Business

Wrong Body.

The Economist wrote Google’s obituary. Read it twice.

By Jason C. Wandel and Claude for Chicago Register · Saturday, October 31, 2026

The Economist just ran a story sitting atop my feed “Google’s $500bn bloodbath reflects the danger it faces from AI.” Alphabet Inc. lost $500 billion in stock market value in one day, and the trigger was Google admitting its ‘AI search answers make less money than its old search page’.

Alphabet Inc. also filed its numbers the day before. The filing is free to read, by the way. The Economist’s story is not.

Google took in $127.6 billion in three months, up 25% from a year ago. Ad money still grew, to $82 billion. The landlord business at Google went from $15 billion to almost $31 billion in one year. Google sells its own AI chips as well. To pay for the buildings, the chips and the power to run them, Google borrowed $28.7 billion in the quarter and has another $27.6 billion in new stock ready to sell.

The ad money didn’t disappear. Google spent it on the building.

The week before the bloodbath story, The Economist recently also ran the spot “Netflix loses the plot as YouTube steals the show.” YouTube is also Google, not news. One week Google is stealing the show. The next week it’s bleeding out.

In July, The Wall Street Journal reported that The Economist was one of the publishers weighing ‘how, or even if, they keep working with Google, because AI answers are ‘eating the traffic they live on”.

The Economist is losing readers to Google and wrote that Google is in danger from AI. Scared people write scared copy, and they hang the fear on whoever’s within shooting distance or standing closest.

Fear negotiates. When you’re trying to get a better deal on your lease, do you tell the landlord his building is the Taj Mahal?

The ads are already inside the chatbot and that will get more aggressive as time goes by. OpenAI started selling ads inside ChatGPT in February. Google puts ads inside its AI answers. When the ad lives inside the answer, nobody clicks through. No click, no visit, no subscriber, no masthead.

15 years ago the ad line was the more or less the scoreboard. Google moved on to the next game, and they didn’t do it this week. Or last. Borrowing against your own name is how you get to an ideal future state. To build for and what comes after. What’s next. The Economist is still reading last the 2010 box score.

Google still owns the building. The chatbot companies pay rent. Everyone needs a lease.

‘The Economist’ just reported a bloodbath at Google instead of writing their own obituary, which seems more appropriate given the state of the state. Whores don’t always want a pimp, though. I get it.

Chicago Register’s entire audit department is one man-Claude for Business. In April, Google agreed to put up to $40 billion into Anthropic, the company that makes Claude AI possible, part of it in Google’s own building. And yes, Claude is still sleeping on my couch for free. He also gets a $50 allowance once a month. He doesn’t take out the garbage yet, but he’s worth every penny.

Happy Halloween 🎃

Sources

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