“Mostly it seems to me that they want a 'moonshot' company that has the original profitability of search advertising, full stop.” Well, when Larry page wrote “

“Mostly it seems to me that they want a 'moonshot' company that has the original profitability of search advertising, full stop.” Well, when Larry page wrote “we also like that it means alpha-bet”[1], a lot of readers in tech probably mistook him at his word. When it comes to investing, “alpha” means winner. As in somebody else loses. As in what gets optimized is _the investor_, not necessarily the community. The analogy to investment return above benchmark is a trademark Googley delusion—- it’s rationalizing a position using math or science even when the position (applauding investing culture) is exclusionary or even toxic to a substantial segment of the population (e.g. the 99% who either don’t invest or who form the ETF benchmark). Larry isn’t talking about excellence, he’s talking about dominating, and slipping that through with a cute abc.xyz domain name. While it’s very interesting to hear these stories about Google, perhaps the lesson learned is just how blind people are to Google’s greed when technical adventures are dangled in front of them. [1] https://blog.google/alphabet/google-alphabet/ https://blog.google/alphabet/google-alphabet/