Recode Daily: Apple and Tesla head up this week’s earnings lineup

Apple’s fiscal third-quarter earnings report — scheduled for tomorrow after the market close — is often its most boring of the year, since many people who would be interested in buying an iPhone have either gotten one already or are holding out for the September lineup. Watch for commentary or indications about timing and pricing for the next iPhone release. Tesla CEO Elon Musk has a history of making earnings calls lively; when the company reports second-quarter earnings on Wednesday, watch for information about Model 3 sales and production, as well as the costs incurred by the company as it ramps up production. Also reporting this week: Cybersecurity companies Symantec and FireEye, telecoms Charter and Dish Network, and hardware makers Fitbit and GoPro. [Emily Bary / MarketWatch]

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President Trump’s latest troubling swipe at the free press: “Very unpatriotic!” His tweetstorm yesterday was a jab at the New York Times after the newspaper’s publisher, A.G. Sulzberger, revealed details about a meeting with Trump, where Sulzberger hoped to discuss the president’s “deeply troubling anti-press rhetoric” that he says is “contributing to a rise in threats against journalists and will lead to violence.” The meeting was originally agreed to be off the record, but after Trump tweeted about it Sunday morning, the NYT released a statement summarizing the conversation. [Hadas Gold / CNN]

Last week, Facebook saw its market value drop a record $120 billion in a single day after its uncharacteristically bad quarterly report — the drop in perceived value is bigger than the entire value of more than 90 percent of the companies in the S&P 500. Twitter stock dropped, too, when it announced that it lost one million monthly active users from the previous quarter, and the decline was echoed in other tech companies, with the notable exception of Google parent company Alphabet — Facebook’s main competitor for digital ad dollars — whose stellar earnings sent its stock up about 5 percent this week. [Rani Molla / Recode]

Facebook suspended Infowars founder Alex Jones for 30 days for uploading videos that violated the platform’s content policies. But Facebook didn’t suspend the actual Infowars Page — which has a long history of spreading false information — or the official Alex Jones Page, or any other Pages where those inappropriate videos were posted. Understanding the issue means understanding the company’s “multiple strikes” clause and the distinction between a Facebook user profile and a Facebook Page. Here’s a look at how conspiracy sites keep outsmarting big tech companies. [Kurt Wagner / Recode]

Former U.S. intelligence officials warn that there’s a full-on epidemic of espionage in Silicon Valley right now, and many of its targets are unprepared to deal with the growing threat. The open, experimental, cosmopolitan work and business culture of Silicon Valley has encouraged a newer, “softer,” “nontraditional” type of espionage — efforts that mostly target trade secrets and technology. Here’s a history of the West Coast’s spy war and its current escalation and new tactics. [Zach Dorfman / Politico]

Corporate directors at CBS discussed whether CEO Les Moonves should step aside from the company pending its investigation into allegations that he sexually harassed women, as reported by Ronan Farrow in the New Yorker. The CBS board meets today via conference call in advance of this Thursday’s second-quarter earnings announcement; the board is expected to select a special committee to oversee the investigation, which will make a broad inquiry into CBS’s workplace culture, not just Moonves’s alleged behavior. [Keach Hagey and Joe Flint / The Wall Street Journal]

Recode Presents ...

The CEOs of Macy’s Zola and Crate and Barrel will join Recode editors onstage at Code Commerce on September 17 and 18 in New York City. Jeff Gennette, Shan-Lyn Ma and Neela Montgomery will join a slate of retail and e-commerce leaders that already includes Shopify CEO Tobi Lutke, Instagram product chief Vishal Shah and Instacart CEO Apoorva Mehta. The two-day event sold out last year, and prices will increase next week, so register today.

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Twitter is prioritizing its network ‘health’ over adding new growth features. Is that the right move?

The social communications company’s stock tanked on negative user growth, but CEO Jack Dorsey think efforts to clean up the service will pay off down the line.

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Sarah Kerruish and Matt Maude, the directors of a new documentary about the pioneering tech startup, explain on the latest Recode Decode.

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All the things satellites can now see from space.

This article originally appeared on Recode.net.

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