Alphabet shares tumble about 13% after earnings, erasing roughly $500 billion in value

Alphabet, Google's parent company, saw its shares fall as much as 13% on Thursday, erasing more than $500 billion in market value in its worst single-day performance. Fox Business reported the stock closed at $283.82, down 12.64%, while Daily Mail put the loss at $482 billion. The sell-off followed Alphabet's third-quarter report on Wednesday, which showed revenue of $127.6 billion, up 25% from a year earlier but below Wall Street's expectations. Search revenue rose 12% to about $63 billion, short of the roughly $65 billion expected, while Google Cloud revenue more than doubled to around $31 billion. Alphabet spent approximately $51.4 billion on capital expenditures, mostly on data centers and computing infrastructure. The drop ranked as the second-largest single-day market value loss for a US-listed company, behind Nvidia's $593 billion loss in January 2025.

NBC News, the left-leaning source, leads with whether the AI bubble is about to pop, using the $500 billion loss as its hook and pointing to big tech's spending and AI's effect on the job market; its excerpt gives no earnings figures. Right-leaning outlets stress scale: Daily Mail calls it a historic $482 billion wipeout, the steepest one-day percentage drop since Alphabet's 2004 debut, and compares it with the 2008 crisis and the 2020 Covid crash, while noting Cloud's growth. Fox Business centers on the roughly $500 billion loss and the 12.64% close, cites The Wall Street Journal, and stresses slowing search growth and AI spending. Alternative outlet Semafor offers a distinct angle, quoting an analyst who said the miss fuels fears that AI tools will take share from search, and noting lenders are tightening terms on AI debt deals. Left and right agree on the earnings miss, the sell-off and AI spending worries, but differ on the loss figure ($482 billion versus about $500 billion) and on framing, with bubble fears on the left and record declines on the right.