On Tuesday, Google’s parent company Alphabet reported higher profits and revenues in the first quarter than a year before. All in all, the tech giant reported a profit of $6.8 billion. That’s an increase of nearly three percent compared to the same quarter in 2019. Revenue grew 13 percent to $41 billion. In March, Alphabet said, its advertising revenue did take a hit but that hit wasn’t as significant as many investors feared. As a result, Alphabet’s shares rose three percent in after-hours trades.
Great news for Google and for Silicon Valley, but there was more where that came from. You see, Elon Musk’s Tesla also reported high profits despite the crisis. “The electric car maker earned net income of $16 million, while income excluding special items, such as stock-based compensation, came in at $227 million,” CNN reports.
Analysts believed beforehand that Tesla would post a “narrow loss” because of the crisis and the shutdowns of its factories in Shanghai and California. That forecast was, clearly, wrong. Tesla’s shares jumped 9 percent in after-hours. Since the start of the year, Tesla’s shares have actually doubled.
Doubled. Think about that.
And there was more good news to come for Tesla. “While near term profit guidance is on hold, we believe we will achieve industry-leading operating margins and profitability,” the company said in a statement to investors.
This while small companies everywhere are going out of business and millions of people in America have lost their jobs.
It must be absolutely marvelous to be Google’s Larry Page or Tesla’s Elon Musk. The entire world is going to flames, everybody is losing money… except for them and their companies. If it continues like this, we’ll soon end up with a Hunger Games scenario in which a very, very small percentage (far less than one percent) of the people live in great wealth, while the rest of us barely get by.
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