Tech stocks hammered on Iran war worries, Meta legal woes

A bad week for stocks was particularly rough for tech investors, as the Nasdaq suffered its worst weekly drop since April 2025. Meta and Micron saw double-digit drops, but the pain was felt across the board as concerns about the Iran war drove up energy prices.

The Nasdaq dropped 3.23% for the week. The last time the tech-heavy index witnessed such a sell-off was in April after President Donald Trump’s threats of sweeping tariffs led to a near panic in the market.

Google parent Alphabet fell nearly 9% and Microsoft sank almost 7% this week, while Nvidia and Amazon slipped about 3% each. Tesla slid almost 2%. Among tech’s megacap companies, Apple held up the best, notching a slight gain for the week.

Meta had the worst week in the group, dropping more than 11% after two stinging court defeats added to the social media company’s challenges. Both trials — one in Santa Fe, New Mexico, and the other in Los Angeles — pointed to the struggles Meta has faced to adequately police Facebook and Instagram, which remain the primary cash engines as the company chases Google, OpenAI and Anthropic in artificial intelligence.

Meanwhile, investors rotated out of memory maker Micron, which has been one of the market’s standout performers in the past year due to a shortage caused by soaring demand for AI processors.

Micron shares plunged more than 15% for the week, though they’re still up almost 300% over the past 12 months. The sell-off started last last week, after Micron’s blowout second-quarter earnings report. Revenue almost tripled to $23.86 billion in the latest quarter, and the company issued strong guidance, projecting gross margins of about 80% for the next quarter.

“Memory today is very tight supply and supply cannot be brought up that easily, and you are seeing that in our results,” Micron CEO Sanjay Mehrotra told CNBC’s “Squawk on the Street” after the report.

But with global markets feeling the pain of rising fuel costs and uncertainty about when the conflict in the Middle East may settle, Micron’s results did nothing to soothe Wall Street’s nerves.

Oil prices on Friday closed at their highest in more than three years after incidents in the Strait of Hormuz exacerbated investors’ energy supply concerns. In a Truth Social post, President Trump suggested he’s seeking an end to the war in Iran, as rising costs weigh on sentiment and create a growing problem for Republicans in Congress heading into the midterm elections.

With investors bailing on tech this week, attention turns to Elon Musk, the world’s richest person, and what comes next for his trillion-dollar companies. SpaceX, which was valued at $1.25 trillion last month after merging with Musk’s xAI, is expected to file for an IPO very soon in what could be the largest offering on record. And Tesla, Musk’s electric vehicle company, is slated to report quarterly deliveries next week.

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