“I don't really think this is a spending issue. I think Wall Street has basically given these companies the green light to spend and spend with abandon. But we're getting to the point where free cash flow is going from positive to negative, as we saw again with Google, two quarters in a row of negative free cash flow. And when that happens, the questions about the core business emerge. And so this isn't a question about AI spending. It's really a question about is your core business going to stay around long enough?”

Certainly an interesting week to be called Big Technology Podcast when the big technology companies lost nearly a trillion dollars in market cap. This is from the Financial Times. Big Tech sheds nearly $900 billion in route over soaring AI spending. Big tech companies lost about a trillion dollars in market value after another sharp rise in their spending in the third quarter, which has turned some of the most profitable businesses in history into cash incinerators as they stake their futures on AI. Shares in the big four hyperscalers, Amazon, Meta, Microsoft, and Google, all fell after revealing their third quarter results in which capital expenditures almost doubled and alarm bells sounded about slowing revenue growth in the core business. Ronjohn, here's my hot take here. You know, a lot of this has been borne by Google, which reported still strong, but not as strong as expected search results. Search results, that's funny. Search earnings, right? They were supposed to grow 15%. They grew 12%. I don't really think this is a spending issue. I think Wall Street has basically given these companies the green light to spend and spend with abandon. But we're getting to the point where free cash flow is going from positive to negative, as we saw again with Google, two quarters in a row of negative free…