Green Owl

AI

How much was real

Google reported $112bn of profit last quarter. About $35bn of it came from actually selling anything.

Numbers as of 28 Aug 2026

The full story

  1. Seven columns, each as tall as that company's reported quarterly net income, filled with water to the part that came from the business. Google 112 billion dollars, 35 billion from the business. Amazon 63 billion, 21 billion. Nvidia 60 billion, 53 billion. Microsoft 36 billion, 33 billion. Apple 30 b
  2. The biggest: Google's paper profit came to 77 billion dollars after tax in three months, from two stakes that were marked up: SpaceX, worth 94 billion dollars, which went public in June, and about 14 percent of Anthropic, which raised money in May. Nearly all of it came from shares it never sold.
  3. One stake: Amazon's paper profit was about 41.3 billion dollars after tax in three months, almost all from Anthropic, which raised money in May. Nearly twice what its business earned.
  4. A small boost: Nvidia's paper profit was about 6.5 billion dollars after tax in three months. Its stakes include SpaceX, worth over 20 billion dollars, which went public in June; the chipmaker Intel; and CoreWeave, a cloud that rents out its chips. Small next to what its chips earned.
  5. A small boost: Microsoft's paper profit was about 3.1 billion dollars after tax in three months, from two AI labs: Anthropic, the lab behind Claude, and OpenAI, the lab behind ChatGPT. Its business still earned over 9 of every 10 dollars.
  6. Mostly paper: Tesla's paper profit was about 750 million dollars after tax in three months, on SpaceX shares it got for 2 billion dollars in xAI, swapped in the merger. Its operating profit fell 57 percent, to 398 million dollars.
  7. What did it: two price tags made most of the paper profit. Anthropic raised money at 965 billion dollars on 28 May, up from 380 billion in February. SpaceX went public on 12 June at 1.77 trillion dollars; Google, Nvidia and Tesla own shares. Apple and Meta had no gain like this; Meta owns 49 percent
  8. You may never see our page again if you don't follow. Green Owl, where the money goes, weekly.

Some of the Magnificent Seven hold big stakes in private companies - AI labs, and for Tesla, SpaceX. The rules make them mark those stakes to market each quarter, straight through the income statement. A valuation jumps, reported profit jumps with it, and no share was sold.

Last quarter's reported net income, and the part from the business:

Google - $35.1bn of $112.2bn. Equity gains added $77.1bn. Amazon - about $21.3bn of $62.6bn. $53.4bn pre-tax, 'primarily from our investments in Anthropic'. Nvidia - about $53.2bn of $59.7bn. $7.77bn of pre-tax equity gains. Microsoft - $32.7bn of $35.8bn. A $3.2bn Anthropic gain plus $480m from OpenAI. Apple - $29.8bn and Meta - $15.8bn hold no comparable stake. Tesla is on the chart. You may have to look for it: the whole quarter was $1.11bn, of which $1.005bn was an unrealised gain on its SpaceX stake. About $0.36bn came from the business.

None of this is improper or hidden - the figures are the companies' own, and the rules require the mark-up. The number that led the coverage just is not the one measuring the business.

Method: where a company gives the net-income effect we use it; where it gives only a pre-tax gain we apply that quarter's effective tax rate.

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Where the numbers come from

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Companies in this picture

AppleAmazonAnthropicCoreWeaveGoogleIntelMetaMicrosoftNvidiaOpenAISpaceXTesla

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