Update: This article originally reported on Alphabet’s unexplained $98 billion in unrealized investment gains. It has been updated after the company disclosed the day after that it held $94.1 billion in SpaceX stock at the end of the quarter, accounting for most of those gains.
Google’s early SpaceX investment is paying off handsomely.
The tech giant’s stake in Elon Musk’s company is now worth $94.1 billion, it just disclosed in a new SEC filing.
That comes after Alphabet, Google’s parent, disclosed making nearly $100 billion extra — and dedicating exactly one vague sentence to it.
Google was an early SpaceX investor, buying about 7% of the company in 2015. SpaceX also uses Google Cloud for its Starlink service. SpaceX is currently worth about $1.5 trillion dollars since its IPO last month. Google invested in SpaceX when it was worth only about $12 billion — that’s a 133x return.
Google is also an investor in Anthropic and Databricks, which were most recently valued at $895 billion and $188 billion, respectively.
Despite Google’s savvy investments, analysts didn’t ask its executives about them on its earnings call. Instead, they focused on its rising capital expenditures and position in the AI race. The tech giant’s stock closed down about 1.24%.
Google, SpaceX, Anthropic, and Databricks didn’t respond to requests for comment.
Google’s investing chops are certainly impressive. But investors are more concerned about Google’s own prospects.
The tech giant hiked its capital expenditures to a maximum of $205 billion this year as it races to compete on AI. While Google has strong advantages in distribution and chipmaking, its efforts to build a leading AI model haven’t paid off.
It keeps delaying its next big AI chatbot, which some rivals are mocking online.
Still, many analysts remain bullish on Google’s fundamentals. Its revenue jumped by almost 25% compared to last year on the back of strong ads and cloud sales, which are also being boosted by AI.
“Another impressive quarter for Google,” said Emarketer principal analyst Nate Elliott.
