Meta's ad business is sprinting. Google's search business is jogging with a limp. The gap between them hit its widest point since 2021.
The cause is artificial intelligence. It helps one company sell ads and hurts the other company's main product.
Mark Zuckerberg spent years lighting billions on fire for a virtual world where legless avatars attended meetings. Now he's winning because a robot picks which shoe ad you see at 2 a.m. The metaverse failed. The shoe ad succeeded. Nobody on Earth predicted this, least of all Mark.
Google has the opposite problem. People used to type a question into a box and get ten blue links. Now they ask a chatbot and never click anything. Google invented much of the underlying AI technology. Then it aimed it at its own cash register.
That's like inventing the fire extinguisher and using it on your own kitchen.
Sundar Pichai now has a delicate job. He must convince the world that AI is the future of search, while the present of search quietly files for a smaller apartment.
Retail traders will read this and conclude one thing. Buy Meta, sell Google. They'll do it Monday, at the top, using a phone they've dropped in a toilet twice. The gap was already priced in. It was priced in before you finished the headline. You are the last person to know, and you will tell your family about it at dinner like you discovered fire.
Here's the technical analysis. A line went up. Another line went sideways. Both lines are indifferent to you.
Meta will keep growing until AI finds a way to hurt it, too. Then you'll read a headline just like this one with the names swapped, and you'll nod like you saw it coming.
You didn't see it coming. You can't even see your own brokerage balance.
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