Just checked out Google’s earnings report, and I feel like a lot of people might be underestimating Google— Quarterly net profit: $62.6 billion, with about $36.9 billion in paper gains from equity investments in companies like SpaceX and Anthropic, accounting for more than half of the profit. For the past two years, the market has been mocking Google’s Gemini for getting outplayed by OpenAI, but take a look at its investment portfolio: In 2015, they invested $1 billion in SpaceX, betting on low-Earth orbit satellites, Starlink, and the future of space infrastructure; In 2023, they invested $3 billion in Anthropic, betting on Claude and the second pole of large models. Based on Anthropic’s current valuation expectations, this investment is basically a masterpiece in venture capital history. Networks in the sky, data on the ground, enterprise AI, global payments, connections between phones and satellites—Google has pretty much touched all of it ahead of time. Feels like Google suddenly figured it out— If I can’t be number one, I’ll just sit where the money flows: selling shovels, selling cloud, selling computing power, selling traffic. Kind of reminds me of that line from *The Art of War*: ‘The skillful fighter puts himself in a position which makes defeat impossible, and does not miss the moment for defeating the enemy!’