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Google tried to distance itself from a pre-planned drag show featuring longtime performer “Peaches Christ” in San Francisco but employees still attended. Some of them booed their employer for what they viewed as a caving to pressure of an internal religion-led protest.

Jennifer Elias

A drag show originally meant to celebrate the end of Pride month turned into a rallying cry for corporate allyship as dozens of Google employees attended, some of whom booed their employer.

“I don’t usually usually talk about this sort of thing,” began longtime San Francisco-based drag performer Joshua Grannell, as he opened his a multi-performer drag show Tuesday evening from a small stage at a bar in the Castro neighborhood.

“Folks who work at Google put this together and we did this last year and it was fabulous and it was fun and we had a good time,” he continued. “And this year, a group of Christians at Google signed a petition to take this event from their employees because they thought it was upsetting, offensive, controversial.”

“Boo!” yelled dozens of attendees, including several Google employees wearing company “Pride” T-shirts.

Grannell, whose drag performer name is “Peaches Christ” was a planned performer at a drag show sponsored and promoted by Google to close out Pride month. However, as CNBC previously reported, the company removed its affiliation and instead encouraged employees away from the drag show to a new event at its offices. The move came as several hundred employees signed a petition opposing the drag performance, claiming it was offensive to their Christian religion and that they’d complained to human resources.

The company said the event hadn’t gone through the proper approval process but didn’t comment on the petition.

Attendees and Grannell said they viewed the change as a buckling to pressure of the Christian employees’ petition and complaints.

“I was called all sorts of things,” Grannell said on stage, referring to the petition. “Boo!” more attendees yelled. “We support you!” one employee yelled from the crowd.

Watch a video from the show here.

Both employees and Grannell told CNBC they were disappointed in the company for backtracking, adding that the company held a similar event last year without any problems.

Attendees described Grannell as an “icon” and “an institution” in the gay community.

“I’ve been a performer for nearly 30 years in San Francisco, and I employ hundreds of people, performers and artists across the city,” Grannell told CNBC.

“This thing that happened with Google, unfortunately for this event, is actually indicative of a huge groundswell of hatred across the country using drag queens and trans people a scapegoats,” he told the crowd Tuesday, which garnered more boos and yelling.

Drag shows have been a target of religious and conservative organizations and politicians leading up to the 2024 presidential election. That includes a flurry of legislative proposals backed by GOP governors attempting to limit drag events. 

Corporations have also faced backlash for Pride-related marketing. Bud Light came into the crosshairs after it struck a partnership with trans influencer Dylan Mulvaney, while North Face received backlash for an ad featuring drag queen Pattie Gonia. Target and Kohl’s have been criticized for Pride-themed clothing.

Joshua Grannell, who goes by the stage name “Peaches Christ,”addressed Google’s decision to distance itself from the pre-planned drag show.

Jennifer Elias

Following Grannell’s opening monologue, he repeated the reason for the event was to celebrate Pride and then proceeded to introduce the performers on a small stage toward the back of the venue, which held rainbow-colored lights.

The first performer sang in a sequenced Marilyn Monroe-style red dress to Diana Ross’ upbeat “The Boss.” The next performer dawned a large, multi-color coat who danced to Gloria Gaynor’s “I will survive.”

A few others followed, with their own unique acts. Some were comedic musical skits, others featured dancing and lip syncing.

“For me, it’s real bummer to see this happen but I also think it needs to be called out,” Grannell told CNBC after the show, referring to Google’s decision to distance itself from the planned event. “If you’re going to put a rainbow flag on stuff and march in the queer Pride parade but not support your queer employees and not take a stand against anti-queer sentiment, even in the name of religion, then you’re not a real ally.”

Drag performer acted out a comedic skit about her love of cats while lip synching “Crazy” by Patsy Cline. The skit garnered laughs from the audience.

Grannell said the stakes for a lot of drag performers are high, as some of them have come to rely on corporate sponsorship. “We’ve now created a culture where corporations’ allyship includes paying performers and paying queer people to celebrate Pride month. Google sets a standard for a lot of companies in the industry and in San Francisco,” he added.

Attendees and employees alike danced, cheered and took turns walking dollar bills to the stage throughout the nearly two-hour event.

“You have some work to do, Googlers,” Grannell told the crowd as he ended the show. “We’ve got to keep fighting and we will win—we’re on the right side of history.”

The crowd erupted in applause and cheers.

Google did not respond to a request for comment.

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Paramount cuts costs, SoftBank sells its Nvidia stake, Warren Buffett’s new tradition and more in Morning Squawk

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Paramount cuts costs, SoftBank sells its Nvidia stake, Warren Buffett's new tradition and more in Morning Squawk

Traders work on the floor at the New York Stock Exchange (NYSE) in New York City, U.S., Nov. 10, 2025.

Brendan McDermid | Reuters

This is CNBC’s Morning Squawk newsletter. Subscribe here to receive future editions in your inbox.

Here are five key things investors need to know to start the trading day:

1. The reopening trade

Investors yesterday were pleased with the Senate’s approval of an agreement that could end the government shutdown. The three major indexes all surged in Monday’s session, regaining ground after posting sizable losses last week.

Here’s what to know:

  • The tech-heavy Nasdaq Composite saw its biggest one-day rally since May, signaling traders’ shift back into the artificial intelligence trade. Microsoft snapped its longest losing streak since 2011.
  • Bitcoin climbed back above the $105,000 mark, another sign of the deal boosting animal spirits in the market.
  • The Senate officially passed the bill in another vote last night, sending it to the House of Representatives.
  • Earlier in the day, House Speaker Mike Johnson did not commit to holding a December vote on extending enhanced Affordable Care Act subsidies — one of the deal’s key guarantees for Democrats. Here’s what Democrats are, and aren’t, getting in the deal.
  • Johnson said members of his chamber should return to Washington, D.C., to vote on the deal as soon as possible. Members of Congress were told that votes in the House could begin by 4 p.m. ET tomorrow.
  • When asked if he supports the agreement, President Donald Trump on Monday said “I would say so.”
  • Follow live markets updates here.

2. Cashing in your chips

The logo of Japanese company SoftBank Group is seen outside the company’s headquarters in Tokyo on January 22, 2025. 

Kazuhiro Nogi | Afp | Getty Images

Japanese firm SoftBank said Tuesday that it sold all of its stake in Nvidia for $5.83 billion. Nvidia shares slipped nearly 2% in premarket trading this morning.

The sale comes as SoftBank focuses its attention on OpenAI, the buzzy startup behind ChatGPT. But SoftBank is still involved with Nvidia through other artificial intelligence ventures that use the chipmaker’s technology, such as the Stargate project.

SoftBank also dumped some of its T-Mobile position for $9.17 billion.

3. Paramount+, or Paramount-?

The Paramount Studios in Los Angeles, California, US, on Sunday, Nov. 9, 2025.

Ethan Swope | Bloomberg | Getty Images

Paramount Skydance announced more plans to cut costs, lay off employees and raise prices yesterday. Shares jumped as much as 5% in overnight trading.

The CBS parent said it’s aiming to trim an additional $1 billion from its business. As CNBC’s Lillian Rizzo notes, that’s on top of the $2 billion in savings the company outlined when its merger completed in August. Paramount also announced its latest round of layoffs, tied to its divestiture of parts of its South American business, impacting about 1,600 employees.

The entertainment company said it would hike prices for its Paramount+ streaming service in the first quarter of 2026.

4. Air travel headwinds

American Airlines planes sit at gates at Charlotte-Douglas International Airport (CLT) on November 9, 2025 in Charlotte, North Carolina.

Grant Baldwin | Getty Images

Air travel remains under pressure as the government shutdown strains airport infrastructure. Just over 6% of U.S. flights were cancelled yesterday, according to aviation data firm Cirium.

Air traffic controllers, who are required to work during the shutdown, missed their second full paycheck yesterday. Trump said he would recommend a $10,000 bonus for controllers who don’t take off time during the shutdown, while threatening to dock pay for those who don’t go to work.

Flexjet global CEO Andrew Collins told CNBC’s Leslie Josephs that demand for flights on private planes has jumped sharply in recent days. But the Federal Aviation Administration on Monday limited private flights at 12 major U.S. airports amid the staffing challenges.

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5. A holiday tradition

Warren Buffett and Greg Abel walkthrough the Berkshire Hathaway Annual Shareholders Meeting in Omaha, Nebraska on May 3, 2025.

David A. Grogen | CNBC

Berkshire Hathaway CEO Warren Buffett plans to “step up” the pace of giving away his $149 billion fortune to his children’s foundations, according to a letter released yesterday.

But Buffett said he would hold onto a “significant amount” of Class A shares so investors can build confidence in his successor, Greg Abel. Buffett said it “shouldn’t take long” for shareholders to warm up to Abel, who will take over as chief executive next year.

Buffett said his letter will become a Thanksgiving tradition and that Abel will take over writing Berkshire’s annual shareholder letters. In typical fashion for the investing titan, the Oracle of Omaha used his note on Monday to dole out some life advice, too.

The Daily Dividend

How the TNT shortage could impact U.S. consumers

CNBC’s Lillian Rizzo, Sean Conlon, Dan Mangan, Kevin Breuninger, Leslie Josephs, Kate Rogers, Yun Li, John Melloy, Ryan Ermey and Macklin Fishman contributed to this report. Josephine Rozzelle edited this edition.

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AI spending is not all equal. Wall Street rewards hyperscalers, punishes DoorDash and Duolingo

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AI spending is not all equal. Wall Street rewards hyperscalers, punishes DoorDash and Duolingo

Duolingo, Doordash and Roblox apps

Tiffany Heard-Grear | Bloomberg | Getty Images

Across the tech sector this earnings season, companies told Wall Street to get ready for ramped up spending as the artificial intelligence boom accelerates.

But while investors largely rewarded the megacaps for their boosted capital expenditure forecasts, or just shrugged off their guidance, companies outside the trillion-dollar club are getting punished.

DoorDash, Duolingo and Roblox all saw their stock prices suffer double-digit slumps after the companies said spending is on the incline, raising concerns about future profitability. Unlike the tech giants, which are promising hefty buildouts to meet soaring demand for AI services and workloads, smaller companies are getting viewed more skeptically, with analysts uncertain about whether their bets will pay off and result in substantial new revenue opportunities.

“Investors don’t like investment cycles,” Evercore ISI’s Mark Mahaney told CNBC’s “Closing Bell: Overtime” last week. That’s what happened, he said, with “all those companies that went into and out of this earnings cycle and negatively surprised the market by saying, ‘We really want to lean into investments first.'”

Investors don't like investment cycles, says Evercore ISI's Mark Mahaney

DoorDash’s stock sank 17% on Thursday, its worst drop in the food delivery platform’s five years as a public company. In its third-quarter earnings report, DoorDash said it plans to shell out “several hundred million dollars” on new products and technology next year.

“We wish there was a way to grow a baby into an adult without investment, or to see the baby grow into an adult overnight, but we do not believe this is how life or business works,” the company wrote in its earnings release.

DoorDash has recently amped up investments in autonomous delivery, with the launch of Dot in September, and spent a combined $5.1 billion on restaurant booking platform SevenRooms and British food delivery service Deliveroo.

CEO Tony Xu said on the earnings call that the company’s investment track record signals “some success in repeating this playbook, and we’re doing this now for future growth.”

Analysts see it differently.

“Looking ahead, we maintain our Hold rating as we see limited multiple expansion opportunity until there is greater clarity surrounding how long investments could weigh on margins,” wrote analysts at Gordon Haskett.

A DoorDash spokesperson said in a statement that the company is “fortunate to have an increasingly successful core business” and that it takes a “disciplined investment approach” to new projects.

‘Monetization and user growth at odds’

Duolingo also had its worst day as a public company on Thursday, despite beating on revenue and bookings in its third-quarter earnings report.

The stock lost a quarter of its value and is now down 41% for the year, after Duolingo said it’s prioritizing finding new users. The company has been pouring money into AI features, such as an interactive video call option, as it tries to win over paying subscribers.

“There are experiments that put monetization and user growth at odds, and part of my job has been, always, arbitrating between these two,” CEO Luis von Ahn told CNBC after the earnings report. He said the company is shifting the “trade off to be much more towards user growth.”

On the earnings call, von Ahn said that it’s “going to take some time for us to see the results, financial results, over the long-term investments that we’re doing.”

After the report, analysts at KeyBanc Capital Markets downgraded the stock to the equivalent of hold from buy, citing concerns that increased investments will weigh on near-term bookings, earnings and valuation.

“This suggests to us that it might take several quarters to see more meaningful financial benefits,” the firm said.

Duolingo didn’t provide a comment.

AWS to build out new AI infrastructure for OpenAI in $38B deal

Meanwhile, the biggest companies in the tech industry may similarly be years away from seeing if their big AI wagers result in profits. But investors aren’t terribly concerned.

Alphabet and Amazon both rallied after reporting earnings in late October. The companies again raised their forecasts for capital expenditures for the year and suggested that there’s no slowdown coming in 2026.

Amazon Web Services is the leading provider of cloud infrastructure, a market where Google is third, and is racing to build out data centers to meet expected demand for compute capacity tied to AI. AWS and Google are also investing in their own silicon so that they’re less dependent on Nvidia and can offer customers a more complete tech stack.

Microsoft, which is second in the cloud infrastructure market, slipped after its earnings report, which also included a guide to higher capex. But the company, valued at close to $4 trillion, still mostly has the backing of Wall Street as it competes for more AI deals and bigger workloads.

The exception among the megacaps is Meta, which sank 11% following earnings. The company expects to spend as much as $72 billion this year on capex, but doesn’t sell a cloud service that rivals Amazon, Google and Microsoft.

Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg wears the Meta Ray-Ban Display glasses, as he delivers a speech presenting the new line of smart glasses, during the Meta Connect event at the company’s headquarters in Menlo Park, California, U.S., Sept. 17, 2025.

Carlos Barria | Reuters

While Meta says it’s infusing AI across its product portfolio and improving targeting in its core ad business, the lack of clarity surrounding revenue is giving investors pause. Mahaney grouped Meta in with companies that he said “negatively surprised” the market.

Roblox was also in that category.

Shares of the online gaming platform fell almost 16% on Oct. 30, after the company warned that higher spending on safety and infrastructure could hit margins. CEO David Baszucki told CNBC’s “Squawk on the Street” that safety on its platform was a “top priority.”

Finance chief Naveen Chopra said the investments may weigh on near-term engagement and bookings but are “a magnifier of longer-term growth.”

Analysts at Benchmark downgraded shares to hold from buy, expecting investments will hinder profitability. Roth analysts, who recommend holding the stock, also see a potential hit to margins next year.

“The impact from these initiatives may negatively impact platform engagement in the near term,” the analysts at Roth wrote, “but is expected to have a greater long-term benefit for users.”

Roblox didn’t provide a comment for this story.

WATCH: Rising tide lifting hyperscaler boats

Rising tide is lifting all hyperscaler boats right now, says Madrona's Matt McIlwain

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Oura expects close to $2 billion in 2026 sales, almost doubling for the second consecutive year

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Oura expects close to  billion in 2026 sales, almost doubling for the second consecutive year

The Oura Ring 4.

Courtesy: Oura

The chief executive of Finland’s Oura told CNBC on Tuesday that he expects the wearable tech company to generate close to $2 billion in sales next year.

The smart ring maker has upped its forecast as it invests in artificial intelligence and international expansion, hot on the heels of a $900 million funding round in October. 

Oura is on track to secure $1 billion in sales in 2025, doubling its 2024 revenue, CEO Tom Hale told CNBC’s Arjun Kharpal from Web Summit in Lisbon, Portugal.  

Next year is “certainly going to be a lot more,” Hale said in an exclusive interview. “I don’t know if we know exactly how much but, it’ll be north, maybe close to $2 billion.” 

It represents a sharp increase from a previously reported sales forecast of over $1.5 billion, setting Oura up to nearly double sales for a second year running.  

“I think a big part of that is just that we’ve really hit the market well with health features for women, we’ve expanded internationally, all these things are driving our growth,” Hale said.  

Oura eyes 'close to $2 billion' in 2026 sales: CEO

The Finnish company, which is valued at $11 billion, sold over 5.5 million Oura Rings since the product’s launch in 2015 up until September. Oura says it has sold more than 2.5 million rings since June 2024.

Oura has been an “AI-forward company from the get-go,” Hale said, but he is even more bullish on the company’s adoption of AI going forward as the company eyes a range of preventative healthcare features.  

“One of the things that Oura does particularly well is it generates insights — basically text — for you that helps you understand your metrics,” he said. The company uses AI to translate those data points into advice and coaching. It has also its own chatbot, the Oura Advisor, which is like a “doctor in your pocket” that can be asked questions, Hale added.

In 2022, Oura struck a partnership with Natural Cycles, an FDA-cleared birth control app, to add fertility features to its offering. It introduced glucose monitoring earlier this year, via a partnership with Dexcom, and in October announced blood pressure research. 

“One the things that we really believe is that we can become like this sort of guardian angel, right, that’s with you all the time and is starting to give you these predictions about your longer-term health,” Hale said.  

Despite Oura’s ambitions, there is “no news on an IPO,” he added. 

— CNBC’s Arjun Kharpal contributed to this report

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