Wall Street Breakfast Podcast: Adobe Beats, CEO Exits

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Adobe (ADBE) slips despite record Q1 results; long-time CEO reveals plan to step down. (00:13) U.S. grants 30-day waiver for purchases of Russian oil stranded at sea. (01:22) Meta Platforms (META) delays rollout of new AI model ‘Avocado’ amid performance concerns, NYT reports. (02:34)

This is an abridged transcript.

Adobe (ADBE) is down 9% in premarket action after reporting its first quarter fiscal 2026 financial results.

Adobe also revealed that its CEO Shantanu Narayen plans to step down after 18 years.

For the quarter ended February 27, Adobe reported adjusted earnings per share of $6.06 versus the consensus estimate of $5.87.

Revenue for the first quarter increased 12% year over year to $6.4B, which was more than the $6.28B consensus.

Looking ahead, Adobe expects second-quarter revenue to range from $6.43B to $6.48B, with a midpoint of $6.455B, which is more than the $6.43B consensus. The company expects adjusted EPS to range from $5.80 to $5.85 versus the $5.68 estimate.

Narayen plans to remain as CEO until a successor has been appointed. He will retain his position as chair of the board.

The United States has issued a 30-day waiver allowing countries to purchase sanctioned Russian oil and petroleum products already stranded at sea, expanding a temporary exemption granted last week to India alone.

The move aims to ease pressure on global oil prices as the war in the Middle East continues.

The waiver makes Russian crude and fuel aboard about 30 tankers in Asian waters potentially available for purchase, provided the cargoes were already at sea when the exemption was granted.

According to ship-tracking data compiled by Bloomberg, the vessels are carrying at least 19M barrels of Russian crude and about 310,000 tons of refined products.

The U.S. has taken several steps to curb surging crude and fuel prices since strikes on Iran began two weeks ago. These include plans to release 172M barrels from the Strategic Petroleum Reserve.

Still, Brent crude (CO1:COM) is trading over $100 a barrel, on track for a 9% weekly surge. Crude oil futures (CL1:COM) are at $96 a barrel, on track for a 6% weekly surge.

Meta’s (META) new foundational A.I. model has reportedly fallen short of the performance of leading A.I. models from its rivals.

The New York Times reported on Thursday, citing sources, that internal tests for reasoning, coding and writing fall short of Google (GOOG) (GOOGL), OpenAI (OPENAI) and Anthropic (ANTHRO).

The model, code-named Avocado, outperformed Meta’s previous A.I. model and did better than Google’s Gemini 2.5 model from March. But they said it has not performed as strongly as Gemini 3.0 from November.

As a result, the people said, Meta (META) has delayed Avocado’s release to at least May from this month. They added that the leaders of Meta’s A.I. division had instead discussed temporarily licensing Gemini to power the company’s A.I. products, though no decisions have been made.

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Dow, S&P and Nasdaq futures are treading cautiously. Crude oil is down 0.2% at $96. Bitcoin is up 1.9% at $71,000. Gold is up 0.2% at $5,093.

The FTSE 100 is down 0.5% and the DAX is down 0.8%.

The biggest movers for the day premarket: Eastman Kodak (KODK) +8% – Shares surged after the company reported Q4 revenue of $290M, up 9% Y/Y, while gross profit jumped 31% to $67M.

Economic calendar: