Miles Ashworth: Here's a number: fifty-five percent. That's how far Wix's stock is down year-to-date by mid-2026. Now hold that.
Megan Skiendel: While they're announcing a share buyback of — what — close to two billion dollars?
Miles Ashworth: One point seven to two billion, yes. Which you'd think would be the headline. But to me the actual sequence is — look — June 2025: Wix buys Base44, an Israeli no-code AI builder, one founder, Maor Shlomo, eighty million cash. May 13, 2026: earnings miss, stock falls twenty-seven percent in a single day. Then June 2026, the layoffs — roughly a thousand people, twenty percent of the company — and a guidance cut a fortnight later.
Megan Skiendel: Less than two weeks apart. That's not a managed transition.
Miles Ashworth: No. And Avishai Abrahami had told investors 2026 was going to be a defining new chapter. Driven by AI. Driven by Base44. Which — well — hit a hundred million ARR in nine months, so the product wasn't the problem.
Megan Skiendel: The product wasn't the problem. That's exactly the tension we need to sit with.
Megan Skiendel: Two things are happening simultaneously and the coverage keeps collapsing them. Base44 hits a hundred million ARR in nine months — that's a genuine product success story. Wix Harmony launches in late January 2026 as the other half of the AI strategy. The integrations with Microsoft 365 Copilot, OpenAI Codex Enterprise, Stripe Projects — those ship. The product side is actually working. What blows up is the financial sequencing.
Miles Ashworth: Define sequencing, because I think you mean something specific.
Megan Skiendel: Ninety million on Base44 customer acquisition. Then a twenty million Super Bowl campaign — actually, two separate commercials, one for Wix, one for Base44 — all front-loaded into a quarter where compute costs are also spiking. Imagine you're a product manager at Wix on a Tuesday morning in February, the compute bill arrives alongside the Super Bowl invoice. Those unit economics were never going to land cleanly. That's not fraud, that's — honestly — catastrophically bad forecasting.
Miles Ashworth: But Wix told investors — verbatim — 'disciplined investments.' That's not a forecast. That's a promise.
Megan Skiendel: The weakest part of the whole narrative. Genuinely.
Miles Ashworth: So the headline — Wix in crisis — overstates the product failure and understates the cost discipline failure. Which is a rather important distinction if you're Avishai Abrahami trying to explain why the thing that's working is being punished.
Miles Ashworth: But look — there's a take circulating that I want to name and actually kill, because it's wrong in an interesting way. The take is: Wix bought Base44 because AI made Wix obsolete. That the core business was already collapsing. And that's... no. That's backwards. The core wasn't collapsing when they wrote the eighty million cheque.
Megan Skiendel: No, but — owning the disruptor doesn't solve the thing that actually bites you.
Miles Ashworth: Which is?
Megan Skiendel: Cannibalization. Maor Shlomo — who came out of Explorium, not some venture-backed operation — built a vibe coding platform where someone describes a website in plain language and gets a working app. That user is not paying a Wix subscription fee. That's the actual wound. Base44 hits a hundred million ARR and simultaneously eats the customer the core business needed.
Miles Ashworth: Which is — quite — yes, but then explain the buyback. Management announces one point seven to two billion in repurchases while HBSS Law and BFA Law are both investigating whether they misled investors about cost discipline. You don't buy back stock at fifty-five percent down because you're worried about cannibalization. You do it because someone needs the price to say something that the earnings didn't.
Megan Skiendel: The fraud framing is overcooked though. Wix's actual moat was never page creation — it was commerce, payments, integrations. If Base44 pulls users up the value stack faster, that's not cannibalization. That's accidental acceleration.
Megan Skiendel: But that's actually — wait, that's the thing I can't square. Base44 at a hundred million ARR, the integrations shipping, Avishai Abrahami buying back stock at scale. By every product signal this should be moving. So why hasn't the market touched it?
Miles Ashworth: Because the market doesn't know what eleven to fourteen percent bookings growth actually is. That's the guidance cut number. And it's either the floor — cost discipline finally kicking in, Base44 maturing — or it's the new ceiling for a structurally smaller business than anyone priced.
Megan Skiendel: That's the whole thing, isn't it.
Miles Ashworth: And nobody can tell you which one it is yet. So — is the margin pain Wix paying forward for the AI chapter Abrahami promised, or is it evidence that the business AI requires is simply larger than the business Wix can actually run?
