Alphabet IncGOOGBUYJul 09, 2018Stock 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.
Google vs. Alibaba: He owns both. Both have leadership in the West and China, respectively. Under 25% of Google's revenue stream comes from the search engine, then they re-invest it. The search engine is like a piggybank and takes up a huge proportion of overall online advertising revenue. Similarly, Alibaba is dominant in China. They have long runways (as noted in how Google reinvests revenue from searches). As for Trump's tariffs, these are nickels and dimes against the big scheme of themes--unless the tariff war escalates.