Why did Alphabet stock drop after earnings, according to Kara Swisher and Scott Galloway?

Alphabet missed Wall Street's quarterly earnings expectations for the first time in nearly four years and fell about 13% at the time of taping, on course for its biggest post-earnings drop ever, even though revenue grew 25%. Kara Swisher pointed to negative free cash flow of $9 billion and long-term debt of $125 billion, up roughly sixfold from $21 billion. Scott Galloway said the market fears the return on AI spending will not catch up with the investment.

• Cloud revenue more than doubled to $30.7 billion, while search advertising grew 12% and missed expectations.
• The Gemini app reached 1 billion users.
• Swisher said Google's AI search tool would not say who won the 2020 election, which the hosts called bad timing for a company selling an AI story.

Source: our own transcription of the episode. The full conversation is on Pivot (2026-10-30). Read the whole episode summary →

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