Alphabet stock dropped harder than it has in over a year because two AI researchers quit. Not ten. Not a mass exodus. Two people left their jobs and the market decided this meant Google can't build robots anymore.
Retail traders saw the headline and panic-sold like they just found out their entire portfolio was actually shares in a Wendy's franchise. They read "high-profile exits" and assumed the building was on fire. The building is not on fire. Two employees found better jobs. This happens at every company every single day. Your neighbor Gary quit his job at the insurance firm last week and Geico's stock didn't crater 8%.
But these weren't just any employees. These were AI researchers. High-profile ones. Which means they had LinkedIn profiles with more than 500 connections and maybe gave a TED talk once. Google has approximately 182,000 employees. Losing two of them is a rounding error. Losing two of them on the same week is apparently an existential crisis worthy of erasing $200 billion in market cap.
The technical analysis here is bulletproof. Draw a line on the chart. Any line. It doesn't matter. The stock went down because people who don't understand AI got scared that the people who do understand AI might go work somewhere else. This is like selling your car because your mechanic switched garages. The car still f*cking runs.
Somewhere right now a day trader is explaining to his wife why they can't afford groceries this month because Google lost two employees he'd never heard of until yesterday. He's probably pulling up articles about the future of machine learning on his Chromebook. Built by Google. Using Google Chrome. Searching on Google. But sure, the company's finished.
Photo by Igor Omilaev on Unsplash
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