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Greetings!
We’re heading into the holidays, when a look back at 2025 seems natural (and a good way to make up for the relative lack of news!). Let’s start with Google’s amazing turnaround in 2025. Not only did it emerge mostly unscathed from the antitrust litigation regarding search, it made a giant leap forward in the AI market. Conspiracy theorists will see a significance in the fact that those two things happened in that order. Indeed, it’s hard to imagine they would have happened in the reverse order.
Consider that when Amit Mehta, the judge in the search antitrust case, decided to impose relatively light requirements on Google to remedy its monopoly, he made it clear that the emergence of AI chatbots such as ChatGPT influenced his thinking. The perception that ChatGPT threatened Google’s dominance of search ended up working to Google’s advantage. It may not just be coincidence that once the threat of a more onerous remedy ruling was removed, Google suddenly emerged as a more successful force in AI. Did Google deliberately hold back its AI efforts to avoid being perceived as too powerful in AI, which could have prompted the judge to take more drastic action to weaken its search position?
That seems unlikely. But Google certainly became more comfortable about widening Gemini’s distribution on its various outlets after the ruling. For instance, shortly after the ruling it added Gemini to its Chrome browser, ensuring that more people will try Gemini. Google’s technological progress, such as the well-received release of Gemini 3 in November, which helped boost usage of the chatbot, seems more serendipitous. Whatever the cause, Google is ending the year much better positioned than when it started. Its stock price reflects that—as of Friday’s close, its shares were up 62% on the year, the best performance among the big tech names, according to Koyfin data.
In contrast, perceptions of Meta Platforms’ competitiveness in AI weakened through the year. Its release of its Llama 4 AI model in the spring, after a couple of delays, was a bit of a dud. That prompted Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg’s decision to blow up his AI research team and go on a costly hiring spree for the best talent. We should see the fruits of the new team’s work in 2026. Meanwhile, Zuckerberg’s declaration in the fall that he’d continue increasing capital spending for AI in 2026 spooked the market. Meta shares on Friday were just 12.5% higher than where they started, which is an OK performance, but well below where the stock was at over the summer.
OpenAI, as we’ve chronicled here, ran into its own issues (although ChatGPT remains the top chatbot). So if we’ve learned anything from 2025, it’s that the AI sector is still developing and that it’s too early to call a winner and a loser. If Google could come from behind this year, Meta could pull off the same feat in 2026. Or OpenAI could put to rest questions about its competitiveness. This is shaping up to be a fun year.
Two Other Big Winners of 2025
Elon Musk has to be counted as a big winner of this year, if only because of the Delaware Supreme Court’s decision on Friday which overturned a lower court decision that blocked Tesla from paying Musk his 2018 compensation package, was worth $139 billion to Musk at Tesla’s closing price on Friday of $481.20. That should guarantee the Musk children get some nice Christmas gifts!
ByteDance is another big winner. It has come out of the TikTok “sale” in about as good a position as it could possibly have. An internal memo sent out to TikTok employees last Thursday, which set Jan. 22 as the completion date for the deal, made clear that TikTok isn’t really being sold.
Intead, TikTok is carving off its existing USDS data security arm and putting it into a joint venture—which, yes, a bunch of American investors will control, along with Abu Dhabi–based investment firm MGX. But that memo, which my colleague Sylvia Varnham O’Regan got her hands on, also said the global TikTok (the one still owned by ByteDance) would handle “ecommerce, advertising and marketing”—in other words, the parts of TikTok that bring in revenue.
A separate memo to employees on Friday revealed that USDS staffers won’t be able to get ByteDance stock compensation in the future, showing how the sale specifically affects that group of employees. In essence, the deal has formalized TikTok’s original proposal for dealing with concerns about the security of its U.S. users’ data, which was to ring fence its data security unit from the rest of the company. That wasn‘t enough for the Biden administration and TikTok’s other critics in Washington D.C. Hence we got the ban-or-sell law that triggered this faux sale. For a detailed description of TikTok's original proposal, see this story.
One big question now is how the joint venture will make money. After all, it’s essentially a cost center. Perhaps ByteDance will pay it a fee based on TikTok’s revenue. But you can bet ByteDance will keep the lion’s share of the money. (It’s little wonder the joint venture was only valued at $14 billion, a fraction of what TikTok is thought to be worth.) Another question is whether any of the China hawks who agitated for forcing ByteDance to sell TikTok will accept this outcome. Right now, though, people at ByteDance must be laughing all the way to the bank.
In Other News
• Neobank Mercury has applied for a national bank charter with the Office of the Comptroller of the Currency, the latest in a rush of banking fintech startups to take advantage of an easing in the regulatory environment under the Trump administration.
• Google on Friday sued SerpApi, a startup whose product OpenAI and other tech companies use to access Google’s search data. The suit, filed in federal court in California, accused SerpApi, which scrapes Google’s search results and sells them to other companies, of bypassing technology restricting access to the results pages.
Today on The Information’s TITV
Check out our latest episode of TITV in which Jessica Lessin, along with our AI, venture capital and crypto reporters, lay out some of their big predictions for 2026.
