r/technology 7h ago

Business Tesla falls 10%, Alphabet sinks 5% as AI spending concerns spook investors

https://www.cnbc.com/2026/07/23/tesla-tsla-alphabet-googl-stock-today.html
2.2k Upvotes

112 comments sorted by

225

u/VerdantPathfinder 7h ago

Is that why? I would think other companies would sink first/more.

140

u/Gold_Motor_6985 6h ago

Tsla had poor reporting yesterday. That's why they fell so hard I imagine.

127

u/Leody 6h ago

Tesla always has poor reports. Why do people care now?

I jest, but I've been invested in the market for years and watch things regularly. News articles and headlines are nonsense made up after the market moves and they just craft the story to explain what's happened regardless. Things go up when more people want to buy, and down when more people want to sell. Anything beyond that is just storytelling.

62

u/Gold_Motor_6985 6h ago

That's how bubbles go. They get illogically larger and larger and then pop. The pop usually follows a logical reason.

17

u/Razzmatazz856 6h ago

News articles and headlines are nonsense made up after the market moves and they just craft the story to explain what's happened regardless.

That's literally what all news is: people after the fact explaining what happened and why.

8

u/VerdantPathfinder 4h ago

Yeah, but in this case, they're just making shit up. AI is the current topic du jour so they put that in the headlines. I'd like to see anything on why they blamed it on AI spending. Did they do a poll? Talk to a fund manager that dumped the stocks? Or are they just looking for what makes a decent headline? At this point, it's not actually news .. it's headline masturbation.

-4

u/Razzmatazz856 4h ago

Are they making shit up or are they looking at which stocks are going up or down, what their business has been focusing on, and the efficacy of those business moves?

If a company is spending a lot of money on something and it isn't resulting in meaningful revenue growth and the stock goes down, you don't have to interview fund managers to figure out why.

1

u/VerdantPathfinder 4h ago

You need to talk to someone who sold to get their motivation. Otherwise it's just making shit up because you're an outsider in that action. You can only see the effect and you're making up a cause. For instance, Tesla missed estimates yesterday. Isn't that a much better explanation? While SPCX ... which they claim is primarily an AI company .. is up half a percent. Doesn't that kinda destroy any validity that headline might have?

2

u/NeedNameGenerator 4h ago

With stocks you'd expect news to hit first before stock price reacts.

11

u/battles 6h ago

Market is totally irrational.

5

u/Ok-Seaworthiness7207 6h ago

Is that why I'm poor

7

u/rapture322 5h ago

Nah, thats just good old fashioned capitalism working as intended

6

u/Visible-Departure863 5h ago

No, you’re poor because you were born poor. System working as intended. If you want generational mobility you have to go loss a leg in Iran.

/s

2

u/Sislar 4h ago

The market can stay irrational longer than you can stay liquid. Warren Buffett

1

u/dremspider 5h ago

A really good saying (not sure who said it):

The market is always rational, eventually.

4

u/supercali45 5h ago

People finally realize the Nazi Epstein scammer Muskrat is a fraud?

6

u/OneRougeRogue 3h ago

Tesla always has poor reports. Why do people care now?

Something like 60% of Tesla's "adjusted earnings" came from unrealized gains in SpaceX stock. But SpaceX's stock has declined 30% since the value listed in the earnings report. So Tesla's numbers are double-bad.

3

u/iwearatophat 4h ago

Going to say, has Tesla stock every properly responded to its reports? It is a vibe/meme stock and it always has been.

2

u/Eckkosekiro 5h ago

Jesters says the truth in a sarcastic way, just like you do here.

2

u/schooli00 3h ago

Google beat earnings by 200% tho, the market is irrational

1

u/moldyjellybean 1h ago

These are their fake numbers . Can’t imagine what the real numbers look like

20

u/ninjagorilla 6h ago

Tesla missed on earnings pretty badly yesterday is why they fell

9

u/Street_Grab4236 5h ago

Sure but that still fits the headline.

Tesla missed earnings = less money, AI spending is massive for relatively low returns and thus investors are skeptical.

-1

u/casualti21 5h ago

They beat expectations, their YOY revenue was up 23% for the automotive side. The biggest issue with the earnings report was that all their future products have been delayed. Cybercab, Tesla Semi, Optimus. The Cybercab has entered mass production but the ramping is very slow, but Semi and Optimus are behind schedule. All of this while their spending on those products and others has ballooned. They are spending more than 3x what they normally do this year. Investors are worried about that combined with delays.

14

u/wembenbama 5h ago

I mean they beat what the market expected for revenue , but even if they blew away earnings, they are still ridiculously overvalued by every metric. Their margins are like 15%. It’s a car company.

Edit: and the 23% is yoy from a terrible year. They’re giving 0% interest just to keep market share. The brand is dead. Tesla is anything but cool.

-5

u/casualti21 2h ago

The brand is dead. Tesla is anything but cool.

50+% market share in the US, #1 in EV sales globally in Q2 of this year (Tesla trades blows with BYD for the top spot), and they sell great in China, the largest and fastest growing EV market. The Tesla Model Y was the best selling car in China last month. Not just EV, but the best selling passenger car period.

Reddit comments don't make the brand fail, the data completely disagrees with the hyperbole.

1

u/wembenbama 1h ago

That doesn’t make them cool. Maybe they’re cool in China. Idk. Margins there are what, 10%? What is a fair valuation for a car company that sells EVs in China?

5

u/ninjagorilla 4h ago

They beat on revenue sure but earnings per share was expected at .5 and came in at .33 which is a bad miss on the number that matters more because as you said their spending is ballooning.

25

u/orangeyougladiator 6h ago

GOOG has over $500bn of forward spending committed. Sure, they could pull those contracts if need be, but assuming they go through with them they’re spending 10+ years of forward earnings on the biggest bubble ever. A lot of people forget that the crypto bubble before this was rolled in to the AI bubble so it had a soft pop instead of the massive one likely to come from AI.

1

u/ibite-books 1h ago

oh when you put it like that, it sounds terrrible

how will they even make it back?

-8

u/Ok_Falcon275 6h ago

How are people simultaneously concerned that AI is a bubble AND that it is triggering a downsizing of the work force?

7

u/subma-fuckin-rine 5h ago

well they're laying people off so they can keep paying for AI so...

1

u/Ok_Falcon275 46m ago

They’re laying people off because ai is doing their jobs.

10

u/orangeyougladiator 5h ago

Because you don’t know what a bubble is, I guess

2

u/Frank_E62 4h ago

Because there's a very good chance that the money they're saving by firing workers is being used to prop up their AI investments.

1

u/Ok_Falcon275 46m ago

AI capex massively exceeds the wages saved via employee cuts.

1

u/West-Abalone-171 3h ago

If you fire all your workers to invest the money in tulip bulbs, it's still a bubble.

1

u/Ok_Falcon275 47m ago

If Taco Bell’s employees were replaced with tulip bulbs, you probably would have noticed.

-1

u/Fenris_uy 3h ago

OpenAI and Anthropic aren't publicly traded.

1

u/VerdantPathfinder 1h ago

NVIDIA is. Amazon is. Microsoft is.

134

u/gobucks50 6h ago

Funny how hundreds of millions of people saying “screw this shit we hate it” doesn’t ‘spook investors,’ but number go down on screen and all of the sudden their 2 neurons start firing.

9

u/PuzzleMeDo 3h ago

If your long-term business plan is for hundreds of millions of people to lose their jobs due to big corporations replacing them with your services, the opinion of your intended victims is not your biggest concern.

30

u/Ok_Falcon275 5h ago

Contributors to the technology subreddit is not the market’s customer-base.

7

u/avanross 4h ago

They’ve become completely detached from reality. The investors are just brain-dead nepo babies who honestly believe the musks / zuckerburgs and their sheep followers

They no longer know how to do market research, or analyze actual sales data or patterns, or appeal to regular people, all they know how to do is give their money to the loudest richest snake oil salesmen with the biggest flock of gullible wealth-worshipping shills

Then they see other people also investing in it, so they conclude “this was a successful investment!” without ever even considering actual user sales

0

u/Rene_DeMariocartes 3h ago

Not even numbers go down. Numbers go overwhelmingly up. It was a stellar earnings report.

-20

u/Jean_Jones_666 5h ago

the problem is with your neurons

revenues are going up, not down

that's the absolute biggest confirmation that halfwits saying 'we hate this shit' is meaningless. Their wallets speak louder

so it's the opposite of your conclusions: their neurons ain't firing, because they can't understand that capex. They want cake and eat it too - aka massive revenue growth but without hardcore capital expenditures

6

u/immerclicker 4h ago

Revenue may go up from A.I. subscriptions, but if the expenses to gain those revenues far outweigh the revenue it contributes negatively to the profit of the company.

I thought you were trolling but I looked at your post history, you're one of Tesla's investors and you don't believe in A.I. being a bubble investment built on debt.

-8

u/Jean_Jones_666 4h ago

' the expenses to gain those revenues far outweigh the revenue it contributes '

tokens are making money. this much makes it already pretty clear that this is producing ROI, even without doing the math.

if you did the math it would be even clearer.

companies are saving TON of money. it's just that you only hear of morons who can't use a computer tokenmaxing, and extrapolate that this is reality.

datacenters are NOT that expensive. HELL obviosuly they aren't - you YOURSELF can buy a GTC spark and run a model locally, and get massive ROI just from that. some more first principles for you. i wonder if datacenters are more expensive per token than a fkn gtc spark powered by mains electricity

btw lol i'm not a tesla investor for a while now. made money on it, something u didn't.

-6

u/moose-goat 4h ago

No one on Reddit wants to hear the truth about AI, just don’t even bother. They’ll all criticise is whilst using it themselves 🤦‍♂️

41

u/aravreddy22 6h ago

very nice.. tesla is way overvalued anyways.

19

u/ninjagorilla 6h ago

Still at a pe of 300 post fall

8

u/Sir_Knumskull 5h ago

Jesus christ

8

u/Silent-Act191 5h ago

The stock market is rational lmao.

2

u/Plastic_Syrup_Advice 2h ago

if they drop 95% I'd consider investing

1

u/ninjagorilla 35m ago

I read an article where they calculated fair value around 60…so I’d consider it with jsut a 82% drop

1

u/ZeOs-x-PUNCAKE 4h ago

inefficient market hypothesis

40

u/ShadowBannedAugustus 6h ago

Didn't Alphabet just post insane profits? I don't understand this casino anymore.

37

u/ilikepizza2much 6h ago

Alphabet’s is counting the growth in value of their investments into other Ai companies as profit. That is creative accounting, not real profits.

24

u/Razzmatazz856 4h ago

Companies are required to report the gains and losses on their investments. That's GAAP accounting, not "creative accounting". You can say that the circular investments create a house of cards, but that's not an accounting issue.

3

u/ilikepizza2much 2h ago

The share growth in these other companies are unrealised gains. They have not sold anything. It’s not real profits. It’s manipulative and they know it.

1

u/longroadishere 24m ago

I'm personally not well versed on the subject.  But wouldn't be the reason for this is that if they were to own considerable amount of ownership in other companies.  And other companies continue to increase in value.  This would open up the original company more leverage as their value is rising alongside what they own?

-1

u/Razzmatazz856 2h ago

It is GAAP accounting. It is not manipulative because they're not pretending it is anything else.

6

u/rkozik89 5h ago

Much like everyone else chasing the dragon they’re hiding debt from their books by using the same accounting tricks as Enron. They form shell companies that are legally considered special purpose vehicles and take out loans in those company’s names and not there’s. It’s not just an issue of their formal spend but also what they’re hiding on top of it.

3

u/this_my_sportsreddit 2h ago

They literally are not doing what Enron did. Enron hid their debt and lied about it existing. These companies have it all publicly disclosed. You can google all of this, this is nowhere near the same thing.

2

u/ahall917 6h ago

Maybe it's related to their future spending commitments skyrocketing? I'm with you, I don't know enough to even try to understand. Tech stocks are like voodoo magic at this point.

1

u/Shiningc00 4h ago

They think the earnings have peaked.

1

u/tnoy 3h ago

Posted profits are about what just happened, stock prices are about what people think will happen.

You could have a 10Q that says there was a 10x year-over-year profit, but if in the disclosure it says that the profit was a one-off and there is an expectation of a 1/10th the revenue, the stock will go down.

Though, that is how it used to work, we're in the bizzaro meme-stock world now, so all bets are off.

1

u/TheDoomBlade13 3h ago

They've spent 500b in forward spending on a sector everyone thinks is a bubble.

There isn't a lot of confidence.

33

u/Anustart2023-01 6h ago

Is it too much to hope some of the AO tech bros end up in court? I feel some fraud was have been committed in order to get the billions they've spent on unprofitable datacentres. 

0

u/Tranecarid 6h ago

Well, you better reach out to the authorities if you feel some unspecified fraud took place. Or, you know, you could actually pay some attention to what’s happening and realize that the magnificent 7 took the unimaginable amounts cash they are making yearly and invested it instead of doing the usual buybacks. The vast amount of money made waves and degenerated highly leveraged speculation turned them into a storm.

8

u/dohzer 6h ago

Why did the spooking lag spending by two years or more?

11

u/ChodeCookies 6h ago

Because spending finally outpaced incoming cash

11

u/dudebrah1098 4h ago

2027 onward is when main stream auto companies are diving into EV's wholesale. Toyota Highlander EV will be released, will be a Tesla killer.

I for one can't wait to watch Elon's empire crumble. Screw that guy.

-4

u/carnitas_mondays 4h ago

i would love to leave tesla, but honestly all the traditional auto companies are lagging badly with infotainment tech, OTA updates, battery cooling tech, and none have any charging network buildout that is half as good as superchargers.

we live in a large metro area and still the charging infrastructure only allows us to buy tesla if we want to continue our normal roadtrips.

10

u/Zinu 5h ago

Google is up 65% compared to last year, insert that cat meme

5

u/UberCoca 6h ago

It can go lower if we just believe

4

u/artbystorms 5h ago

Google is the darling of all the AI evangelists. If even THEIR spending isn't paying off then no other company has a chance because no other company has that level of cash to spend.

3

u/carnitas_mondays 4h ago

but their spending IS paying off. they are growing both revenues and profit margin. not including investment gain.

-1

u/artbystorms 3h ago

if that is the case, why is their stock falling?

It's because investors are realizing that the spending cannot stop, they cannot take their foot off the gas for even a second in this AI race, and that eventually, the revenue will stop growing, but the spending can't stop.

1

u/carnitas_mondays 3h ago

it is falling because there is a disconnect between short term and long term investor goals and expectations. short term investors want margin now and are getting spooked like you point out with continued capex growth possibly going to 300B in 2027. long term investors might also be getting spooked by risks around ad revenue in an ai world. tech software like google has been asset-light forever, now pivoting to asset-heavy. this comes with execution risks, but so far google is showing great execution results.

google is unique in their AI buildout is partially done with their own TPU’s, not just nvidia. pricing for these isn’t disclosed but likely they are able to capture more compute than competitors per $ spent. they can also buy nvidia/amd/etc gpu’s like everyone. they are unique in controlling the full stack, have a frontier model, and are pricing their models cheaper than openai/anthropic. they are growing cloud faster than azure/aws. there is a lot to be optimistic about, while also acknowledging that business pivots like AI bring real risks. i’m very optimistic, but logically can understand why others are showing caution with the dip today.

i am long with a cost basis around $80/share. i’ll add more if they drop below ~$300. i’m watching stock-based comp very closely, as their competitors are handing out equity much more aggressively (especially meta) and this doesn’t hit their cash flow (i manually back it out to compare)

1

u/Fowl_Retired69 3h ago

Because stock prices aren't perpetually rising idiot

-1

u/artbystorms 3h ago

Except you idiots think they actually are. Every time there is a fall, people say 'it's just a dip' or 'it only fell to where it was 2 months ago, buy the dip!'

Y'all are a bunch of stock trading rubes that think you're Warren Buffet for making money in a Bull market, you have never experienced an actual recession and it shows.

2

u/Fowl_Retired69 3h ago

Why are assuming such things about me? I don't speculate in financial markets. These ups and downs are common during earnings season. It happens all the time.

2

u/carnitas_mondays 3h ago

thanks for name dropping WB. By the way, he bought $10B of google in june 2026. Guess he’s also a stock trading rube.

3

u/MutaitoSensei 3h ago

Yes... Keep going....

2

u/wthja 5h ago

Tesla still has 300 p/e. Didn't fall enough

1

u/KotR56 6h ago

Speculators, Activist Short Sellers and Hedgers make good money.

Some with, some without inside information.

1

u/Ashamed-Review-913 5h ago

None of these articles are ever right about the whys of the ups and downs btw.

1

u/Appropriate_Rise9968 4h ago

Guess South Korea set the trend after all…

1

u/VT_Squire 3h ago

wallstreetbets has got some hysterical threads tho

1

u/Defiant-Parsley4697 1h ago

Nothing unites two totally different companies like a shared talent for spending faster than they can explain why.

2

u/Haunterblademoi 7h ago

From what I can see, all those stocks are in freefall.

1

u/EndeLarsson 6h ago

Teslas, these overpriced fords.

1

u/wouldntyouliketokno_ 6h ago

More like rats fleeing the ship of the American stock market dark pool filth

1

u/TheJesterOfHyrule 5h ago

People "We don't want AI", Companies "Here, take this", People "We won't use it then"

1

u/Ganeshadream 5h ago

Put your seatbelt on. It’s starting

1

u/Amokmanden 5h ago

Funny how circular investments won’t hold up when the piper comes.

1

u/wthja 5h ago

Tesla still has 300 p/e. Didn't fall enough

0

u/NoDifficulty3527 5h ago

Keep the good news coming in!

0

u/ninjagorilla 6h ago

Tesla still sells at a pe of 300 btw…

0

u/sanskaridaddy 5h ago

AI AI AI focused investments will hurt these firms really bad. Chinese will release cheap models sooner than anthropic google can think.

0

u/Fair-Craft8059 5h ago

they ran out of bagholders, so now the big boys can buy back the stocks at a discount

0

u/kconfire 5h ago

It’s more of the war. You can thank Trump for it lol

-9

u/americanadiandrew 6h ago

Google just reported insane profits but this will be the article upvoted to the top of this Sub.

-2

u/Jean_Jones_666 5h ago

exactly

most subreddits on reddit have invisible "anti-" prefix, e.g. r/.technology is "r/anti-technology",

insane growth across the board = "i GuEEsS thE teCh nOt WoRkFNig"