Imad Elyafi retweeted
My key takeaways from the $GOOGL (Alphabet) Q3 2026 earnings call.
1. Search slowed while query growth hit a five-year high. Search and other ads grew 12% to $63.3B, down from Q2. The deceleration has four parts. FX was the biggest drag. The EU ended its de minimis exemption (duty-free treatment for cheap parcels), which hit APAC retail advertisers. World Cup media budgets landed in June instead of July. And AI Mode queries grew fast on a surface with "lower monetization" than classic Search. The first three wash out over time. The fourth is structural: more usage on a surface that earns less per query.
2. The EPS miss is mostly a SpaceX mark. Revenue grew 25% to $127.6B. Operating income grew 30% to $40.6B, a 31.8% margin. EPS came in at $2.12 against $3.02 expected because OI&E (other income and expense, the non-operating line where investment gains and losses land) swung to negative $8.2B. Most of that was an unrealized loss on the SpaceX stake after its share price fell. My rough math: after tax, that mark costs around $0.55 a share, so it explains more than half the $0.90 gap but not all of it.
3. Q4 Search is already guided softer. Lapping last year's Search acceleration cost about 3 points of growth in Q3 and will cost a couple more in Q4. FX gets slightly worse at current spot rates, mostly in Search and YouTube. The rest of Services won't make up the difference: YouTube ads grew only 9% to $11.2B, and Network grew 1% to $7.5B.
4. The AI Mode ad fix is rolling out but not proven. Ads in AI Mode go international for the first time, and multi-turn ads (ads that stay in a back-and-forth conversation) launch in the U.S. The evidence offered: inside AI Mode, sponsored and organic product listings get similar click-through rates. AI Mode queries run about 3x longer than classic searches, and most are incremental, meaning they would not have happened otherwise. What's missing is any number on how far AI Mode revenue per query trails classic Search. Agentic commerce (AI agents that shop and buy for users) is called additive, and consumer agents arrive in the Gemini app later this year. No revenue is attached to it yet.
5. Cloud doubled. Revenue grew 103% to $30.7B. Operating income was $11.1B, more than triple last year. Margin was 36.2% versus 23.7% a year ago. Backlog (signed contracts not yet booked as revenue) reached $561B, and just over 55% of it, about $310B, converts within 24 months. Two caveats. TPU system sales contributed to the growth but were not sized, and Cloud growth excluding TPUs was described as very strong with no number attached. Also, the rented third-party compute capacity came online only at the very end of Q3, so its margin drag lands in Q4.
6. TPU economics stay private. A TPU is Google's in-house AI chip, sold here as full racks with networking, storage and software. One analyst framed a TPU system at roughly $35B per gigawatt and asked how much of that becomes revenue and at what margin. Neither got an answer, because product-level financials are not disclosed. The cash cycle is clear. A signed contract shows up in backlog, Google builds inventory, and cash arrives on delivery. Inventory is only built against committed contracts. There are nearly 100 TPU customers, including Anthropic (directly and through Broadcom) and Apple, which is scaling pretraining on TPUs. New distribution comes through Oracle and Crux AI, a joint venture with Blackstone. The meaningful revenue ramp is 2027.
7. Free cash flow went negative. Q3 FCF was negative $9.1B on $51.4B of capex. Operating cash flow of $42.3B also absorbed the TPU inventory build and a $5.2B payment on a 2018 EC fine. Trailing twelve-month FCF is $19.7B. The 2026 capex guide is unchanged at $195B to $205B, and 2027 rises significantly, with numbers on the Q4 call. On top of that sit $924B in future purchase commitments and $152B in leases that haven't started and other obligations. Those are contractual maximums, and some have volume flexibility.
8. The return math is stated, not shown. Return on invested capital is said to stay meaningfully above the cost of capital, with no figure. Compute allocation is described as a long-range plan run on ROIC discipline, with no ranking of who gets capacity first. Cloud says it could serve a lot more demand with more capacity. About 65% of Q3 infrastructure spend went to servers and networking depreciated over six years, while TPU 8t claims up to 2.7x the training performance of the prior generation. My view: six years is a long life for hardware that loses that much ground each generation. Shorter lives would mean higher depreciation on top of the capex.
9. First-party model APIs process nearly 32B tokens (units of text an AI model reads or writes) per minute, up 40% QoQ and more than 4x YoY. In its first week on developer platforms, Gemini 4 Argon ramped 3.5x faster than Gemini 3, even with capacity limits. Customers who used Gemini Enterprise in Q3 2025 have more than quadrupled their spend. The Gemini app is at 1B users. This is the clearest evidence that the capex has real buyers.
Bottom line: The operating business beat. Revenue grew 25%, operating income grew 30%, Cloud doubled at a 36% margin, and the headline EPS miss is mostly a paper loss on SpaceX. The stock still fell about 10% after hours, from $322.22 to $288.35, because the market is now pricing cash, not growth. Quarterly FCF is negative, capex runs near $200B and rises again in 2027, commitments total about $1T, and the biggest profit pool is slowing as usage shifts to a surface that earns less per query. Management described every link between the spend and the payoff and did not put any number on them.
@AskRobinhood @RobinhoodApp, your mobile UI is built as a dark pattern that tricks users into liquidating positions. Clicking Sell prefills 100% of holdings by default with ZERO manual input required. Swiping up executes an instant liquidation without a clear confirmation screen
I accidentally liquidated a $500k position in seconds because zero friction was required to sell 100%. I called support 2 mins later to reverse it and was denied. Minus 6-figure. Filing complaints @FINRA, @SEC_Enforcement, @FTC #DarkPatterns
Reddit & forums are full of complaints about accidentally liquidating positions due to Robinhood’s frictionless UI. No major broker pre-fills 100% of shares with a 1-swipe submit and zero double-confirmation dialogs. Consulting lawyers regarding potential class action. #FinTech
Imad Elyafi retweeted
Google put ~$3B into Anthropic for a 14% stake worth ~$53B at February's $380B round. At the $800B offers sitting on Anthropic's table right now, that same stake is worth ~$112B. 17 to 37x on paper.
Then look at the commercial side.
In October 2025, Anthropic signed a deal to buy up to 1 million Google TPUs worth "tens of billions." Two weeks ago they expanded it to multiple gigawatts of Broadcom-designed Google TPUs running through 2031. Anthropic's revenue run-rate just hit $30B, up from $9B at the end of 2025. A growing chunk of that spend flows through Google Cloud.
Google invested $3B in a competitor, booked a $50B+ paper gain, and signed that same competitor to a decade-long cloud contract worth considerably more than the equity.
The SpaceX stake runs the same play. Google wrote a $900M check in 2015 for 7.4%. Starlink runs core workloads on Google Cloud. At the $1.75T IPO target, that 7% is worth ~$122B, over 130x the original check, with a multi-year cloud contract sitting underneath it.
The 12,508% Alphabet chart only shows public Alphabet. The hidden column is ~$175-250B of stakes in two companies Google technically competes with, each one also feeding the cloud business that competes with AWS and Azure.
DOJ tried to force Google to divest these during the antitrust case. They dropped the proposal in March. Google now runs its own frontier lab (Gemini), owns 14% of the second lab, sells the chips both train on (TPUs), and rents the data centers both run on. Four revenue streams on the same AI trend, with $250B of equity optionality as the kicker.
Alphabet sits in two ledgers. Public market cap at $341 a share. And $250B in strategic stakes that each come stapled to a decade-long cloud contract. Google figured out how to get paid four ways for every dollar its competitors spend.
Imad Elyafi retweeted
This 40 minute lecture from Peter Thiel at Stanford will teach you more about business competition than a 2 year MBA program
Imad Elyafi retweeted
This missing puzzle piece needs to change for $SHOP over the next four quarters
Imad Elyafi retweeted
Lots asking about this video (forget the notes @buccocapital -- here's a cheat sheet)
What I think happened at $AXON
Imad Elyafi retweeted
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Imad Elyafi retweeted
Few companies have as many moving pieces as $MELI
Here's how they all break down -- and the 2 that are really holding the company's stock back 👇
Imad Elyafi retweeted
Interview with a former $GOOGL employee on $TSLA's potential and $GOOGL's Waymo position in the market today:
- The expert emphasizes that successful autonomous vehicle deployment hinges on sensor redundancy, using cameras, LiDAR, radar, and ultrasonic sensors, because each modality fails in different ways, allowing for more robust safety cases. The expert believes the industry is now at a critical inflection point: after more than a decade and billions in investment, companies like Waymo, backed by $GOOGL are hitting the steep part of the S-curve, enabling rapid growth.
- The expert clarifies that $TSLA could emerge as a disruptive force by leveraging its vertically integrated model to operate autonomous vehicles at a much lower cost, aiming for sub-$0.20 per mile versus Waymo’s sub-$1 target.
- According to the expert, combining LiDAR and computer vision provides a faster and safer route to autonomy, while $TSLA's camera-only approach lacks the necessary redundancy for strong safety guarantees. Although LiDAR once cost over $100,000, prices have dropped significantly, making it feasible for custom robotaxis that can amortize the sensor cost over many rides; however, it is still too expensive for mass-market vehicles.
- The expert believes that autonomous driving costs will significantly drop once safety drivers are removed, but current deployments, such as Waymo, still face high operational costs due to infrastructure and frequent interventions, including the need for roadside assistance in unhandled situations. These vehicles also require high preventative maintenance and calibration, making them expensive to operate.
- The real cost breakthrough is expected when companies like $TSLA or $BYDDF can produce autonomy-ready vehicles that function with standard consumer-level maintenance. $TSLA's vertically integrated model, covering manufacturing and charging, positions it to eventually offer far better margins than current players like Waymo, which still rely on high-maintenance, sensor-heavy fleets.
- The expert emphasizes that $TSLA's robotaxi unveiling is more of a demo than a true launch, as the vehicles still require safety drivers and aren't yet cost-effective or provably safe. Despite showcasing impressive progress, real-world videos reveal edge cases where human intervention is still necessary, raising questions about system reliability. The launch appears driven more by investor pressure than technical readiness. While $TSLA's system may feel safe 99.99% of the time, that still falls short of the provable safety levels demonstrated by companies like $GOOGL's Waymo.
Imad Elyafi retweeted
If you own any of these stocks:
$NFLX
$ABNB
$RBLX
$UBER
$NET
$BN
$ASML
$PLTR
$META
$CRWD
Here’s the main KPI you should be tracking to measure their success 👇🧵
1/ $NFLX | Netflix
KPI: Paid Net Additions
In the brutal world of streaming, this is the one number that tells the story.
Revenue and margins matter, but if Netflix isn’t adding new paid subscribers, it’s losing ground.
This KPI shows whether consumers are still picking Netflix first. It reflects product market fit, pricing power, and global momentum.
The entire strategy is built to grow this number. If it stalls, the model breaks.
Imad Elyafi retweeted
1. If you’re not actively investing in someone, you’re quietly drifting apart. Relationships decay by default. Growth takes intention. If you’re not feeding it, you’re losing it.
Imad Elyafi retweeted
🚨 BREAKING: Figma, the collaborative design powerhouse, has just filed its S-1 to go public on the NYSE under the ticker “FIG.”
After years of explosive growth, a failed $20B Adobe acquisition, and a wave of AI innovation, Figma is finally opening its books. Here’s what the S-1 says:
Imad Elyafi retweeted
A 40g casein shake before bed can elevate overnight muscle-protein synthesis.
It also piles calories onto the circadian rest-and-repair window, elevates your resting heart rate, prevents your core body temperature from naturally falling in sleep, makes it harder to wind down and fall asleep, and keeps mTOR switched on while autophagy should peak.
It may also aggravate reflux, and long-term cardiometabolic risk.
If at all, use this strategy sparingly and strategically with the following risk mitigation steps
1. Tailor dose to weight: cap at ~0.3 g protein·kg⁻¹ (≈ 20–25 g for a 70 kg adult) and finish ≥ 45 min before lying down.
2. Cycle fasting nights: leave at least two autophagy-friendly, calorie-free evenings per week to avoid chronic mTOR engagement.
3. Favor slower digesting, lower-BCAA sources: cottage-cheese or skyr portions give casein with less leucine spike than isolates.
4. Mind reflux & sleep: if you have GERD, metabolic syndrome, or struggle with sleep onset, shift the protein to earlier in the evening or skip it.
5. Prioritize daytime distribution: hit your daily protein target (≈ 1.6–2.0 g·kg⁻¹) with balanced meals; the pre-sleep dose is optional, not essential.))
