Alphabet IncGOOGBUYDec 21, 2017Stock price when the opinion was issued
As of Jul 13, 2026. Market Open.
Fears that AI would eat its lunch. Harder for Anthropic to monetize a new tool than for GOOG to take AI and apply it to a business model that it already monetizes. Muscle memory of the populace gravitates to GOOG to find information. Probably thrives in the new AI world, until something more disruptive comes along.
AI monetization is happening, and AI Mode has been a game changer. Stronger cloud growth (revenue grew 63% YOY last quarter, tremendous), broader monetization across platforms. Search and advertising remain strong, lots of cashflow. Also a great ecosystem.
Good growth, but relatively decent valuation. Yield is 0.25%.
A year ago, consensus was that Search was going to die. Seems ridiculous now. Gemini is overtaking ChatGPT. Data centre business is growing faster than before. Still not that expensive. He hasn't sold any shares yet, but may take some off the table from the long-term holding and put toward one of the Mag 7 laggards.
He likes it. Quite a good company. Has shown a long history of return on capital that’s really quite impressive. But getting slightly worse, return on capital has gone down but stock price has gone up. That would generally be counterintuitive normally. The stock would go down. But they have so much cash on their balance sheet that the returns do get dragged down. If you take out the cash all of a sudden you realize that the return on capital is outstanding. It’s a stock you have to own. It’s so good, they are changing the world, they make a ton of money.It’s an amazing company.