One stat in Amazon's fourth-quarter earnings reported raised some eyebrows.

It reported a 3% decrease in sales from physical stores compared to the same quarter a year prior. That appears significant, as this was the first year-over-year comparison Amazon had reported for Whole Foods since it acquired the grocery chain in 2017.

Amazon executives threw cold water on any speculation about a decline in sales at Whole Foods during the earnings call with analysts, however.

CFO Brian Olsavsky said the decline was mostly due to an accounting change. In the fourth quarter of last year, Amazon lined up Whole Foods' fiscal calendar with its own, resulting in five extra days of revenue in the fourth quarter of 2017.

Read more: Amazon tops Wall Street's holiday expectations, but offers weak sales guidance

Amazon also launched its Whole Foods grocery pickup and delivery services — which it offers through Prime Now — to cities across the country throughout 2018. Those sales are counted in Amazon's online revenue instead of with its physical store sales.

Adjusting for those two factors, Whole Foods sales are up 6% year over year, Olsavsky said during the call with investors.

That does leave the rest of Amazon's physical store initiatives, including Amazon Books, without any reliable way to discern sales growth or lack thereof. It'll be a while before we get any hard data on Amazon's fleet of Go or 4-star stores, both of which rapidly expanded in 2018 and are poised to grow further in 2019.

It also means that online sales at Whole Foods have likely boosted online sales, contributing to a rosier outlook than otherwise would have been reported. Analysts from Nomura Instinet wrote in a note to investors on Friday that Whole Foods sales contributed an estimated 1% of the 12.5% online stores sales growth.

As Apple plunged 30% late last year against a slew of bad headlines about China and iPhone demand, some of Jon Porter's clients had concerns.

Porter is the CEO of Three Bell Capital, a Los Altos, California firm that manages more than $1 billion for clients, mostly people in San Francisco, and that means people who work in technology.

Some of his clients were heavily invested in Apple, either from equity grants from years of working there, or as technology-focused investors looking for blue-chip stocks. Porter is a former Apple employee too, and based on his experience inside the company and following the stock, he sent an email to his clients.

The message? Relax. "The punchline is: don't lose sleep over this. Wait it out, and over time, Apple will be just fine," read the email.

"One reason I'm bullish on Apple is because Tim [Cook] is a very capable CEO. And he's one of the few people on the planet who I think is going to excel in an environment that has so many different business lines," Porter said in an interview with Business Insider. "He is surrounded by field generals and an executive team that are very very seasoned, many of them overlapping with Steve [Jobs'] tenure."

Turns out, many of the reasons Porter described in his email to clients echoes what Apple's leadership said on its earnings call on Tuesday. Since that call, Apple is up more than 7%.

Here's why Porter doesn't think you should freak out about Apple's recent slump:

Apple spends a lot on R&D and is poised to create new revenue streams

MacCallister HigginsPorter doesn't buy into the narrative that Apple's days of innovation are behind it.

"I would submit to you for their Apple's track record for coming up with the next new thing, to quote Steve Jobs, 'seeing around the corner' and understanding what consumers want, their track record for doing that is like 100%," Porter said. "They have a demonstrated track record of doing that, and they have a ton of talent and they invest, reinvest a ton of their profits back into R&D."

Some product lines that Porter sees Apple capitalizing on in the near future includes a streaming service to take on Netflix.

"Apple is gearing up to go head to head with Netflix and Amazon in content production. You see snippets in the news — so and so director was hired by Apple," Porter said. "But what you don't necessarily hear people talking about is what happens when Apple enters content production. That's an entirely new revenue stream."

He continued: "Yes, it's going to have a cost associated with it. But HBO, Amazon, Netflix have all made a ton of money essentially creating their own content. Once Apple enters that market, they have a lot of money they can spend to create high-quality content."

Another area where Porter sees Apple expanding and eventually making money from is Apple Pay.

"I can easily see a combination of Apple Pay that has an underwriting component to it whereby Apple's deploying its own cash in the form of a loan to buy its own products," Porter said. "What happens when those 900 million [iPhone users] start using Apple Pay and Apple starts tacking on a service fee like Venmo or PayPal? Now you've got a brand new revenue stream that didn't previously exist."

In the long run, Apple could be a big player in self-driving cars. It wouldn't be investing in "Project Titan" if it wasn't serious about making money from it, Porter says.

"Not much is public knowledge, but Apple didn't kill the autonomous vehicle program, and that means that they're actively working on something in that space. They'll eventually bring that to market — and that will have nothing to do with iPhone or iPads declining by one percent. These are complimentary revenue streams that are going to come in and add to the bottom line over time," he said.

Don't underestimate the dividend

Getty Another part of Porter's long case for Apple involves how much money it returns to investors.

"One of the reasons why I'm long-term bullish on the stock is because if you look at what Apple's done with their dividend, since they started paying dividends, they've increased it by 93 percent," Porter said. "And there is a lot more room to grow."

This makes Apple attractive to income investors or people who want to have the upside of a stable company like Apple — and then they get a 4% annual dividend on top of that.

"Apple has also gone in and initiated the mother of all share buybacks," Porter said. "In a lot of ways, Apple can and actually has influenced its own stock price by saying look, we're going to buy share back."

He continued: "A company that doesn't have a fundamental conviction that its shares are going to be worth more tomorrow than they are today doesn't back its own shares."

Would you rather have the S&P at 20 or AAPL at 13?

Markets InsiderUltimately, though, Porter believes that Apple is undervalued — especially compared to the rest of the market.

His general argument revolves around what's called a "PE ratio." If you're not familiar with it, the PE ratio is simply the market price of the stock divided by the last four quarters of income. The higher the price-earnings ratio, the more expensive the stock.

Apple's PE is far lower than the rest of the market.

"If you look at where the market is trading, the S&P 500, it's still hovering around 20, in terms of its PE ratio," Porter said. "If you look at Apple given the recent pullback it's hovering right around 13, which is exceedingly low for a company that has demonstrated the type of growth that Apple has over the last two decades."

That's not to say that Porter recommends having his clients put all their eggs into the Apple basket. His firm consistently recommends that his clients diversify out of heavily concentrated positions, but he believes that investors should do so intelligently, especially when it comes to stocks like Apple's, which have been on long, positive runs.

"I will take Apple against the S&P 500 every day of the week and twice on Sunday," he said. "Right now my message to everybody that's in our stable of clients, is sit this [pullback] out, because there's a lot of great stuff on the horizon, and the numbers support holding on to Apple versus the rest of the market."

For years, Tesla patiently explained that it wasn't "demand constrained." Rather, it was "production constrained." This led the company to do stuff like down-sell the Model X SUV before it launched in 2015. The concern was that Tesla would stoke demand that it couldn't satisfy.

Demand actually became a serious potential problem when the Model 3 was unveiled in 2016 and promptly racked up over 400,000 pre-orders. That problem has only recently moderated, as Tesla has discovered that that pre-orders and actual orders are different things — and true, configured vehicle order means that Tesla has to build the customer's car.

By the numbers, Tesla now has neither a demand nor production problem. It sold almost 250,000 vehicles in 2018 — 150,000 more than in 2017. Its production capacity is now more or less aligned with what everyone always figured it could produce at its California factory, something like 400,000-500,000 vehicles annually.

What is now happening is Tesla watchers are fretting about ongoing demand. Some bears think it could be tapped out for the Model 3. Musk disagrees. He thinks Tesla can sustainably sell over 700,000 a year, with a dip to 500,000 in the event of a recession.

Tesla believes it has solid demands moving forward. What the company doesn't want is crazy demand. And this is where the confusion comes in.

In the car business, demands is great, but demand in excess of what you can reliably satisfy is bad. Lacking any sort of steady market-share situation — Ford, Chevy, and RAM can expect to sell around three million pickups every year in the US, while the electric-car market is still forming — Tesla doesn't want to confront demands that overwhelms its production footprint.

Excess demand, without historic precedent, would be unstable. It could bring weak competitors into the space and cause an electric-car market crash in the future. What Tesla really wants is demand that can be met by its two existing production frameworks. That would be 100,000 units annually for Models S and X and in the near term 300,000-400,000 on Model 3.

Mark Zuckerberg says that Facebook's plans to merge Facebook Messenger, WhatsApp, and Instagram's messaging service won't see the light of day until 2020 at the earliest.

In Facebook's fourth-quarter earnings call on Wednesday, Zuckerberg said the plans to stitch together the backend of the three messaging services were still primitive.

"There's a lot more that we need to figure out before we finalize the plans. And then, of course, this is going to be a long-term project that I think will probably be to whatever extent we end up doing it in — a 2020 thing or beyond," he said.

Read more: "This is probably the last time you'll ever talk to me": WhatsApp's cofounder broke his silence about his icy relationship with Mark Zuckerberg

Facebook's plans to assimilate the three services was first reported by The New York Times this month. Nick Clegg, Facebook's global policy and communications chief, laid out some of the issues Facebook needs to overcome earlier this week. He told an audience in Brussels:

"We haven't worked out how that will work, whether it's workable, what regulators may or may not think about it before they jump to any conclusions, what you would need to do, how you make that work in the data infrastructure, how much data integration you need between them."

Zuckerberg said he was excited to roll out end-to-end encryption — which is currently a WhatsApp defining feature — across the new, unified service.

"People really like this in WhatsApp. I think it's the — it's the direction that we should be going in with more things in the future. I think there's an opportunity to use the work that we have done with WhatsApp there rather than doing it in different ways in the different messaging experiences," he said.

Facebook bought WhatsApp in 2014, and its cofounders Brian Acton and Jan Koum left Facebook in 2017 and 2018 respectively. Media reports said Koum and Acton had clashed with Facebook top brass over user privacy.

Instagram's founders Kevin Systrom and Mike Krieger also left the company in September 2018, and reports suggested that clashes arose after Facebook dialled back the autonomy it had once promised Instagram.

The amount Facebook spent in 2018 rose dramatically, partly thanks to the firm's increased efforts to keep fake news, harassment, and fake ads off its platform.

Its expenses for all of 2018 were up 51% from 2017, hitting $31 billion. That's $10 billion higher than in 2017, when its expenses were $20.4 billion.

These feel like abstract, large figures, so to put it into context: Hot workplace chat app Slack is worth around $7 billion. Facebook's costs alone this year rose by the equivalent of a Slack. The costs themselves are equivalent to an Airbnb, which is worth around $31 billion.

In a call with analysts on Wednesday, CFO Dave Wehner and CEO Mark Zuckerberg attributed these rising costs to increased spend on "safety" — essentially the costs of fixing security, privacy and misinformation problems, and putting preventative measures in place.

That's in the wake of multiple crises including the Cambridge Analytica data scandal, which highlighted how Facebook failed to police third-party developers on its platform; fake political ads; and exacerbating hate speech in Myanmar.

Read more: Facebook's stock soars 12% after beating on top and bottom lines for Q4 2018 earnings

"The reality is that we've had a number of substantive issues that we needed to address, and the investments we made in safety, security, privacy and well-being both increased our costs and, in some cases, reduced our revenues," Zuckerberg said in the call.

"We've changed how we build services to focus more on preventing harm. We've invested billions of dollars in security, which has affected our profitability," he added.

The bulk of the security costs have arisen, it seems, from hiring new staff. Facebook ended the year with substantially more full-time employees, with the number rising 42% to 35,500. Mark Zuckerberg indicated in the call that 30,000 of those new hires were people working on safety and security, though it wasn't clear that all of those 30,000 are full-time staff.

Facebook is a huge business, and not all of its expenditure was about security. The company also spent money in the holiday quarter promoting its smart speaker Portal, and the Oculus Go virtual reality headset. And $10 billion of that $30 billion expenditure was on research and development.

Wehner said costs would rise in 2019 by as much as 50%. He said: "[We] do plan to continue to invest aggressively in the priority areas, including on the innovation side with AR/VR and AI and continuing to invest in the safety and security programs that we're undergoing."

Private equity firms have stepped up their game.

That segment of active acquirers — which includes heavy-weights like the Blackstone Group and the Carlyle Group — made up 34.2% of all M&A deals in North America and Europe in 2018, according to PitchBook's annual M&A report. That's up from 29.9% of deals in 2017 and 27.4% of deals in 2016.

While the over-all volume of deals has declined since 2015, the median deal price is on the rise.

The median M&A deal across both North America and Europe hit a record high of $48.2 million in 2018, according to the report, up 34.3% from the year before. In North America specifically, the median was $60 million, up 22.4% from 2017. In Europe, the median was $34.2 million, up 34.2% from 2017.

PE M&A made up 34.2% of all deals in North America and Europe in 2018. PitchBook

"Deals have been persistently larger in North America than Europe over the long term, a trend we have witnessed across VC, PE, and strategic M&A. Part of the reason for swelling deal sizes is the growth in PE as a proportion of overall M&A," PitchBook said in the report.

In part, this is because PE firms have raised larger funds in recent years, which has given them the financial leeway to participate in competitive bidding processes, and pay more for deals.

By the end of 2018, the median leveraged buyout was $140 million, which is nearly triple the median size of an M&A deal, according to the report.

Leveraged buyouts are acquisitions made with a mix of equity and debt, which is a common practice for private equity firms.

With multiple deals over $10 billion, it's no wonder the median deal price rose.

Among the biggest deals were JAB Holding's $21 billion Dr. Pepper Snapple acquisition, and Blackstone's $17 billion buyout of 55% Thomson Reuters' financial and risk business.

Slightly under the $10 billion in Europe, KKR bought out Unilever's spreads business for $6.7 billion, and Hellman & Friendman bought the payments processing firm Nets for $5.3 billion.

An Apple employee has been charged by the FBI with stealing self-driving car secrets from the company's secretive Project Titan division, according to a charge document seen by NBC's Bay Area affiliate.

Project Titan has been the centre of a lot of speculation since it launched in 2014. Initially it was believed to be working on an electric car, but executives hires in 2016 pointed towards autonomous driving. Recently, Titan has undergone some major reshuffling, as Apple laid off 200 employees tied to the project earlier this month.

Jizhong Chen, a Chinese national, was hired by Apple as a hardware developer engineer for its self-driving car project in June 2018, according to the unsealed FBI charge sheet.

He aroused suspicion when fellow employees saw him taking photos. After that, Apple asked to look at his personal devices and found "over two thousand files containing confidential and proprietary Apple material, including manuals, schematics and diagrams," backed up onto a personal hard-drive. The was in violation of Apple's policies.

Chen claimed the images were an "insurance policy" because he was making job applications after being placed on a performance improvement plan in December 2018. However, Apple found he had collected information before being put on the improvement plan, the FBI document said.

Read more: Apple's secret car project is much bigger than people think. Of course it had to cut 200 jobs.

Chen told Apple that he was applying for positions inside the company, but it then learned that he'd applied to two jobs outside the company — one of which was with a direct Chinese autonomous driving competitor. Apple suspended Chen without pay on January 11.

He was arrested one day before he was due to fly to China, allegedly to visit his sick father. Chen's attorney Daniel Olmos declined to comment when contacted by The Wall Street Journal.

Chen is the second Chinese national Apple employee to be charged with stealing trade secrets in six months.

In July, federal agents stopped ex-Apple employee Xiaolang Zhang at San Jose airport after he bought a last-minute ticket to China. The FBI indictment said he was in possession of a confidential 25-page document containing schematic drawings of a circuit board for autonomous Apple vehicles.

Xiaolang is also being represented by Olmos, who said he has pleaded not guilty to theft of trade secrets.

The arrests come against the backdrop of the ongoing trade war between the US and China. On Tuesday, America formally requested the extradition of Huawei CFO Meng Wanzhou, after charging Huawei with breaking US trade sanctions and stealing trade secrets from T-Mobile.

Apple was not immediately available for comment when contacted by Business Insider.

Amazon's Prime service may be starting to become too much of a good thing for the tech giant.

The offering has attracted some 100 million subscribers. That sizable customer base has in turn encouraged a growing number of third-party merchants to sign up as customers of Amazon's fulfilment services. That's because products offered by vendors who are part of that program are eligible for Prime's free shipping offers.

So far, so good right? Prime brings more customers to Amazon, which lures in more merchants, which helps Amazon expand its product offerings, which likely attracts more shoppers and encourages existing ones to buy more items from Amazon.

The problem for the company is that shipping costs are rising, cutting into its profits and making its free shipping offers more costly. Amazon's fulfillment costs have already been rising faster than its revenue, noted Dan Morgan, a senior portfolio manager at Synovus Trust, which owns Amazon shares.

One of the key questions for the company, he said in an email, is "How can Amazon balance its fulfillment/shipping costs with increased order volumes from Prime members?"

Free shipping is costly for Amazon to offer

Morgan is a longtime bull on Amazon, but much of his optimism about the company is due to its Amazon Web Services cloud-computing business and its burgeoning advertising business. He's more skeptical of the prospects for its traditional retail business.

Read more:A gold mine is buried 'under the weeds' at Amazon — here's why it could take the company beyond the $1 trillion mark

Amazon charges customers $119 a year for its Prime subscription. But about half of that amount is now being consumed by the cost of offering free shipping to customers, Morgan estimated.

Dan Morgan, a senior portfolio manager at Synovus Trust, worries about rising shipping costs at Amazon. Bloomberg/YouTube Those costs could continue to rise.

Amazon spent $25.2 billion on fulfillment costs in 2017, which was up 43% from the year before and amounted to 14% of the company's total revenue. That amount likely rose to $35 billion, or 15.1% of the company's sales, for all of 2018, and will probably jump to $43.3 billion, or 15.4% of sales, this year, estimates Benchmark analyst Daniel Kurnos in a recent report.

Indeed, Kurnos worried that shipping-related factors may have weighed down Amazon's results over the holidays. While Wall Street analysts as a whole are betting that the company posted $3.7 billion in operating income in the fourth quarter, Kurnos is forecasting $3.2 billion.

Amazon is slated to report its holiday period results on Thursday.

"We are somewhat cautious ... given external pressure on delivery costs and significant increases in same-day to two-day shipping," he said.

Amazon is facing price hikes

Part of the problem for Amazon going into this year is that all three of the major domestic shippers — the US Postal Service, FedEx, and United Parcel Service — just hiked their prices. Amazon recently adjusted its own charges for merchant customers who take advantage of its fulfillment services. But it's unclear if its higher charges will fully cover its increased costs. And regardless, those fees only apply to third-party merchants, not to products Amazon sells itself.

Add it all up, and Prime's free shipping offering is becoming a better deal for customers — and a worse one for Amazon.

The "rising fulfillment costs not only hurt operating margin, but it also erodes revenues from Prime members, as the $119.00 annual fee revenue evaporates as shipping costs rise," Morgan said.

There's a growing realization on Wall Street that self-driving cars are still many years away. That pessimism is weighing far more heavily on traditional automakers than technology companies.

The big picture: Investors are betting the real value of AV companies will come from the estimated 4 terabytes of data each car will generate per day. And based on the way they're valuing the major AV players, Wall Street seems to think tech companies have a better shot than Detroit at capitalizing on that data.

The bet on data helps to explain why analysts at Morgan Stanley have very different views on the two leading AV companies.

What's happening:The mood has changed about automated vehicles. Bold predictions by Tesla and others that cars would be able to drive themselves by now have evaporated in the face of technology challenges and market realities.

The business model for AVs assumes that by removing the driver, the cost per mile falls dramatically, from today's $2.50 or $3 per mile, to less than $1, unlocking a much larger market opportunity.

That math looks even more difficult when you factor in the pressures facing GM's legacy automotive business under CEO Mary Barra, who is trying to lead a rapid transformation. It's a race, says Jonas, between management's execution and a cyclical downturn ahead.

The bottom line:"The value is in the data, and what you can do with it," says Jonas.

Facebook's reputation among lawmakers has taken another hit and the company could be in for more tough questions, following reports that it paid people, including teens, to install a special app to monitor their movements online.

On Wednesday, several US senators fired off letters to the company or made public comments voicing their unease and demanding answers.

"I have concerns that users were not appropriately informed about the extent of Facebook's data-gathering and the commercial purposes of this data collection," Sen. Mark Warner wrote in a letter to Zuckerberg.

TechCrunch on Tuesday reported that Facebook had a program that paid people up to $20 a month to install a VPN app that tracked their data.

The app, called Facebook Research, is similar to Facebook's controversial virtual-private-network app Onavo and shares much of the same code, according to security expert Will Strafach, who was asked by TechCrunch to investigate the program. Apple previously banned Onavo outright from its App Store on the iPhone and the iPad over violations of its privacy policy.

Warner (D-VA) continued: "Facebook's lack of full transparency with users... has been a source of frustration for me."

Facebook has said the program existed for it to learn more about the apps that people download and how they use their phones. The company said that only five percent of the participants were teenagers.

Blumenthal (D-CT) in a statement to TechCrunch said, "Wiretapping teens is not research, and it should never be permissible. This is yet another astonishing example of Facebook's complete disregard for data privacy and eagerness to engage in anti-competitive behavior."

He then called Zuckerberg's promises "empty" and urged the Federal Trade Commission, which is currently investigating Facebook, to add the Onavo app to its probe.

Sen. Edward J. Markey (D-Mass.) told Mother Jones, "It is inherently manipulative to offer teens money in exchange for their personal information when younger users don't have a clear understanding how much data they're handing over and how sensitive it is."

This latest privacy scandal is one in a long line of back-to-back-to-back controversies the company has faced in the last two years. Critics and lawmakers have said Facebook has a lot of trust to gain back from its users, who have pioneered movements like #DeleteFacebook, and have implored it to clearly define consent in terms of data collection.

Read Sen. Warner's full letter here:

The $1 billion video conferencing company Zoom is in the process of filing confidentially for an IPO with the Securities and Exchange Commission but its registration is stuck due to the government shutdown, according to a source familiar with the company's plans.

While Zoom has submitted paperwork with the SEC, the compay still isn't officially filed because of a processing delay, the source added.

The startup has picked banks for a public offering that include Morgan Stanley, JPMorgan, Goldman Sachs and Credit Suisse, the source said.

Representatives for Zoom and the banks declined to comment.

Reuters previously reported that Zoom was preparing for an IPO with Morgan Stanley last October.

Zoom was founded in 2011 by CEO Eric S. Yuan, who was previously VP of engineering at the video conferencing company WebEx. Yuan joined Cisco in 2007 when it bought WebEx for $3.2 billion.

Zoom, which sells subscriptions for enterprise-grade video conference services, is used by companies including Uber and Box. Morgan Stanley also uses Zoom's video conferencing technology, which played a role in the company's decision to appoint the bank as its lead underwriter, the source said.

The company is cash flow positive, the source said. It was last valued at $1 billion in a Series D led by Sequoia Capital in 2017. The company is also backed by Facebook and Qualcomm.

Zoom is just one of a handful of tech unicorns awaiting feedback or confirmation from the SEC following the federal government shutdown. The ride-hailing competitors Uber and Lyft reportedly had not gotten comments from the SEC as of January 9, despite filing confidentially in early December, ahead of the shutdown.

After a two-year apology tour, Facebook is changing strategy: It's going to go all-out building stuff again.

On Wednesday, CEO Mark Zuckerberg told analysts on a conference call after the company's Q4 2018 earnings that the Silicon Valley tech giant believes it has made significant progress tackling its myriad woes, and that throughout 2019 one of the company's key areas of focus will be launching significant new features and products for its apps.

"I'm not talking about the many day-to-day iterative improvements we make so that ranking gets a bit better or things get somewhat faster, but major improvements to people's lives that whole communities recognize and say 'wow, we're all doing something new on Facebook or WhatsApp that we weren't doing before,'" Zuckerberg said in remarks also shared to his public Facebook page.

It's a significant step for Facebook, which has been on the back foot almost constantly since the 2016 US presidential elections, as its historically rosy image was tarnished by a string of scandals over everything from misuse of users' data and hacking, to the social network's role in spreading hate speech that fueled genocide in Myanmar and Russia's sowing of propaganda on the platform.

The new focus on product updates is also a likely necessity for keeping the company's increasingly unhappy workforce on board. Employees have been bombarded by a barrage of negative headlines, while the company's faltering stock price has put a dent in their compensation packages. ("Employee morale is dead," a Facebook employee recently told Business Insider. "It's like an open secret ... everyone has to pretend like they're all happy-go-lucky, but most people aren't, which is kinda crazy.")

As such, Zuckerberg's change of tack will allow rank-and-file employees, especially newer ones, to feel invested in new initiatives — rather than constantly playing on the defense and cleaning up other people's mess.

Zuckerberg conceded this, saying: "The reality is we've put most of our energy into security over the past 18 months so that building new experiences wasn't the priority over that period."

Particular points of focus when it comes to building new experience will be around messaging, groups and communities, "commerce and shopping" on Instagram, and Facebook's video service Watch, the 34-year-old billionaire chief exec said.

The plan is one of four key priorities Facebook's leadership has set for 2019. These are (in Zuckerberg's words):

Facebook's attempts to refresh its image have had false starts before. The New York Times previously reported that in early 2018, the company had an internal comms campaign that was "meant to assure employees that the company was committed to getting back on track in 2018" — but it was ditched in the aftermath of the Cambridge Analytica scandal.

And 2019 is already shaping up to pose some challenges for Facebook.

Less than a day before Facebook announced its Q4 earnings, TechCrunch reported that Facebook was paying users on iOS to let it spy on them — and Apple responded by revoking the company's developer certificate, effectively blocking Facebook employees' from using internal apps to do their jobs and causing chaos for the company.

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The end of Google+ is drawing nearer.

On Wednesday, Google announced its consumer version of Google+ will officially shut down on April 2.

On that date, Google+ accounts and pages will become inaccessible to users. At that point, content on Google+, including photos and videos from Album Archives, will begin to be deleted. Also, as soon as February 4, users will not be able to create new Google+ profiles, pages, communities or events.

To gear up for the April 2 closer, Google has encouraged users to download and save their content before it is deleted. Android Police has recommended a download tool called the Google+ Exporter for power users of the social network.

Read more: Here's how to quickly check if you have a Google+ account, and delete it

Google had announced last December that Google+ for consumers would be shut down in April, but it had not provided a definite date.

At the time, Google cited "challenges involved in maintaining a successful product" and the "platform's low usage" as reasons for shuttering the service. The company reiterated this messaging in its announcement on Wednesday.

Last October, The Wall Street Journal revealed that data from 500,000 Google+ users had been exposed over a three year period, but the company had decided to keep quiet on the matter.

Two months later, Google announced that more than 52 million Google+ users had been affected by another bug which exposed personal information including names, email addresses, occupations, and ages. This issue prompted the company to expedite the shut down of its consumer product, moving it from August 2019 to April 2019.

Got a tip? Contact this reporter via Signal at +1 (209) 730-3387, emailThis email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it., or direct message on Twitter @nickbastone.

Facebook appears to have blatantly violated Apple's rules by convincing some users to install a special iPhone app that collects personal data.

The revelation, reported by TechCrunch on Tuesday, has caused an outrage among privacy advocates. And it's spurred speculation that Apple could retaliate with the nuclear option: Banishing the Facebook app from Apple's app store.

The move would be virtually unprecedented in the modern tech business, and although there's a case to be made that Apple would be within its rights, the reality is much more complex.

Both companies simply need each other too much to break their commercial ties.

"Apple has a has lot of leverage here. If they want to ban Facebook's app, they can," said Matt Stoller, a fellow at the Open Markets Institute, a research and advocacy group that has been helping lead the charge against the market dominance of tech firms, particularly Facebook.

But, he continued, Apple surely recognizes the risk that "people won't want to buy the iPhone, because they want access to Facebook's suite of products."

Facebook skirted around Apple's rules

Animosity between Facebook and Apple has been growing for years now. Apple CEO Tim Cook has repeatedly criticized Facebook publicly over its privacy practices. In response to those comments, Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg ordered his company's management team to ditch their iPhones for rival devices running Google's Android operating system.

(Photo by Drew Angerer/Getty Images)

But tensions reached new heights this week after the TechCrunch report that Facebook has been paying consumers as young as 13 to install an app called Facebook Research. Facebook Research is a virtual private network (VPN) app that can be used to monitor everything users do on their smartphones.

Instead of offering Facebook Research through the App Store, Facebook distributed it through a special "sideloading" process that Apple set up to allow companies to distribute iPhone apps internally to their employees. An Apple representative told TechCrunch that Facebook's use of this channel for the Faceook Research app clearly violated the iPhone maker's rules.

In response, Apple revoked the security certificates for all the apps that Facebook distributes through this channel. That means not just the Facebook Research app, but pretty much all the internal apps Facebook employees rely on to do their jobs and to communicate everyday. Apple's move caused chaos inside Facebook, because it basically disabled all of those apps.

Read this: Chaos has reportedly erupted inside Facebook as employees find themselves unable to open the company's apps on their iPhones

"Sometimes a bully needs to be punched in the face"

But some outside observers believe Apple needs to go further.

John Gruber, the Apple blogger, wrote that Apple would be justified if it pulled Facebook's consumer-facing apps from the App store.

"Sometimes a bully needs to be punched in the face, not just told to knock it off," he wrote on Wednesday.

Anil Dash, the CEO of app development startup Glitch, tweeted that it "would be a good time for Apple users to show that they want Facebook held accountable in the same way that other devs are."

"Any other publisher carrying out this level of deliberate circumvention of Apple's platform rules would have all their apps kicked out of the store," Dash continued.

Apple banned a Facebook-owned VPN app called Onavo Protect from its app store in August, after concluding that the app was monitoring user activities on their iPhones and being used by Facebook to collect info on rival apps, as TechCrunch noted in its report. And Tim Cook's predecessor Steve Jobs famously blocked Adobe from working with Apple products, for a variety of supposed transgressions.

But banning Facebook, which has more than 2 billion users, would be a move on an entirely different level. It would amount to a direct attack on one of the most powerful companies in the world. And it would likely cause deep pain to both sides. It may not be mutually assured destruction, but it will cause a lot of damage.

Apple may not like Facebook, but its users love the latter's apps. The top free app in Apple's App Store is Facebook-owned Instagram. Facebook Messenger ranks no. 6. Facebook's eponymous app and WhatsApp, which the company owns, are also in the top 20. And those apps aren't just sitting idle on customers' iPhones. Numerous studies have indicated that customers spend gobs of time each day on Facebook's apps.

If Apple were to boot Facebook from its App Store, it could give users a real incentive to trade in their iPhones for Android devices.

But Facebook needs Apple, and vice versa

In fact, some industry observers have suggested that Facebook is the one with the leverage, and that it should threaten to pull its app from Apple's App Store to bring the iPhone maker to heel.

However, it's not like Facebook can really do without Apple either. Mobile ads now account for 93% of Facebook's total advertising revenue, which provides nearly all of Facebook's overall sales, as the company detailed in its fourth-quarter earnings report Wednesday. Nearly half of Facebook's total revenue comes from the US and Canada, and in the US, depending on what figure you believe, somewhere around 40% to 50% of all mobile devices in use are iPhones.

Apple CEO Tim Cook. Lucy Nicholson/Reuters

Although the iPhone's market share is less in other areas of the world, it's still a sizeable player in many important markets, including Japan.

In other words, if Facebook were to pull its apps from Apple's App Store, it would be putting at risk a huge portion of its revenue, somewhere around a fifth of its total sales just from US iPhone users alone.

In the end, those facts are likely to prove too much to overcome. As much as Facebook and Apple are at odds, the amount of money at stake will almost certainly encourage both sides to continue to deal with the other.

To paraphrase "The Godfather," their dispute may be personal, but this is still business.

Tesla CFO Deepak Ahuja will retire in the next few months.

The company made the announcement on the company's fourth quarter earnings conference call.

The new CFO will be Zach Kirkhorn, a nine-year veteran of Tesla who has been serving as Tesla's vice-president of finance.

Ahuja had actually already retired once, in 2015. He was succeeded by Jason Wheeler, who came over from Google. Ahuja later returned to the company.

This story is developing.

Despite numerous scandals around security and data, Facebook continues to soar.

During fourth-quarter earnings, the social network reported $55.8 billion in 2018 revenue, up 37% from 2017. During the fourth-quarter — when advertisers tend to spend the most of their yearly budgets around the holidays — Facebook netted $16.9 billion, beating Wall Street's expectation of $16.4 billion.

Read more: LIVE: Facebook's stock soars 8% after beating on top and bottom lines for Q4 2018 earnings

"We know we still have a lot of hard work ahead of us — we need to do better at anticipating the risks that come from connecting so many people," Facebook COO Sheryl Sandberg said during the earnings call. "We need to earn back peoples' trust."

Small and midsize businesses make up the bulk of Facebook's advertisers, and the number of marketers on the platform continues to grow. Facebook now has seven million active advertisers, up from 6 million in 2017.

Execs continued to stress that Facebook's news feed is maxing out on ad load and prices, making Instagram the company's big bet on future advertising growth.

"On the supply front, we benefitted from strong Instagram growth, which was aided by both growth in impressions on Instagram feed and Stories," said Facebook chief finance officer David Wehner. Similar to recent past quarters, Wehner advised investors that Facebook's ad growth rate will slow down and will be reflected in first-quarter earnings this year.

Facebook's Stories product in particular holds a lot of promise and represent Facebook's attempt to create one ad unit that can run across Facebook, Instagram and WhatsApp.

According to Facebook, 500 million people use Stories every day, and 2 million advertisers run ads on Stories.

However, advertisers haven't completely shifted to Stories and continue to see prices for news feed ads go up.

Advertisers have struggled to create vertical-oriented content that's required by the Stories format, as opposed to horizontal ads that are suited to the news feed. Sandberg noted that the company began offering technology last fall that converts news feed ads for the Stories format.

When asked by an analyst during the earnings call about the performance of Stories ads and if the pricing gap between news feed and Stories ads is narrowing, Sandberg said: "There's a benefit to being an early adopter, so the pricing is really attractive — we think the shift to Stories is a big opportunity for us, and it's going to take time to get advertisers in."

Tesla CEO Elon Musk said on Wednesday that he expects Tesla vehicles to be able to safely drive themselves without human assistance by the end of 2019.

"When will we think it's safe for full self-driving? It's probably towards the end of this year, and then it's up to regulators to decide when they want to approve that," he said during the automaker's fourth-quarter earnings call.

Read more: Elon Musk said he expects Tesla to deliver around 50% more cars than last year, even if there's a global recession

Musk has missed projections about autonomous driving technology on multiple occasions. In 2015, Musk said Tesla would have fully-autonomous driving technology ready in about two years, and Tesla has passed multiple deadlines set by Musk to send a self-driving vehicle across the US.

During Wednesday's call, Musk also characterized Tesla's semi-autonomous Autopilot driver assistance system as having full self-driving capability on the highway.

"We already have full self-driving capability on highways. So from highway on-ramp to highway exit, including passing cars and going from one highway interchange to another, full self-driving capability is there," he said.

Musk's description of Autopilot's capabilities contrasts with the owner's manual for Tesla's Model 3 sedan, which instructs owners to remain in control of their vehicle when using Autopilot.

"Never depend on these components to keep you safe," the manual says of Autopilot's features. "It is the driver's responsibility to stay alert, drive safely and be in control of the vehicle at all times."

Tesla has received criticism for how it has promoted Autopilot, and fatal accidents involving the feature have raised questions about whether drivers place too much trust in it and fail to pay attention to the road. Tesla says Autopilot is meant to be used with an attentive driver whose hands are on the wheel, but the most visible accidents involving Autopilot have involved reports of distracted drivers.

In October, Consumer Reports released its rankings of four semi-autonomous driver-assistance systems. Autopilot ranked second, behind Cadillac's Super Cruise, with the highest rating among the four for capability and performance and ease of use, but the lowest for keeping drivers engaged.

Tesla on Wednesday announced its earnings from the fourth quarter of 2018. The automaker posted adjusted earnings of $1.93 per share on revenue of $7.23 billion. Wall Street analysts had expected adjusted earnings of $2.10 per share on revenue of $7.1 billion.

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Apple's price hikes on its iPhone line have been depressing its sales. But they've had one beneficial effect for the company: A larger portion of customers are purchasing pricier phones.

More than seven out of every 10 iPhone purchasers in December paid at least $700 for their phones and nearly a quarter paid more than $1,000, UBS analyst Timothy Arcuri reported in a research note Monday, citing data from Consumer Intelligence Research Partners (CIRP). Both figures were up considerably from December 2017.

"Apple continues to move customers up the price curve," Arcuri said.

The company saw gains in several different price ranges, according to the CIRP data. One big jump was in the $700 to $800 range. Some 37.5% of iPhone consumers last month paid in that range for their devices. In the same month a year earlier, just 12% did.

The other big jump was for phones that cost $1,001 or more. The proportion of purchasers that paid that much grew from 8% in December 2017 to 23% last month, according to the CIRP data.

Overall, about 71.5% of iPhone purchasers paid at least $700 for a phone in December, up from about 45% in the same month a year earlier. On average, iPhone customers paid about $814 per phone in the holiday quarter, up from about $796 in the same period a year earlier, Arcuri estimated.

Customers are paying up for extra storage and new models

A combination of factors helped boost sales of pricier devices.

A larger proportion of iPhone customers purchased the latest models, which are generally priced higher than older versions, in December than in the same month in 2017. Some 65% of purchasers bought and iPhone XS, XS Max, or XR last month. In December 2017, 61% of buyers purchased an iPhone X, 8, or 8 Plus, the new models then, according to the CIRP data.

"The mix of new [phones] is returning to historical levels after a dip last year when consumers saw greater value in the older models," he said.

More customers also paid extra for models with added storage. For example, less than half of iPhone XS purchasers last month got the base model. In December 2017, by contrast, nearly 60% of iPhone X buyers purchased the base model.

And then there are Apple's prices. Last year, the company pushed prices up to the $1,000 point with the iPhone X, and this year it went even higher.

Last year's lineup included the X, which started at $999, and the iPhone 8, the next priciest model, which had a base price of $699.

This year, in addition to the $999 iPhone XS, the company has the jumbo-sized iPhone XS Max, which starts $1,099. Its next priciest model is the iPhone XR, which starts at $749.

The higher prices have depressed sales

Of course, those increased prices have proven to be a double-edged sword. Demand for new iPhones has plunged overall. The company has repeatedly cut production of its latest smartphones, according to published reports, and earlier this month, it warned of worse-than-expected sales.

Many analysts don't believe the increased prices will make up for the depressed unit sales. Arcuri for one expects a sharp drop in Apple's iPhone revenue in its current fiscal year, and doesn't expect the company's sales to recover until the fall of next year at the earliest.

Read this: Don't expect Apple's iPhone sales to get better anytime soon, says analyst

Investors and customers will learn more about how Apple fared in December and its expectations for the rest of the year Tuesday, when it reports its holiday results.