Alphabet Is Having a Terrible, Horrible, No Good, Very Bad Monday — And Finsta is Open
Key DeepMind and Gemini talent head for Anthropic and OpenAI as Alphabet craters 6% intraday — and the Iran war backdrop isn't helping anyone's nerves
Ticker Ratings
$GOOGL is getting absolutely cooked today — down nearly 6% intraday, its worst session since early February — and the culprit isn't ad revenue or antitrust. It's a full-blown AI talent exodus. Google DeepMind's John Jumper is bolting to Anthropic, and Gemini co-lead Noam Shazeer is heading to OpenAI. Lose your best players mid-season, and the fans notice.
Making things worse, $MSFT's Satya Nadella is out here publicly arguing AI is becoming commoditized — cheaper models, less dependence on frontier labs — which is basically Microsoft and Amazon doing a victory lap while Google watches its moat drain. Bloomberg Surveillance's Lori Calvina still sees the bull case intact for equities broadly, citing 86–90% S&P 500 upward revision rates, but semiconductor crowding concerns are real.
Meanwhile, geopolitics delivered a plot twist: a US-Iran deal just authorized Iranian oil sales, sending crude whipsawing and the dollar higher on haven demand. SpaceX, somehow, also picked this week to launch its first-ever $20 billion investment-grade bond offering to fund AI ambitions — shares dropped 9% in three sessions. Monday came in swinging.