In some ways, getting named to the Dow Jones Industrial Average is like a 37th birthday: First, it doesn’t mean as much as it used to.

Second, it’s an unmistakable indicator of the transition from trendsetting youth to comparatively staid “adulting.”

Exhibit A(BC): Google-parent Alphabet is set to replace Verizon on the price-weighted 30-company index next week, a sign that the once definitive disruptor is now, at least notionally, a steady industrial titan of the modern age.

Talent Wars

In fact, Google has found itself more of the disruptee in recent days, unable to shake a pair of plucky young competitors nipping at its heels. Its shares have been hammered in the past week as two top artificial intelligence researchers spurned the company to join OpenAI and Anthropic. In what may be the most costly LinkedIn profile updates of all time, the resignations helped wipe out $270 billion of the company’s market value.

Outsized as it may seem, the extraordinary fallout may match the extraordinary scope of the brain drain:

• First, Gemini co-lead Noam Shazeer said last week that he was leaving the company to join OpenAI. Shazeer co-wrote a pivotal research paper in 2017 that pioneered the “transformer architecture” now underpinning much of the AI industry (the “T” in ChatGPT stands for “transformer”); Google paid $2.7 billion to “acqui-hire,” or “acqui-rehire,” Shazeer in 2024 after he left the Big Tech company three years earlier to launch Character.AI.
• Days later, veteran Google DeepMind director John Jumper said he’d be jumping ship to join Anthropic. Jumper had been an integral part of Google’s AI coding team and won the 2024 Nobel Prize in Chemistry for his work using his AlphaFold deep learning algorithm to predict protein structures.

“Google is losing the war for talent at the frontier of AI,” DA Davidson’s head of technology research, Gil Luria, told Barron’s earlier this week. “Google had the state-of-the-art model for a few weeks last year, which helped it get credit as an AI winner, but has fallen off since, and these departures may mean it is falling behind.”

This Is Dow You Do It: Google’s stock is now down more than 6% in the past five trading days, after slipping 0.3% on Wednesday. Unfortunately, the Dow listing likely won’t confer extra credibility. Fellow tech titans Amazon, Apple, Microsoft and Nvidia have already beaten it to the Dow punch, and show that addition to the index hardly provides a bump. Nvidia and Amazon fell 0.8% and 0.1%, respectively, on their Dow Inauguration Days in 2024. The index is weighted by share price, not market cap. Meaning that, given their roughly equal stock prices, it’s the one place that Home Depot (market cap: $341 billion) can say it’s on equal footing with the $4.2 trillion Google.

Lee Robinson shorted the subprime mortgage market in advance of the 2008 financial crisis, turning $20 million into $200 million. For that, the Brit was not portrayed in the hit film The Big Short, which focused on his American short-selling brethren. He did, however, witness the real-life version of the Deutsche Bank housing market presentation famously dramatized by Ryan Gosling as a Jenga game heralding economic catastrophe.

Now, Robinson’s angling for a role in the sequel. He told Bloomberg News his investment firm, Altana, is launching a fund that’s designed to protect against a downturn in the private credit market and includes short bets against life insurers like Lincoln National, MetLife and Berkshire Hathaway with exposure to the $1.8 trillion sector.

Trading Places

As you’ve by now read more times than Archimedes could count, private credit investors are in cash-out mode this year. Rising redemption requests have forced major fund managers BlackRock, Morgan Stanley, Blue Owl, Apollo Global, and Cliffwater to impose caps on withdrawals. Industry champions note the caps are designed to protect investors from a fire sale, and regulators have said they don’t view private credit as posing a systemic risk. But that hasn’t fully satisfied concerns about defaults, valuations and exposure to the AI-vulnerable software industry, and so the redemption requests keep rolling in.

Among the biggest backers of private credit are life insurers, attracted by the higher yields on debt issued by non-bank lenders. Earlier this month, Moody’s said US life insurers’ $807 billion of private credit and illiquid assets at the end of 2025 represented a fifth of their combined fixed-income portfolio, up from 18% a year earlier, “raising risks owing to weaker credit quality.” So shorting insurers as a proxy bet against private credit is fit for Altana’s bearish appetite. Robinson has been open about this trade for a while now, but there are signs it’s gaining steam:

• He told the Financial Times in April that Altana held credit default swaps that will pay out if US life insurers exposed to private credit fail to meet their obligations. What’s new is the fund, which will include Altana capital but allow others to get in on the trade.
• But it’s not just Altana: Bloomberg reported that Wall Street firms, including JPMorgan Chase and Goldman Sachs, have been responding to client requests for financial products that protect against private credit risk.

Another Way to Play: S&P Dow Jones Indices launched a credit default swap index linked to the private credit market in April, allowing investors to bet against the sector.

A Jeff Bezos-backed startup is wiping the slate clean on EVs, revealing that it’ll sell its first electric truck for just under $25,000. Slate Auto managed that bargain-bin price by making the vehicle radically simple — hand-crank windows, no radio, and a smartphone mount instead of a built-in navigation screen.

The company, which came out of stealth more than a year ago, started taking preorders yesterday for the vehicle. While the truck’s initial sticker price is $24,950, shoppers can spruce up the base model with extras that might come standard in a competing car: exterior colors other than gray, speakers, floor mats, etc. For an additional $5,000, owners can turn their truck into an SUV.

Slate also said it won’t have dealerships, instead delivering models directly. The startup has racked up more than 160,000 reservations and plans to start deliveries in the fourth quarter.

Race to the Bottom

Slate Auto’s new truck undercuts the cost of a new car in the US by nearly half as its founders look to make its car this generation’s Ford Model T. A new car cost an average $49,000 last month, according to Kelley Blue Book, and a truck set shoppers back by about $66,000.

Electric cars typically cost more:

• An EV last month ran up a bill of more than $54,000, and that’s down more than 4% since last year as automakers cut prices to cope with excess inventory. EV sales fell after customers lost a $7,500 tax credit that helped the cars compete with gas-powered options.
• Ford is working on a $30,000 electric truck that it plans to start selling next year. Tesla killed plans to produce a $25,000 EV in 2024, but Reuters reported in April that Elon Musk’s company is trying to make a smaller and cheaper vehicle soon.

Cutting Out the Middle: Slate Auto’s simplified truck could fill a gap in the market. Data from Ford, Nissan and Hyundai shows shoppers gravitating toward bare-bones base models rather than cars with all the bells and whistles. This March, cars that retailed for less than $30,000 made up about 14% of US sales, Cox Automotive found.