May, 2026 | Wall Street Memes

Google has announced that Google will no longer be Google

At Google I/O this week, the tech company unveiled an overhaul of its flagship search box into an “intelligent search box”. AI-powered, conversational, and capable of deploying AI “information agents”, Google says this is the biggest change to search in 25 years.

This might spell the end for that simple list of blue links that we imagine when we think of the internet. And that might be sad, but the truth is the internet has been heading this way for a long time.

Who clicks on page two of Google anyway?

You see, navigating the internet has always evolved in eras. At first, getting anywhere worked like an address book. There was no map: you needed to know the exact URL you wanted to visit, or you weren’t going anywhere.

The advent of search engines was like someone drawing the first map. Now you had more of a guide, but you still had to find your own way. Sure, Google wasn’t the first search engine, but it stormed ahead of the competition by just working better than all the others. At launch, Google had faster, fairer results, untampered by ads and clutter.

The next era was like the development of map apps. Now, search engines wouldn’t just show you where to find the information: they would give you answers. Fuelled by interactive pop-ups that quoted websites and widgets such as currency converters and translators, sifting through the hyperlinks was often now the second port of call.

By this point, Google dominated search and ‘Google’ was almost synonymous with ‘the internet’. Without any competition, they were able to push adverts, features, and products far beyond their remit of just finding you the website you were looking for. Google was no longer a guide but a destination in itself.

Do you have any idea how hard it is to Google search ‘news about Google’s new search’?

Now we enter the next era of navigating the internet: AI.

Ever since AI has become properly functional, Google has integrated AI tools into almost all its products. Search has been no exception, and AI summaries are now at the top of most queries. But this week’s announcement goes far beyond that initial rollout, offering pretty much all of Google’s AI tools right there in the search box.

So, if we started with just an address book, then got a map, then an app, now it’s like we’re searching with semi-sentient self-driving cars.

Note that crucially, each of the eras has not just shaped how we search but created a feedback loop that has shaped how the internet itself behaves.

When the internet was just disconnected websites, each one could exist with a separate, distinct purpose. Search engines brought about the era of SEO and encouraged websites to climb the rankings. Single-purpose websites would lose out to the sites that offered a bit of everything, bringing about our current era of an internet dominated by just a handful of single sites.

But at the top of every Google ranking was always Google itself. So Google made itself into the ultimate everything website, and the actual sites you were looking for were pushed down the rankings.

Now is just the next step in that evolution.

All the other websites will still be there, sure, but most people likely won’t need to visit them when AI can summarize them for you. And so the internet ecosystem will evolve once again to match this change.

Google is dead, long live Google

This endgame all becomes clear at the top of Google’s latest press release, which says that: “The goal of Search has always been simple: to help you ask anything on your mind,” because… has that really always been the goal of search?

Now that’s the goal, sure, and AI has made that possible. But originally, the goal of Search was just to help you find the website you were looking for.

Originally, Google Search was nothing more than a map. Now it’s your own personal tour guide.

President Donald Trump has settled with his own Justice Department in maybe the most bizarre legal case in US history.

As experts explained it to the presiding judge, “A sitting president seeks monetary damages for alleged harm to his personal interests from an executive agency that he controls.”

But the $10 billion lawsuit never went before the judge because two days before the deadline to start the case, the plaintiffs (the Trump organization) settled with the IRS (Internal Revenue Service).

Now, Trump and his sons will receive a formal apology from the IRS for leaking Trump’s tax returns just before the election, and the IRS will create a $1.8 billion “Anti-Weaponization Fund” that can be paid out to other victims of unfair political investigation.

So Trump sued himself, settled with himself, and will now pay himself?

Well, no, he can’t just pay himself. Instead, this tax-funded fund (fun!) is to provide a “systematic process to hear and redress claims of those who suffered under weaponisation and lawfare.”

Oh, lawfare, like warfare. I see what you did there.

As Acting Attorney General Todd Blanche explains, “The machinery of government should never be weaponised against any American, and it is this Department’s intention to make right the wrongs that were previously done while ensuring this never happens again.”

Tax Return To Sender

But this settlement isn’t the end of it. The Justice Department’s press release was quietly amended a day later to include a hyperlink to additional terms of the agreement.

According to CNN, these bonus terms read, “The federal government is “FOREVER BARRED and PRECLUDED” from prosecuting or pursuing “claims” or “examinations” arising from matters pending before the IRS, including “tax returns” filed by Trump before the agreement was reached. The language applies not just to Trump, but to his family, trusts, companies and other affiliates.”

Democrats have filed a motion to block the settlement and say this is just a way for Trump to give money to his allies and ensure “his family, and his companies’ taxes are permanently off limits,” said Democrat Richard Neal in a Tweet.

While we don’t yet know how the fund will be spent, we also don’t know if the lawsuit had any grounds or not because it never went to trial. The allegation was that the IRS didn’t do enough to stop former IRS contractor Charles Littlejohn from leaking Trump’s taxes (he’s now in prison, btw. Not Trump, the leaker).

So now I guess we’ll never know if that’s true or if the damage was worth $10 billion because the trial never happened and everyone just agreed it was worth $1.8 billion instead.

No doubt this story isn’t over, and the Anti-Weaponization Fund has a lot of lawfare still to come.

Elon Musk’s lawsuit against OpenAI has been overturned by a jury that says he waited too long to bring his grievance to trial.

…Couldn’t they have said that from the start? Or were they also waiting just to prove a point?

Musk was fighting OpenAI’s transition into a for-profit company following his ousting in 2018. But during the trial, OpenAI’s current CEO, Sam Altman, alleged that Elon was for the idea.

“A particularly hair-raising moment was when my co-founders asked, ‘If you have control, what happens when you die?’” Altman explained. Elon then “said something like, ‘maybe it should pass to my children.’”

Well, now nothing’s passing to anyone anyway, as all of that (and the three weeks of testimonials) was apparently hypothetical because the case has been thrown out on a “calendar technicality” (as Elon describes it).

Elon says he plans to fight the case on appeal, but after a judge and jury have sided against him, it’s unlikely that he’d win a rematch.

An Open(AI) And Shut Case

So what does this mean for the wider tech world?

Well, the ruling means OpenAI won’t have any more roadblocks in its transition into a fully for-profit company, enabling it to keep its place as a flagship AI company.

Sorry, Grok.

Had the lawsuit been successful, however, it would be a very different story. Altmans’ OpenAI might easily have been hangstrung with a purely not-for-profit remit and be forced to step out of the AI spotlight.

That vacuum could have then left room for companies like Anthropic, Microsoft, or Google to take on its market share.

So the impact of this lawsuit is less about what’s happened and more about the scenario that’s been prevented from happening: OpenAI won’t revert to nonprofit status, ChatGPT can continue in its push towards profitability, and Elon likely won’t regain the reins any time soon.

But in an alternate universe where Elon won, the tech world would have been changed forever. Would XAI, sorry, SpaceXAI, have taken the place of OpenAI is this crazy future? Well, I guess thanks to this court case, we’ll never know.

Wait, just how big is her underwear?

Last September, a truck driver was stopped in England with a delivery of Kim Kardashian’s shapewear brand, ‘SKIMS’. After x-raying the vehicle, border guards discovered the truck contained a delivery of Kim Kardashian’s shapewear brand, ‘SKIMS’.

They also discovered 90 packages of cocaine hidden in the truck’s back doors.

The 198 pounds of drugs were said to be worth $8.4 million. It’s unclear how much the underwear was worth.

The driver, 40-year-old Jakub Jan Konkel, initially denied smuggling the underwear but confessed to transporting the drugs for a €4,500 ($5,276 (¥832149)) payment.

This week, the driver was sentenced to 13 years and six months in prison for drug smuggling and “crimes against fashion”.

As Paul Orchard, of the National Crime Agency, explained, “Organised crime groups use corrupt drivers like Konkel to move Class A drugs often hidden on entirely legitimate loads such as this.”

“The detection and investigation have removed a significant amount of cocaine whose profits are lost to the crime group behind the smuggling attempt, and with Konkel they’ve lost an important enabler.”

We got ‘em, boys.

Keeping Up With The Kartel

Despite sharing the same first letter of their names, Konkel appears to have no connection with the billionaire socialite, Kim Kardashian.

Kardashian could not be reached for comment, and not just because she’s blocked me on Instagram.

Skims (pronounced SKIMS) was founded in 2019 by Kardashian and Swedish entrepreneurs Emma and Jens Grede. Skims sold out within ten minutes of launch and earned $2 million in profits on the first day. Since then, the company has reached a valuation of $5 billion.

…Sounds like the real money’s in the underwear, Konkel.

But he would say that, wouldn’t he?

Microsoft AI’s CEO, Mustafa Suleyman, recently predicted that white-collar workers might see themselves replaced within just 18 months.

Suleyman did not clarify whether his job was first on the chopping block, but he did look a little nervous as he said, “human-level performance on most, if not all professional tasks” will be done by AI.

Legal, marketing, and project management roles are particularly vulnerable, according to Mustafa, but “anyone writing financial satire is completely irreplaceable”. Huh, weirdly specific shout-out at the end there…

But it won’t just be white-collar workers affected by this change. For example, white-collar shirt manufacturer ‘Whitey Tighty Ltd.’ has spoken out against the news.

“If AI is going to take white-collar jobs, then who will buy all our white collars?” complained Arnold Whitey with tears in his eyes. “What’s that? ‘We could switch to making blue collars?’ What, are you sick? I spit on you. Never in a million years.”

White-collar? More like, wh-AI-te coll-AI-r, amiright?

Of course, the CEO of an AI company might not be completely impartial when he says that AI is ‘pretty powerful, actually.’

A study from the non-profit METR (Model Evaluation and Threat Research) found that AI actually made software developers’ tasks take 20% longer. And while you might have already seen headlines of entire job roles becoming AI-automated, some of these rumors may have been greatly exaggerated.

For example, early this year, Jack Dorsey’s latest startup, ‘Block’, fired 4,000 employees and said it was due to AI, when really they just overhired during COVID.

So is this more AI hype, or will 50%-60% of the global workforce be gone in the space of a year and a half?

CoPilot: Set an alert, ‘Am I fired yet?’ for 18 months.

I’ll get back to you then.

Back in 2018, OpenAI CEO Sam Altman paid a $10,000 deposit to ‘Nectome’, a tech startup looking to preserve people’s brains in the hope that they can one day be uploaded to a computer.

Unlike cryogenic freezing, which is designed to preserve the whole body, Nectome plans to embalm just the brain with aldehyde-stabilised cryopreservation. The brain can’t be unfrozen, but by freezing the neurons in place, Nectome hopes that the brain’s ‘connectome’, and therefore the person’s mind, can be recreated digitally in the future.

As Nectome describes it, they are “archiving your mind.”

But the controversial part is that, unlike cryogenics, the process isn’t done once the person’s dead; the process is done while the person is alive, and it’s “100 percent fatal.”

The company’s co-founder, Robert McIntyre, said the process would feel “identical to physician-assisted suicide.” But, err, how does he know?

More like, Sam Altered-man

According to early reports, Mr. Altman joined a 25-person waiting list with his investment. That deposit is refundable; however, perhaps if Sam decides he doesn’t want to live forever, actually.

However, later reporting clarified that the “waiting list” was in fact 30 “early supporters” of the project who hadn’t been promised anything. However, as McIntyre candidly explains, “Product-market fit is people believing that it works.”

‘Belief’ is the keyword there because if it doesn’t work, they’ll never actually know and literally kill themselves for no reason.

For reference, scientists have only been able to recreate the complete connectomes of fruit flies and worms. But Nectome investors are clearly hopeful that the upward trajectory of the research will one day enable scientists to recreate an entire human mind digitally.

It’s a massive gamble, but hey, the other option is certain death, so maybe $10,000 is a worthwhile bet.

Either way, we’ll probably never know if it pays off.

Google And SpaceX To Launch Orbital AI Datacenter “Project Suncatcher” Next Year, Here’s Everything We Know

Google recently announced that it is in discussion with SpaceX to launch Project Suncatcher, which is not an evil scheme from a supervillain, but instead an orbital data center.

An orbital data center might also sound like an evil scheme from a supervillain, but it is in fact a network of “solar-powered satellites equipped with its Tensor Processing Units into an orbital AI cloud.”

SpaceX and Google: Unlikely Crewmates

Elon Musk and Google have had their beef in the past, specifically with the founding of OpenAI, which was built as a direct rival to Google’s AI plans. But as the old saying goes, “my enemy’s enemy is still my enemy unless we’re building the future of AI together, and then we’re friends.”

Elon has also struck up a collaboration with Anthropic to use SpaceX’s Colossus 1 computing facility, but also because of this orbital datacenter idea. SpaceX has the one thing these tech companies don’t: rockets. Except for Amazon, they’ve got Blue Origin.

And Elon very much wants to lock in these deals to push the tech frontier into space because SpaceX’s potentially very lucrative IPO is coming up, and being seen as the shovel maker for this current AI gold rush can only make you more valuable.

The vision couldn’t be clearer than when Elon merged SpaceX with xAI to make Spacexxai, sorry, I meant to say, the much less sexy: SpaceXAI.

So, will Project Suncatcher eventually have liftoff? Is extra-terrestrial AI computing really the future of tech? Or is this idea destined to remain science fiction?

Well, we won’t know for a while, but what we do know is that Elon and Google’s answers are a massive: yes, yes and no (in that order).

It’s one thing for an actor to be typecast in a movie, but it’s another thing for a real person to be typecast by a movie. It seems that poor Michael Burry is destined to always be called ‘The Big Short’s Michael Burry,’ accompanied by a photo of him at the movie’s premiere, which is apparently the only picture of him in existence.

Burry’s not helping himself, though, as he seems to have doubled down on the persona, shutting his hedge fund company to go all in on the doomsday predictions with his popular ‘Cassandra Unchained’ substack.

Since then, Burry has predicted the demise of GameStop, Nvidia, Palantir, the AI market, and basically the entire economy multiple times.

Because of this, Michael ‘Christian-Bale-in-the-Big-Short’ Burry admits in his latest Substack post that “I am now a meme for the number of times I have called a crash. I have become the boy who cried wolf.”

And sure, not all of these calls have been on the money, but here’s the thing: a stopped clock might be right twice a day, but a screaming alarm clock only has to be right once.

“Still, I got it right in 2000, got it right in 2007. Got it right in 2019, helped by Covid, and I called the meme stock crash in mid 2021. I called the bank stock run in 2023.”

So with all that in mind, let’s have a listen to Burry’s latest death knell…

“We are witnessing history. In the stock market, that is not a good thing,” Burry writes, likening current events to the “scene of the bloody car crash, minutes before it happens”.

“With what is happening in the market the last week, that I had lived this before suddenly dawned on me… The Nasdaq 100, complete reversal. … I am calling something. The market has jumped the shark.”

“Wall Street may be overstating by more than 50% the earnings at our fastest growing, most highly valued companies.”

“Absolutely non-stop AI. Nobody is talking about anything else all day.”

“Stocks are not up or down because of jobs or consumer sentiment. They are going straight up because they have been going straight up. On a two letter thesis that everyone thinks they understand. … Feeling like the last months of the 1999-2000 bubble.”

…you get the idea.

So yeah, not great news, but maybe Wall Street will get lucky for once, Burry will get unlucky, and then for the sake of the global economy, we can finally stop mentioning him in the same breath as ‘The Big Short’.

The mayor of the California city of Arcadia, Eileen Wang, suddenly resigned from her position this week after the Department of Justice charged her with “one count of acting in the United States as an illegal agent” of China.

When reached for comment, the DoJ declined to explain what a ‘legal agent of China’ might be.

The former mayor has pleaded guilty to the felony charge and could face up to 10 years in prison. Now that might seem harsh, but ‘up to’ does mean that ‘zero years in prison’ is still on the cards. She could face ‘up to a billion years in prison’ and be fine. Hopefully, she’s a glass-half-full kind of person.

Before taking office, Wang ran a local Chinese American news website with her then-fiancé, Yaoning “Mike” Sun. According to the plea deal, her website regularly posted propaganda from the People’s Republic of China. Not a good look.

In one example, a PRC official sent Wang a pre-written news article in a WeChat chat.

The article read, “China’s Stance on the Xinjiang Issue – There is no genocide in Xinjiang; there is no such thing as ‘forced labor’ in any production activity, including cotton production. Spreading such rumor to do defame China, destroy Xinjiang’s safety and stability, weaken local economy, suppress China’s development.”

Persuasive stuff.

Within minutes, Wang had posted the article on her website, ‘US News Center’, and received a “So fast, thank you everyone,” from the PRC official.

So, all in all, it’s not really what you want from your local mayor.

This story comes in the wake of the breaking news that Donald Trump is planning a crucial diplomatic trip to China, hoping to secure a trillion-dollar investment in American manufacturing. Trump brings with him a long list of tech CEOs and investors, including Elon Musk, Larry Fink, Tim Cook, and executives from Boeing, Meta, and Visa.

Eileen Wang unfortunately did not make the guest list.

We are just a couple of weeks into the OpenAI trial, and already we’ve had Elon Musk saying that AI “Could kill us all.” Surely there can’t be any more revelations, right?

Well, turns out there’s one big mystery that needs solving, and that’s why Sam Altman was ousted from the company for just five days in November 2023, an event so notable it has its own Wikipedia page and an upcoming movie adaptation starring Andrew Garfield (no, really).

Someone who might know is the CEO of Microsoft, one of OpenAI’s largest backers. Satya Nadella, do you have any answers?

No…? Ok then, moving on.

As Nadella tells it, Microsoft was not given a heads-up regarding the coup and was hit with a 3% stock drop following the news. Nadella also says that he was only informed when he was pulled out of a meeting, then never given full “clarity” over Altman’s firing.

The Microsoft CEO claimed the reason he was given was that Sam Altman was not open and communicative with board members. Nadella didn’t think this was justified and speculated that “There may have been some jealousy… coming through.”

But there might be some truth to that weak excuse Nadella got. As OpenAI co-founder Ilya Sutskever explained, he’d said Altman had a “consistent pattern of lying,” creating a toxic environment ill-suited to developing a safe AI.

However, Sutskever also called the firing “rushed” and was one of the many employees and investors who signed the successful petition calling for Altman’s reinstatement.

The plot thickens.

So what actually happened? And how does this affect the ongoing trial? Well, maybe we’ll never know the full details…

OR maybe we’ll find out EVERYTHING when Artificial starring Andrew Garfield as Sam Altman, Yura Borisov as Ilya Sutskever and Ike Barinholtz as Elon Musk comes to the big screen in 2027!

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Google has announced that Google will no longer be Google

Who clicks on page two of Google anyway?

Do you have any idea how hard it is to Google search ‘news about Google’s new search’?

Google is dead, long live Google

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