How does one of the world's most powerful companies lose nearly $270 billion in market value in a single day even when its business is growing? That's the question investors around the world were asking after Alphabet, Google's parent company, suffered one of its biggest stock market drops in years. The surprising part is that Google wasn't reporting weak earnings. Revenue was rising. Cloud growth was booming. Its AI investments were expanding rapidly. Yet investors hit the sell button. What happened behind the scenes reveals a much bigger story about the future of artificial intelligence, talent wars, and a growing fear that even tech giants can lose their edge.
