Hi! Pole imposition: Devoted F1 fans who didn’t score tickets to the Vegas Grand Prix were riding a pair of escalators over the weekend in an effort to catch a glimpse of the high-octane action without getting fined. Today we’re exploring:

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Google has smoked the rest of its Big Tech peers this year

Sundar Pichai, the most senior Googler of them all, has a lot to be happy about on the work front right now.

Just six months ago, Google was criticized by some investors for being a little lost. Its ultimate cash cow, Google Search, seemed threatened by ChatGPT. Many of the company's nascent bets were still far from making a positive impact on its bottom line, and the US government was still toying with the idea of breaking up the Search-Ads-Maps-Gmail-Chrome-YouTube machine.

But a lot has gone right in the period since. Most notably, the company has stormed ahead in the AI race, with a warm reception to its latest model, Gemini 3 — which even spooked OpenAI’s Sam Altman — sending the stock to record highs at the end of last week, as investors anticipate direct usage of the Gemini chatbot and an even stronger AI-boosted moat around the rest of Google’s vast suite of software products.

That release, combined with the landmark news in September that the nuclear antitrust option — breaking the company up — was essentially off the table, has been the catalyst for a stellar run in Alphabet shares, which is now the best-performing BATMMAAN stock in 2025.

Google has notched other wins, too. The company just released a new TPU chip that’s 30x more power efficient than its 2018 version, helping it keep up with its exploding AI compute needs at a time when Nvidia’s chips are hard to come by. Meanwhile, its self-driving arm, Waymo, has rapidly expanded to include freeways and new cities (with a 2,500-car fleet in service that outnumbers Tesla’s robotaxis), its search business is notching record revenues, its cloud division is signing deal after deal — most recently with NATO this morning — and YouTube remains the biggest thing on TV.

As one user on social media put it, maybe the next Google... is Google.

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No, it’s not a tech company

Big Pharma has never been bigger, at least financially: Eli Lilly, buoyed by sales of its blockbuster weight-loss drugs Mounjaro and Zepbound, joined the $1 trillion market cap club towards the end of last week. 

The pharmaceutical giant’s market value eclipsed $1 trillion shortly after markets opened on Friday and floated around the milestone throughout the day before closing at $1.002 trillion, making Lilly only the second American non-tech company in history to pass the milestone, after Berkshire Hathaway did the same in August 2024. 

The growth comes as the company continues to solidify its dominance in the GLP-1 market, thanks to Mounjaro and Zepbound becoming the top-selling drugs in the world and overtaking Ozempic-maker Novo Nordisk, an early entrant and Lilly’s top rival in the space. 

Still, Lilly joined the club at a bit of an awkward time. Investors have grown increasingly worried that the return on hundreds of billions, or even trillions, of dollars worth of data centers might be a little slimmer than previously thought.

Lilly is comparably less speculative — which is saying a lot for a pharmaceutical company. The company manufactures and sells real, tangible products that are in high demand and are producing billions of dollars in revenue right now. While it won’t have exclusive rights to those drugs forever, and it’s unclear what company will make the next blockbuster GLP-1, investors seem willing to bet that the drugs are going to keep making someone a fortune, and it might just be Eli Lilly for a fair while.

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The US Has a Major Opportunity In Natural Gas — Here’s an ETF That Taps Into It

The US is the cornerstone of global energy supply, standing as the world’s largest natural gas producer and exporter.¹ As rising global power consumption drives demand for natural gas higher, Global X’s newly launched US Natural Gas ETF (LNGX) offers investors pure-play exposure to American companies with high natural gas exposure across the value chain, from upstream production to midstream processing, transportation, and exports.

While US natural gas stands to benefit from the growth of AI and data centers and their large, continuous power needs, it is not just another “AI play.” The sector’s expansion is being driven by a multitude of factors, including rising exports of liquefied natural gas (LNG), growing energy demand, and supportive energy policies which fuel infrastructure investment.

For ETF investors, LNGX offers both a tactical opportunity, as the US strengthens its role as a global energy producer, and strategic structural growth potential, supported by growing exports, infrastructure expansion, and rising demand for reliable baseload power worldwide.

About half of American adults use YouTube and Facebook every single day

Being an adult (or even a child) in 2025 often means navigating the pitfalls of spending too much time on social media.

Many might not want to know how much endless scrolling is affecting us — and, for what it’s worth, Meta appears to feel the same, with Reuters reporting earlier today that the company shut down internal research into the mental health effects of Facebook following some concerning findings.

Still, a growing awareness of the risks doesn’t seem to be deterring too many Americans just yet. Last week, Pew Research Center published an update to their survey on social media use, finding that roughly half of Americans in 2025 use Facebook and YouTube every single day (52% and 48%, respectively).

High profiles

Those were also the only two sites that were used by a majority across all age groups, the survey found. However, young people were far more likely to use the video-sharing platform: only 68% of 18-29 year-olds reported using Facebook, compared with 95% who use YouTube, which retained its crown as the most used social media overall.

While Facebook has been trying to solve its youth problem by bringing back old features like “pokes,” it’s made more headway with age-inclusive services like Facebook Dating and Marketplace. Zuckerberg’s tech empire is also seeing some success at taking on rival X (Twitter) with text-based Threads — a new entrant in Pew’s survey this year, citing 8% of people now using the Instagram-linked site.

At the same time, TikTok, one of Meta’s biggest competitors, has expanded its American user base even as a question mark hangs over its future: the share of US adults reporting using the short-form video app has grown from 21% to 37% over the last four years. Meanwhile, the share who’ve said they use the ever-more influential social forum Reddit has more than doubled to 26% since 2019.

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Natural gas currently generates 40% of the power used by data centers, with forecasts anticipating that the current share of AI power generation could rise as high as 60% by the end of the decade.² Discover more at Global X ETFs.

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Important Information 

1 Reuters, US gas-heavy power pipeline set to stoke LNG exporter tensions, Aug 2025.

2 CNBC, AI could drive a natural gas boom as power companies face surging electricity demand, as of May 5, 2024.