Jo Bhakdi onGOOGLAlphabet (Waymo)

Jo argues Waymo is far behind Tesla's Cybercab in scalability and cost, calling it effectively dead in the water as a competitor despite receiving regulatory approvals of its own.

The host uses Google's 7% earnings-day drop, in parallel with Tesla's decline, to argue Tesla's sell-off was market-wide rather than company-specific, noting Google recovered faster than Tesla.

Google's Waymo is doing crucial regulatory groundwork and public opinion formation for the autonomous vehicle industry. While their technology may lag Tesla's, their lobbying and safety data presentation is essential for industry-wide adoption.

Google is identified as a major hyperscaler spending on data center infrastructure and as a Broadcom customer for custom chips. The company faces the same energy cost pressures as other terrestrial data center operators.

Google's massive AI infrastructure investments are mathematically justified and will generate substantial returns as AI agents replace human labor. The company only needs to capture a small percentage of AI-generated value to break even.

Google's CEO is joining the orbital data center discussion, indicating the company's involvement in space-based computing infrastructure development.

Google is part of the core AGI stocks that are approaching nation-state size revenues and will benefit from the AI revolution. The Iran war doesn't change the fundamental AI transformation.

Google faces competitive pressure from Tesla's digital Optimus technology, which could disrupt Google's white-collar automation efforts. While Google has similar capabilities, Tesla's cost advantages through AI4 chips could provide a significant competitive moat.

Google is identified as one of the major AI companies that will be the biggest winners from the AI revolution and job displacement. The company will benefit from the massive productivity gains as AI replaces white collar workers.

Waymo's lidar-dependent approach to autonomous driving is fundamentally flawed and unscalable. The company's organizational design is optimized for failure because lidar prevents true AI development and world understanding.

Waymo's robotaxi business is financially unviable due to massive cost disadvantages versus Tesla. Even with Google's backing, the unit economics don't work with 8x higher vehicle costs and the need to spend 17% of Alphabet's entire cash to compete meaningfully.

Google might be already a little overvalued and the company thinks too small, focusing on trivial product tweaks rather than deploying AI as a super-intelligent organizational capability.

Google lacks the bigger goals and imagination required to deploy AGI at organizational scale, spending its time refining small UI details like Gmail button colors rather than building a super-intelligent corporate organism. Its leadership is giving away the power of AI compared to Elon.

Alphabet has 100 billion dollars cash yet is raising 15 billion externally for Waymo at a 100 billion valuation, which Jo reads as capitulation that Waymo cannot compete economically. Waymo has roughly 350 million dollars annual revenue run rate with multi-billion losses and no path to cash-flow positivity within 3 to 10 years because lidar-based hardware costs around 80,000 dollars per car and the stack requires manual city mapping.

Google stock dropped 2.51% on the GPT-5.2 release, reversing the rally it enjoyed after Gemini 3 Pro's launch a few weeks ago. Jo notes Gemini 3 Pro now trails GPT-5.2 materially on most benchmarks including GDPval.

Google owns roughly 3.5 billion users and a horizontal cloud layer via GCP, plus its own TPUs. Jo frames Alphabet as one of three cloud monopoly owners (with Amazon and Microsoft) of tens of trillions in infrastructure opportunity.

Google is one of the great leaders in frontier AI and very strong in research. Killing it now with Gemini 3.

Google at 26x forward P/E was just bought by Warren Buffett, validating it. Disciplined execution, not a bubble.

Waymo appears to be panicking and scaling aggressively in response to Tesla competition, increasing its crash rate disproportionately to fleet growth and undermining its safety-first positioning.

Waymo is on track to be dead within 36 months unless Google executes a major OEM JV or acquisition by Q1 2026 to bait-and-switch into a scalable EV robotaxi platform ahead of AGI-commoditized FSD in 2028.