Ruth Porat, chief financial officer of Alphabet Inc., speaks during a news conference at Michigan Central Station in Detroit, Michigan, on Friday, Feb. 4, 2022.
Jeff Kowalsky | Bloomberg | Getty Images
A string of Google executives have changed their roles in the span of several months, in a shift that has sidelined many of company’s remaining old guard.
The changes encompass high-profile executives such as finance chief Ruth Porat, YouTube CEO Susan Wojcicki and employee No. 8, Urs Hölzle, among others. Some say they have left their roles for a new challenge and others have left to seek opportunities in artificial intelligence.
In February, Wojcicki — one of the most prominent women in Silicon Valley — announced that she was stepping back after nine years at the helm of the Google-owned platform that grew to be the world’s most popular video service. She had been at Google for more than 25 years, after famously lending her garage to Google founders Sergey Brin and Larry Page to use as their first office.
While she’ll still be in an advisory role at Google, she said she wanted to “start a new chapter.”
Wojcicki wasn’t the only executive to leave YouTube. Robert Kyncl, the chief business officer for 12 years, stepped away to become CEO of Warner Music Group at the beginning of the year.
In March, CapitalG founder and longtime Google employee David Lawee stepped down from his role after 17 years at Alphabet, saying he wanted to explore new areas of interest and spend more time with his family.
Hölzle, who has long overseen Google’s technical infrastructure and was its eighth employee, said he would be stepping back from management after 24 years of leading technical teams, CNBC reported in July. Hölzle will be classified as an “individual contributor,” which means he will be working independently and no longer managing employees.
Also in July, Porat announced that she will step down as Alphabet‘s chief financial officer after eight years and take a new role as president and chief investment officer. When asked about the timing of the move, Porat, who was previously Morgan Stanley‘s CFO, said she wanted to take on a different set of challenges.
Porat will also be engaged with policymakers to “recognize the importance of technology” and on issues including employment, economic, competitiveness and infrastructure expansion,” the company said.
“We have a steady and experienced leadership team, many of whom have been with the company for well over a decade, ” said Google spokesperson Courtenay Mencini in statement about the shifts. “We also have a strong bench of leaders at Google who can smoothly transition when people who’ve had long and successful careers here decide to pursue new opportunities inside and outside the company.”
Searching for itself in an AI-first world
As Google looks for replacements for executives like Porat, it’s also searching for its own identity in a pivotal moment in the company’s history.
The company was caught flat-footed last fall when OpenAI launched its AI-powered chatbot ChatGPT, and suddenly found itself in a rare spot where its core search business was threatened.
Industry observers wondered if users could simply get answers from an AI-powered chatbot, how long would they keep entering queries into a search engine? It was an ironic moment for the search giant, given that CEO Sundar Pichai had been talking up the company’s “AI-first” strategy since 2016, with little to show externally.
In June, Google execs admitted to employees that users are “still not quite happy” with the search experience, CNBC reported. Search boss Prabhakar Raghavan and engineering VP HJ Kim spent several minutes pledging to do a better job to employees while Pichai noted that it’s still the most trusted search engine.
Geoffrey Hinton, known as “The godfather of AI” and one of the most respected voices in the field, told The New York Times in May that he was leaving the company after a decade to warn the world about the potential threat of AI, which he said is coming sooner than he previously thought.
Shortly before that, amid a reorganization in Google’s AI teams, the company promoted the CEO of its DeepMind subsidiary, Demis Hassabis, to lead AI for the entire company, and former McKinsey exec James Manyika to become Google’s senior vice president of technology and society and to oversee Google Research.
Google’s AI head, Jeff Dean, who’s been at the company since 1999, became a chief scientist as part of the change. The company called it a promotion, but it effectively took him out of a large leading role in AI to be an individual contributor, reportedly helping oversee Gemini, one of its critical large language models.
The company is also cutting costs, another rarity, while the core search product faces changing user behavior, ad pullbacks and an AI boom that requires increasing investment, all amid a slowing economy and investor calls to reduce spending.
It’s also staring down multiple federal lawsuits, including an imminent antitrust trial set to begin in September that alleges Google illegally maintained a monopoly by cutting off rivals from search distribution channels.
More like other big companies, some employees say
Employees’ perceptions of the company have also changed in recent years.
While potential employees still consider Google a top place to work with extremely competitive perks, it has grown to be more bureaucratic than in its earlier days.
This perception shift has created a “fragile moment” for Google amid the pressure from OpenAI and Microsoft, argued former Google employee Praveen Seshadri in a Medium post that went viral earlier this year.
“I have left Google understanding how a once-great company has slowly ceased to function,” wrote Seshadri in his blog post that detailed the challenges of Google’s growing bureaucracy.
“Like mice, they are trapped in a maze of approvals, launch processes, legal reviews, performance reviews, exec reviews, documents, meetings, bug reports, triage, OKRs, H1 plans followed by H2 plans, all-hands summits, and inevitable reorgs.”
Former Waze CEO Noam Bardin, who quit Google in 2021, shared Seshadri’s post on LinkedIn. In a blog post a couple years earlier, Bardin had written that employees aren’t incentivized to build Google products.
“The problem was me — believing I can keep the startup magic within a corporation, in spite of all the evidence showing the opposite,” he wrote in his critique of the company.
Like Seshadri and Bardin, a number of AI specialists have left the company, saying it had grown too bureaucratic to get things done.
Eight AI researchers who created “Transformers,” an integral part of the infrastructure behind ChatGPT and other chatbots, have left the search giant since 2017 — many of them going on to start their own companies. Five of them left in 2021 alone.
Llion Jones, who departed Google this month to start his own company focused on AI, told CNBC’s Jordan Novet, “the bureaucracy had built to the point where I just felt like I couldn’t get anything done.”
Other AI researchers at Google have made similar complaints in recent months. Several have gone on to start their own companies focused on AI, where they have more agency over vision and speed.
In February, longtime product exec Clay Bavor said after 18 “wonderful years” at Google, he was leaving to start an artificial intelligence company with former Salesforce co-CEO Bret Taylor. “We share an obsession with recent advances in AI, and we’re excited to build a new company to apply AI to solve some of the most important problems in business,” Bavor wrote at the time.
“We’ve made intentional efforts throughout the year to move quickly with nimble teams,” said Google spokesperson Courtenay Mencini. “For instance, products like Bard and SGE [Search Generative Experience] are being developed by small, fast-moving teams that have been built for these high-priority efforts.”
Despite its efforts, the company faced criticism from investors and its own employees when it quickly tried to announce its ChatGPT competitor Bard, which it started opening up to the wider public in March. While the rollout’s reputation has rebounded after several updates and a successful developer conference, the company still has yet to launch SGE to the wider public.
The company has also become less flexible as it strives to get employees back into the office.
Google recently cracked down on its hybrid three-day-a-week office policy to include badge tracking, and noted attendance will be included in performance reviews, CNBC previously reported. Additionally, employees who already received approval for remote work may now have that status reevaluated.
There’s also a new emphasis on cost-cutting that has taken some employees by surprise.
Even if the company had been considered slower moving, at least it had been considered secure — commonly known as a place where employees could “rest and vest.” That changed with the company’s first-ever mass layoffs in January, where Alphabet abruptly announced it was eliminating about 12,000 jobs, or 6% of its workforce, in an overnight email. Some employees reportedly arrived at work to discover their badges no longer worked. It then declined to pay out the remainder of employees’ approved leave time.
While the company included competitive severance packages, some employees lost trust in leadership, who had long encouraged employees to be kind, humble and open-minded, or “Googley.”
The company has also reduced spending on real estate, even asking employees in its cloud unit to share desks. It’s also cut down on desktop PCs and equipment refreshes for employees. It started cutting travel and events late last year.
In an all-hands meeting last September, employees voted to ask Pichai why the company is “nickel-and-diming employees” with some of its cutbacks on perks and travel.
Google’s culture can still be enjoyable even if some things, like certain swag items, are getting taken away, the CEO argued.
“I remember when Google was small and scrappy,” Pichai said. “We shouldn’t always equate fun with money. I think you can walk into a hardworking startup and people may be having fun and it shouldn’t always equate to money.”
Pichai’s statement touched a nerve. Yes, many people joined Google so their work would immediately have an impact of many more users than other companies. It’s still considered one of the top places to work, with opportunities to tackle some of the industry’s biggest problems. But, alongside all that, money and perks had flowed generously, regardless of the speed at which projects moved.
Now, the company faces its biggest challenge yet, which falls on the shoulders of Pichai and the next guard — trying to recreate the magic of its early days along with delivering revenue while being under more pressure than ever.
Ben Powell, chief strategist for Middle East and Asia Pacific at BlackRock Investment Institute, during a Bloomberg Television interview at the Abu Dhabi Finance Week (ADFW) conference in Abu Dhabi, AD, United Arab Emirates, on Monday, Dec. 9, 2024.
Bloomberg | Getty Images
The wave of capital pouring into artificial intelligence infrastructure is far from peaking, said Ben Powell, chief investment strategist for APAC at BlackRock, arguing the sector’s “picks and shovels” suppliers — from chipmakers to energy producers and copper-wire manufacturers — remain the clearest winners as hyperscalers race to outspend one another.
The surge in AI-related capital expenditure shows no sign of slowing as tech giants push aggressively to secure an edge in what they see as a winner-takes-all contest, Powell told CNBC Monday on the sidelines of the Abu Dhabi Finance Week.
“The capex deluge continues. The money is very, very clear,” he said, adding that BlackRock is focused on what he called a “traditional picks and shovels capex super boom, which still feels like it’s got more to go.”
AI infrastructure has been one of the biggest drivers of global investment this year, fueling a broader market rally, even as some investors question how long the boom can last.
Nvidia, whose GPU chips are the backbone of the AI revolution, became the first company to briefly surpass $5 trillion in market capitalization amid a dizzying AI-fueled market rally that sparked talk of an AI bubble.
The build-out has set off long-term procurement efforts across the tech sector, from chip supply agreements to power commitments. Grid operators from the U.S. to the Middle East are racing to meet soaring electricity demand from new data centers. Companies, including Amazon and Meta, have budgeted tens of billions of dollars annually for AI-related investments.
S&P Global estimates data-center power demand could nearly double by 2030, mostly driven by hyperscale, enterprise and leased facilities, along with crypto-mining sites.
‘Dipping toes into credit market’
Powell also noted that leading tech firms have only begun to tap capital markets to fund the next phase of AI expansion, suggesting additional capital is on the way.
“The big companies have only just started dipping their toes into the credit markets… feels like there’s a lot more they can do there,” he said.
The “hyperscalers” are behaving as if coming second would effectively leave them out of the market, Powell said. That mindset, he added, has pushed firms to accelerate spending even at the risk of overshooting.
Much of that capital, Powell noted, is likely to flow to the companies powering the AI build-out rather than model developers, reinforcing a growing view among global investors that the most durable gains from the AI boom may lie in the hardware, energy and infrastructure ecosystems behind the technology.
“If we’re the recipients of that cash flow, I guess that’s a pretty good place to be, whether you’re making chips, whether you’re making energy all the way down to the copper wiring,” Powell noted, expecting “positive surprises driving those stocks in the year ahead.”
Netflix’s headquarters are pictured in Hollywood, California on December 5, 2025.
Patrick T. Fallon | Afp | Getty Images
“Who’s watching?” Netflix asks whenever someone accesses its site. On Friday, it was probably everyone with an interest in business, markets and television.
The key characters that had people hooked were Netflix and Warner Bros. Discovery, which jointly announced that the streaming giant will acquire the latter’s film studio and streaming service, HBO Max. The equity deal value is pegged at $72 billion.
Netflix investors did not seem too jazzed about the deal, with shares dropping 2.89% on the sheer size of the transaction.
“Look, the math is going to hurt Netflix for a while. There’s no doubt,” Rich Greenfield, co-founder of LightShed Partners, told CNBC. “This is expensive,” he added.
But if one side is paying a lot, that means the other is receiving a bounty. Indeed, investors cheered the potential Warner Bros. Discovery windfall, sending the stock up 6.3% on the news.
It is not a done deal yet, and faces regulatory scrutiny. U.S. President Donald Trump said he would be involved in the decision, Reuters reported Monday, after a senior official from the Trump administration told CNBC’s Eamon Javers on Friday that they viewed the deal with “heavy scepticism.”
Despite this initial show of resistance, stranger things have happened in this administration, and the transaction might eventually go through. We may as well get ready for Netflix’s next blockbuster: “The K-Pop Demon Hunters’ Song of Ice and Fire”?
What you need to know today
U.S. stocks had a positive Friday. The S&P 500 clocked its ninth winning session in 10 and rose 0.3% for the week. Asia-Pacific markets traded mixed Monday. Japan’s Nikkei 225 ticked up even as data showed the country’s economy shrinking more than expected in the third quarter.
Netflix to buy Warner Bros. Discovery’s film and streaming businesses. The total equity value of the deal is $72 billion, announced the two companies Friday. But the transaction could run intoregulatory hurdles.
China’s exports grow more than expected. In U.S. dollar terms, shipments in November jumped 5.9% year on year, outstripping the 3.8% increase estimated in a Reuters poll and returning to growth from October’s 1.1% drop. But U.S.-bound exports plunged 28.6%.
A Ukraine peace deal is ‘really close.’ That’s according to Keith Kellogg, the U.S. special envoy for Ukraine, who reportedly said Saturday that there were two key outstanding issues: the future of Ukraine’s Donbas region and its Zaporizhzhia nuclear power plant.
[PRO] Have $1 million to invest? The current investment landscape might look volatile. But veteran strategists suggest that the path forward is more straightforward than it seems, advising how they would craft a $1 million portfolio.
And finally…
A construction workers paints an eagle on the Marriner S. Eccles Federal Reserve Board Building, the main offices of the Board of Governors of the Federal Reserve System, on Sept. 16, 2025 in Washington, DC.
Elon Musk has called for the European Union to be abolished after the bloc fined his social media company X 120 million euros ($140 million) for a “deceptive” blue checkmark and lack of transparency of its advertising repository.
The European Commission hit X with the ruling on Friday following a two-year investigation into the company under the Digital Services Act (DSA), which was adopted in 2022 to regulate online platforms. At the time, in a reply on X to a post from the Commission, Musk wrote, “Bulls—.”
On Saturday he stepped up his criticism of the bloc. “The EU should be abolished and sovereignty returned to individual countries, so that governments can better represent their people,” he said in a post on X.
Musk’s comments come as top U.S. government officials have also intensified their opposition to the decision.
Secretary of State Marco Rubio called the fine an “attack on all American tech platforms and the American people by foreign governments,” in a post on X on Friday.
“Today’s excessive €120M fine is the result of EU regulatory overreach targeting American innovation,” said Andrew Puzder, the U.S. ambassador to the EU, on X on Saturday.
“The Trump Administration has been clear: we oppose censorship and will challenge burdensome regulations that target US companies abroad. We expect the EU to engage in fair, open, & reciprocal trade — & nothing less.”
Last week, the Commission said breaches included “the deceptive design of its ‘blue checkmark,’ the lack of transparency of its advertising repository, and the failure to provide access to public data for researchers.”
“With the DSA’s first non-compliance decision, we are holding X responsible for undermining users’ rights and evading accountability,” said Henna Virkkunen, executive vice president for tech sovereignty, security and democracy, at the time.
X now has 60 days to inform the Commission of plans to address the issues with “deceptive” blue checkmarks. It has 90 days to submit a plan to resolve the issues with its ads repository and access to its public data for researchers.
“Failure to comply with the non-compliance decision may lead to periodic penalty payments,” the Commission said in a statement.
X.ai, the company which owns X, and the Commission have been approached for comment. oh
