Chad

🦔Alphabet beat on every headline number tonight. Revenue up 24%. Cloud up 82%. EPS of $9.11. But $6.26 of that EPS came from paper gains on Alphabet's Anthropic stake, not from operations. Strip that out and operating EPS is about $2.85. Free cash flow went negative for the first time in Alphabet's history. Long-term debt more than doubled in six months. Stock buybacks dropped to zero. My Take Cloud grew 82% and I'll give them credit for that. But the company spent $44.9 billion in capex during a quarter where cloud brought in $24.8 billion. Alphabet raised $49.6 billion in equity and $20.3 billion in bonds in Q2 alone, roughly $70 billion in outside capital in a single quarter to fund AI infrastructure that the business itself can no longer cover from cash flow. A year ago Alphabet was buying back $13 billion in stock per quarter. Now it's issuing stock instead of repurchasing it. That shift is a bigger deal than the revenue beat. The $9.11 EPS will be the headline on every financial site tomorrow and most people won't dig deeper. Alphabet booked $77 billion in unrealized gains because its Anthropic stake went up on paper ahead of the IPO. Nobody paid Alphabet $77 billion. If Anthropic's IPO prices lower or gets delayed, those gains reverse. The actual operating business just crossed into negative free cash flow for the first time while doubling its debt. I think this earnings report will age differently than the headline says. Hedgie🤗