This was a week where even bad news was somehow translated into good news. As a result, the Fab Five posted one of their strongest weeks of the year (+$773 billion) while the Telco Top Five lost $3 billion. Through the first 11 months of 2025, the Fab Five have added $2.7 trillion dollars in market capitalization while the Telco Top Five have lost $65 billion.
Over 55% of this year’s $2.7 trillion gain has come from Alphabet, the parent company of Google. Search is not dead but being transformed by Gemini, Google’s AI answer to ChaptGPT (benchmarking of Gemini 3.0 to ChatGPT, Grok and others is here). Google’s cloud unit continues to grow at or above market rates. And, as we reported in the last full Brief, Apple is using some parts of Gemini to make Siri better (and paying Google $1 billion/ yr to do so – more in this Bloomberg article).
In other news, the parlor game “Succession – Apple Edition” has begun with rumors beginning to swirl that Tim Cook is going to announce his retirement in the January earnings call. Two of the four individuals mentioned in this Wall Street Journal article are over 60, so our guess is that it’s a two-person rate between John Ternus, who runs the hardware division of Apple and Craig Federighi, who runs software. There are puts and takes to either candidate, but we think that either would be able to street the company to higher values. Our money is on Craig. We think that having an executive return to the company is also a possibility but unlikely given the existing internal talent pool, and think it would be highly unlikely that they start with an outsider. Tim Cook will probably take the Chairman role from Art Levinson who will turn 76 on March 31. Look for more in January.
Finally, former Verizon Business CEO Tami Erwin penned this heartfelt LinkedIn post to her former Verizon colleagues who were laid off last week. Very good advice. We think that someone (Denny Strigl? Tony Melone?) should pen the next article called “Getting Back to Verizon Basics.” Waxing nostalgic about the past decade of success won’t win the next one. It might take assistance from another retired insider to reignite the Verizon fire.
File is below. Please direct questions and comments to [email protected]. Have a great remainder of the Thanksgiving holiday!
