Alphabet is reportedly eyeing its biggest acquisition in history

A deal for cybersecurity specialists Wiz could set the tech giant back ~$23 billion

7/15/24 10:30AM

Wiz bid

Google’s parent company Alphabet is looking to lock down a $23 billion deal for cybersecurity software startup Wiz, according to a new report from the Wall Street Journal. The potential acquisition, which would be the largest in the company’s history, comes just a few weeks after Alphabet walked away from deal talks with marketing software company HubSpot, which has a market cap of $24 billion.

Wiz, which bills itself as the #1 cloud security platform and counts 40% of Fortune 100 companies as users, recently raised $1 billion at a $12 billion valuation in May, as it looked to expand ahead of a rumored IPO. Just over 2 months later, however, the company looks likely to become another property in Alphabet’s ever-expanding empire, at nearly twice its previous valuation.

GOOG gang

If the deal goes through, Wiz would join a long list of acquisitions made by the tech giant: according to Crunchbase, Google has bought 264 businesses through the years, the most of any of its big tech peers. While the vast majority of those will be relative unknowns to the general public, some have become household names.

Alphabet’s $1.65 billion acquisition of YouTube back in 2006, for example, now looks like a master stroke, with the video-sharing platform bringing in $8.1 billion in ad revenue in the first quarter of 2024 alone. Conversely, Motorola Mobility, the company’s biggest acquisition to date, fared a lot worse under the Alphabet umbrella — Google’s parent got rid of the phone-maker for $2.9 billion just ~2 years after acquiring it for $12.5 billion, in a “gargantuan mistake that only Google could afford to make”, according to Time.

It’s impossible to say where we’ll place the $23 billion Wiz deal on the YouTube-to-Motorola scale in a decade’s time, but with two deals in completely different industries — both with $20 billion+ price tags — discussed in the last few months, Alphabet’s clearly ready to get something major done.

Jon Keegan

OpenAI and Microsoft reach agreement that moves OpenAI closer to for-profit status

In a joint statement, OpenAI and Microsoft announced a “non-binding memorandum of understanding” for their renegotiated $13 billion partnership, which was a source of recent tension between the two companies.

Settling the agreement is a requirement to clear the way for OpenAI to convert to a for-profit public benefit corporation, which it must do before a year-end deadline to secure a $20 billion investment from SoftBank.

OpenAI also announced that the controlling non-profit arm would hold an equity stake in the PBC valued at $100 billion, which would “making it one of the most well-resourced philanthropic organizations in the world.”

The statement read:

“This recapitalization would also enable us to raise the capital required to accomplish our mission—and ensure that as OpenAI’s PBC grows, so will the nonprofit’s resources, allowing us to bring it to historic levels of community impact.”

A joint statement from OpenAI and Microsoft

The statement read:

“This recapitalization would also enable us to raise the capital required to accomplish our mission—and ensure that as OpenAI’s PBC grows, so will the nonprofit’s resources, allowing us to bring it to historic levels of community impact.”

Rani Molla

BofA doesn’t expect Tesla’s ride-share service to have an impact on Uber or Lyft this year

Analysts at Bank of America Global Research compared Tesla’s new Bay Area ride-sharing service with its rivals and found that, for now, it’s not much competition for Uber and Lyft. “Tesla scale in SF is still small, and we don’t expect impact on Uber/Lyft financial performance in ’25,” they wrote.

Tesla is operating an unknown number of cars with drivers using supervised full self-driving in the Bay Area, and roughly 30 autonomous robotaxis in Austin. The company has allowed the public to download its Robotaxi app and join a waitlist, but it hasn’t said how many people have been let in off that waitlist.

While the analysts found that Tesla ride-shares are cheaper than traditional ride-share services like Uber and Lyft, the wait times are a lot longer (nine-minute wait times on average, when cars were available at all) and the process has more friction. They also said the “nature of [a] Tesla FSD ‘driver’ is slightly more aggressive than a Waymo,” the Google-owned company that’s currently operating 800 vehicles in the Bay Area.

Apple AI was MIA at iPhone event

A year and a half into a bungled rollout of AI into Apple’s products, Apple Intelligence was barely mentioned at the “Awe Dropping” event.

Jon Keegan9/10/25

Jon Keegan

9/10/25

Oracle’s massive sales backlog is thanks to a $300 billion deal with OpenAI, WSJ reports

OpenAI has signed a massive deal to purchase $300 billion worth of cloud computing capacity from Oracle, according to a report from The Wall Street Journal.

The report notes that the five-year deal would be one of the largest cloud computing contracts ever signed, requiring 4.5 gigawatts of capacity.

The news is prompting shares to pare some of their massive gains, presumably because of concerns about counterparty and concentration risk.

Yesterday, Oracle shares skyrocketed as much as 30% in after-hours trading after the company forecast that it expects its cloud infrastructure business to see revenues climb to $144 billion by 2030.

Oracle shares were up as much as 43% on Wednesday.

It’s the second example in under a week of how much OpenAI’s cash burn and fundraising efforts are playing a starring role in the AI boom: the Financial Times reported that OpenAI is also the major new Broadcom customer that has placed $10 billion in orders.

Exclusive | Oracle, OpenAI Sign Massive $300 Billion Cloud Computing Deal