for their limited partners.

“Managers are having a difficult time raising additional funds without delivering LP returns, especially because more liquid, lower-risk investments now have attractive yields thanks to high interest rates,” PitchBook wrote in its August report.

The one pure AI company that appears close to going public is Cerebras, a chipmaker founded in 2016 that’s backed by some traditional VCs including Benchmark and Foundation Capital. As a semiconductor company, Cerebras never reached the lofty valuations of the AI model developers and other infrastructure players, topping out at $4 billion in 2021, before the market’s downward tilt.

Cerebras said in late July that it had confidentially filed its initial public offering paperwork with the SEC. The company still hasn’t filed its public prospectus. A Cerebras spokesperson declined to comment.

When it comes to the foundational model companies, the astronomical valuations they quickly commanded put them in a very “different league,” outside of the realm of VCs, said Jeremiah Owyang, a partner at Blitzscaling Ventures.

It’s “very challenging for VCs to be promising any exits right now, given the market conditions,” Owyang said, adding that early-stage investors may not see returns for seven to 12 years on their newer bets. That’s for their companies that ultimately succeed.

In January, Menlo disclosed that it was raising a so-called special purpose vehicle (SPV) — called Menlo Inflection AI Partners — as part of a $750 million funding round in Anthropic in a deal that valued the company at more than $18 billion. Since Anthropic’s launch in 2021, Amazon has been the company’s principal backer as it tries to keep pace with Microsoft, which has poured billions of dollars into OpenAI and is reportedly part of an upcoming funding round that will value the ChatGPT creator at more than $100 billion.

Menlo had previously invested in Anthropic in 2023 at a valuation of about $4.1 billion. To put in more money at a much higher price, Menlo had to go outside of its main $1.35 billion fund that closed last year. In raising an SPV, a venture firm typically asks for LPs to put money into a separate fund dedicated to a specific investment, rather than a portfolio of companies. Menlo filed to raise $500 million for the SPV.

In July, rival startup Cohere, which focuses on generative AI for enterprises, announced a $500 million funding round from investors including AMD, Salesforce, Oracle and Nvidia that valued the company at $5.5 billion, more than doubling its valuation from last year.

Cohere confirmed to CNBC that part of the financing, as well as some of its previous fundraising, came through an SPV. Inovia, based in Montreal, organized the latest SPV, and Shopify CEO Tobias Lutke was one of the participants.

Representatives from Menlo and Inovia didn’t respond to requests for comment.

Some investment banks have also put together SPVs to allow multiple investors to pool capital into a hot company. JPMorgan Chase told CNBC that clients “have been able to access several leading AI investments” through the bank’s Morgan Private Ventures unit.

Still, for investors to get a return there has to be an IPO at some point, as the regulatory environment makes it virtually impossible for big tech companies to orchestrate significant acquisitions. And companies like Microsoft, Alphabet, Amazon and Nvidia can be plenty patient with their investments — they have a combined $280 billion in cash and marketable securities on their balance sheets.

Elon Musk’s SpaceX, which reportedly valued itself at more than $200 billion in a recent employee tender offer, has enabled investor shares through secondary transactions. That may be what’s eventually in store for some investors in xAI, Musk’s 18-month-old AI startup, which is already valued at $24 billion after raising a $6 billion round in May.

But SpaceX is an outlier. For the most part, secondary transactions are viewed as a way for founders and early investors to cash out a portion of their stock in a high-valued company, not a way for VCs to generate returns. For that they need IPOs.

Michael Harris, global head of capital markets at the New York Stock Exchange, told CNBC recently that the NYSE is in dialogue with “a number of AI-focused companies” and said that, “as the industry evolves we’d expect that pipeline to continue to build.”

A select few AI companies have hit the public market this year. Astera Labs, which sells data center connectivity to cloud and AI infrastructure companies, debuted on the Nasdaq in March. The company is valued at about $6.5 billion, down from $9.5 billion after its first day of trading.

Tempus AI, a health-care diagnostics company backed by Google, went public in June. The stock is up around 50% from its debut, valuing the company at $8.6 billion.

The IPO floodgates never opened, though, and high-profile AI companies aren’t even talking about going public.

“Unless there is a dramatic shift in market sentiment, I would be hard-pressed to see why these AI startups would put themselves in the public spotlight when they can keep growing privately at such favorable terms,” said S&P’s Incera. Going public “would only amp up pressure to show returns or reduce spending, which for a lot of them is not a feasible ask at this point in the maturity curve,” she said.

Most venture investors are bullish on the potential for generative AI to eventually create big returns at the application layer. It’s happened in every other notable tech cycle. Amazon, Google and Facebook were all web applications built on top of internet infrastructure. Uber, Airbnb and Snap were a few of the many valuable apps built on top of smartphone platforms.

John-David Lovelock, an analyst at Gartner and a 35-year veteran of the IT industry, sees a big opportunity for generative AI in the enterprise. Yet, in 2024, only 1% of the trillion dollars spent on software will be from businesses spending on generative AI products, he said.

“There is money being spent on certain GenAI tools and the few applications that exist,” Lovelock said. “However, broad-scale rollout of GenAI within the broad enterprise software catalogue of products has not yet occurred.” 

Roblox, the popular kid’s gaming platform that generates billions of dollars a year in the virtual world, is getting real.

The company said on Friday that some game developers on the platform will be able to charge users real money rather than relying on payments through Roblox’s digital currency called Robux. The change applies only to so-called Paid Access games, or those that cost money to play.

The new model, announced as part of the company’s annual developer conference in San Jose, California, takes a cue from the traditional video game industry, allowing developers to make money from selling titles, and to raise and lower prices based on market demand. Game creators can now more easily sell to users without dealing with an intermediary virtual currency.

The goal “is to increase the appeal the platform to existing developers” who want more options to create and make money from their games, said Manuel Bronstein, chief product officer of Roblox.

Payouts will be on a sliding scale, with higher-cost games resulting in a greater percentage of revenue to the creator.

For a game that costs $50, the creator will pocket 70% of the earnings. Those that cost $30 and $10 will lead to payouts of 60% and 50%, respectively. Roblox users will be able to pay with their local currencies later this year from their computers, and the company plans to expand payments to other devices in the future.

Although the majority of Roblox games will still be free to play, the company hopes that the new pricing plan “creates an incentive” for developers and small gaming studios who “want to do something more grandiose” on the platform and earn bigger payouts, said Bronstein.

“To participate in the broader gaming market, we need to branch out to all the forms of the gaming market,” Bronstein said.

Roblox derives the bulk of its revenue from sales of Robux, which people typically use to buy virtual goods. Roblox takes a 30% cut from those sales, with the developer getting the rest.

Roblox said in August that second-quarter sales jumped 31% year-over-year to $893.5 million, while its net loss narrowed to $207.2 million from $282.8 million during the previous year.

This isn’t the first time Roblox has experimented with incorporating real-world money. Earlier this year, the company debuted a revamped digital marketplace, now called the Creator Store, where developers can purchase certain features from other creators using actual currency instead of Robux. The company’s Avatar Marketplace for buying digital goods like virtual hats still relies on use of Robux.

Other ways Roblox has been trying to diversify its business are through online ads and by giving more users a bigger menu of options for creating and selling digital goods. The company said it will soon introduce tools intended to help developers better price their digital goods, and will experiment with regional pricing options.

Developers will also eventually be able to sell some physical merchandise to U.S. users over age 13 though a partnership with Shopify. The company said Friday it will begin testing the in-game shopping feature with creators, brands and other unspecified online retailers in the fourth quarter.

Shopify said it plans for a “larger launch” early next year.

Roblox shares were down close to 3% Friday afternoon to $42.56, and are now down about 7% for the year, while the Nasdaq is up 11% in 2024.

The stock has dropped close to 40% since its first day of trading in 2021, when Roblox’s business was booming as kids flocked to the app during the pandemic.

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