google

Larry and Sergey can’t stay in California since the wealth tax as written would confiscate 50% of their Alphabet shares.

Each own ~3% of Alphabet's stock, worth about $120 billion each at today's ~$4 trillion market cap.

But because their shares have 10x voting power, the SEIU-UHW California billionaire tax would treat them as owning 30% of Alphabet (3% × 10 = 30%). That means each founder's taxable wealth would be $1.2 trillion.

5% wealth tax on $1.2 trillion = $60 billion tax bill, each.

That's 50% of their actual Alphabet holdings—wiped out by a "5%" tax.

Section 50303(c)(3)(C) of the 2026 Billionaire Tax Act states: "For any interests that confer voting or other direct control rights, the percentage of the business entity owned by the taxpayer shall be presumed to be not less than the taxpayer's percentage of the overall voting or other direct control rights."

This means if a founder holds shares representing only 3% of economic interest but 30% of voting control (through Class B supervoting shares), the tax would presume their ownership stake is at least 30% for valuation purposes, not 3%.

The wealth tax is poorly defined and designed to drive tech innovation out of California.
#California #Google

Google has introduced the Personal Intelligence feature for its AI assistant Gemini, enabling the algorithm to access users' personal data from Gmail, Google Photos, YouTube, and other company services. In exchange for a personalized experience, users must agree to allow their data to be used for training generative AI models.

Google has launched the Guided Learning feature in its AI assistant Gemini, transforming conventional chatbots into personal tutors. The new feature creates customized learning courses and helps users truly understand the material, rather than just receiving ready-made answers.
How does the personal mentor work

This is not an experience improvement.
It's a change in the architecture of how buying and selling are done.

Google has just moved AI from the assistant…
at the center of commercial decision-making.

🔍 What's really happening

The new intelligent agents don't just recommend products.
Now they can:

• Analyze purchase intent in real time
• Compare prices and conditions automatically
• Optimize inventories and dynamic offers
• Interact with customers without human friction

Buying stops being a conscious act

Pakistan Central Bank will partner with the #Trump family's crypto project #WLFI to explore cross-border payments using $USD1 .
Animoca Brands has completed its acquisition of digital collectibles and gaming company SOMO.
Visa and BVNK have partnered to launch a stablecoin payment service.
#Bitget collaborates with World Cup champion Julian Álvarez to release a promotional video outlining the strategic vision of UEX.
#Google requests the dismissal of its antitrust lawsuit against media AI search summary services.
#CoinRank

@Cardano Foundation #ADA #Google
$ADA

On Monday, several reports indicated the alleged launch of a Google Cloud node on the Cardano testnet, or testing network. This move could represent a preliminary step towards a potential involvement in staking activities associated with Midnight, a privacy-focused sidechain. However, as of now, there is no official confirmation that the mentioned node actually belongs to the technology giant.
The supposed Google Cloud node can be found in Cexplorer, the Cardano explorer, under the identifier GCW3, with creation date recorded last Friday. Still, as already mentioned, there is no official verification that this node is directly part of the collaboration between Google and Midnight.

PayPal has confirmed that it will support Universal Commerce Protocol (UCP) developed by Google, an artificial-intelligence-driven commerce standard. The new technology is expected to appear soon as a payment option within PayPal’s redesigned checkout experience, according to a press release issued over the weekend.
PayPal’s President and CEO Alex Chriss said on X that the adoption of UCP represents the “next phase” of the partnership between the two companies, which was first announced in September last year. The collaboration is now moving from announcement to practical implementation, with AI becoming a direct component of the payment flow.

Google Unveils UCP as the Foundation of Agentic Commerce
Google officially introduced UCP on Sunday during the annual National Retail Federation conference in New York. Company executives described the protocol as an open, platform-agnostic commerce standard designed to connect artificial-intelligence systems, merchants, and payment providers through a shared “common language.”
The goal of UCP is to enable so-called agentic commerce, where AI agents handle product discovery, checkout, and post-purchase support. At the conference, Google said the protocol marks a significant expansion of autonomous shopping agents across the retail ecosystem.

An Open Standard Designed to Replace Complex Integrations
According to Google, UCP is built to be open and compatible with any credential provider, dramatically reducing the need for one-off integrations between individual AI agents and merchants.
Vidhya Srinivasan, Vice President and General Manager of Google Ads & Commerce, explained in a blog post that instead of requiring a unique connection for each agent, UCP allows all agents to interact seamlessly within a unified framework.
UCP is the second open agentic commerce protocol developed by Google in the past two decades, following last year’s launch of the Agent Payments Protocol (AP2). The company emphasized that UCP is designed to work alongside its other agent-based systems, including Agent2Agent and the Model Context Protocol (MCP).
In the coming months, Google plans to expand UCP with additional shopping capabilities, such as related-product recommendations, loyalty and rewards programs, and highly personalized shopping experiences delivered across its platforms.

PayPal and Major Retailers Helped Shape UCP
Google said the protocol was developed with input from several major retailers and e-commerce platforms, including Shopify, Etsy, Wayfair, Target, and Walmart.
Vanessa Lee, Vice President at Shopify, said the company contributed its extensive experience in building large-scale checkout systems. She noted that Shopify drew on decades of insights from supporting millions of merchants to help ensure that UCP is a robust and scalable commerce standard.

PayPal: Interoperability Is Key to Mass Adoption of AI Commerce
PayPal executives believe that limited interoperability has been one of the main barriers preventing agentic commerce from reaching large-scale adoption. According to Prakhar Mehrotra, Senior Vice President and Head of AI at PayPal, protocols like UCP allow merchants to connect to multiple AI environments at once while maintaining trust, transparency, and control.
Michelle Gill, General Manager of Small Business and Financial Services at PayPal, added that the future of commerce will be defined by how effectively the industry builds open and trusted infrastructure. She said PayPal’s support of, and collaboration with, Google on UCP demonstrates how a trusted payments layer can turn agentic commerce into a real-world experience for consumers.

Analysts Warn of Potential Loss of Direct Customer Contact
Not all industry observers are fully convinced that agentic commerce will succeed without trade-offs. Richard Crone, CEO of Crone Consulting, warned that if checkout flows migrate into AI systems such as Google’s Gemini, merchants could lose their final point of direct contact with customers.
According to Crone, product detail pages are the “fuel” that powers agentic commerce engines. If control over those pages shifts away from merchants’ own websites, retailers may lose leverage—even as Google and Shopify promise increased sales, improved discoverability, and higher conversion rates by enabling off-site selling through AI platforms.

PayPal Expands Its Footprint in Europe and the United States
The UCP announcement follows shortly after PayPal Ventures participated in a funding round for European payments company Klearly, which raised €12 million in a completed Series A round. The investment brought Klearly’s total funding to €20 million, with participation from Italian Founders Fund, Global PayTech Ventures, Antler Elevate, and Shapers. Based in Amsterdam, Klearly processes payments for more than 4,000 merchants and plans to expand deeper into Italy and Belgium.
In the United States, PayPal also strengthened its physical presence in New York by signing one of the city’s largest office leases of the year. The company agreed to a ten-year lease covering approximately 261,000 square feet (around 21,000 square meters) at 345 Hudson Street and 555 Greenwich Street in Hudson Square—a neighborhood that also hosts offices for Google and Disney.

#Paypal , #Google , #fintech , #ArtificialInteligence , #INNOVATION

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#Google parent company Alphabet has become the fourth Big Tech group to hit a $4tn market value, fuelled by investor optimism that its #AI models can compete with rivals such as OpenAI.

Alphabet shares closed 1 per cent higher in New York on Monday, after jumping earlier in the day following news of a deal with #Apple that will entail Google’s GeminiAI models powering a revamped version of Siri, the iPhone’s virtual assistant.

The move capped a more than 6 per cent rise in the past month and carried the company over a threshold already surpassed by Nvidia, Microsoft and Apple.

At the start of last year, Alphabet’s shares had been lagging behind the broader AI-driven rally in Big Tech stocks, amid fears its cash-cow search engine would be overshadowed by new apps such as #chatgpt and Perplexity.

Investors were also concerned US regulators were seeking to break up the Silicon Valley-based company.

But the shares have more than doubled since April, as Demis Hassabis, co-founder of DeepMind, Google’s AI arm, led the group’s effort to make inroads on ChatGPT.

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Google’s parent company Alphabet has become the fourth Big Tech group to hit a $4tn market value, fuelled by investor optimism that its AI models can compete with rivals such as OpenAI.

Alphabet shares closed 1 per cent higher in New York on Monday, after jumping earlier in the day following news of a deal with Apple that will entail Google’s Gemini AI models powering a revamped version of Siri, the iPhone’s virtual assistant.

The move capped a more than 6 per cent rise in the past month and carried the company over a threshold already surpassed by Nvidia, #Microsoft and Apple.

At the start of last year, Alphabet’s shares had been lagging behind the broader AI-driven rally in Big Tech stocks, amid fears its cash-cow search engine would be overshadowed by new apps such as ChatGPT and Perplexity.

Investors were also concerned US regulators were seeking to break up the Silicon Valley-based company.

But the shares have more than doubled since April, as Demis Hassabis, co-founder of DeepMind, Google’s AI arm, led the group’s effort to make inroads on ChatGPT.

Google and Apple on Monday said the two companies had “entered into a multiyear collaboration”. Google’s Gemini models and cloud services will “help power future Apple Intelligence features”, including a long-delayed update to Siri that is expected to be released this year.

“After careful evaluation, Apple determined that Google’s Al technology provides the most capable foundation for Apple Foundation Models and is excited about the innovative new experiences it will unlock for Apple users,” the two companies said.

CNBC first reported the deal. Apple had previously worked with OpenAI to incorporate ChatGPT into its Siri assistant, underscoring how Google’s rival has staged a comeback against the start-up.

The latest partnership between the two is not exclusive, as the iPhone maker will continue to partner with OpenAI to use its models.

Apple experienced a faltering rollout of its suite of AI features, which it dubbed “Apple Intelligence” after its launch in June 2024. Those features included integrating ChatGPT into search and writing assistant functions on newer models of the iPhone.

But a widely anticipated AI makeover for Siri was delayed and high-profile departures from its in-house AI team last year compounded investor concerns that the company was falling behind.

In December, former Microsoft executive Amar Subramanya replaced Apple’s longtime AI chief John Giannandrea.

In the meantime, the competition to offer the most advanced AI models has heated up. Last month, OpenAI chief executive Sam Altman declared a “code red” over the need to improve its products, after Google released its Gemini 3 model, which is considered to have leapfrogged rivals on industry benchmarks.

At the time, Koray Kavukcuoglu, Google’s AI architect and DeepMind’s chief technology officer, said the Big Tech group had “pushed our performance quite significantly” by training its AI models using Google’s own bespoke chips. The company also said it was integrating its latest AI models into products immediately.

Alphabet shares have also been propelled since it showed investors its advertising revenues were growing strongly despite the threat from chatbot rivals.

The company’s quarterly revenues grew 16 per cent in the third quarter to surpass $100bn for the first time, it said in October, boosted by its booming cloud computing business and YouTube ads. Its Gemini app has grown rapidly to 650mn monthly users.

Investors have also become more bullish on Google’s prospects after US courts signalled they were unwilling to break up the Big Tech group.

Last year, a US federal judge said the Department of Justice’s request for Alphabet to spin off elements of its advertising business would not be “easily enforceable”, despite a court in April finding the company had an illegal monopoly in digital ads.

In a separate DoJ case over Google search, the company was spared from a court order that could have prohibited it from making payments to Apple to distribute its products to its more than 2bn global users. Apple and Google have long maintained a deal under which Google is the default search engine on Apple’s browser.

Hello everyone, good evening. I'm Research Coin Uncle.
This research report, instead of discussing the geopolitical tensions, focuses on a historic 'marriage of the century' in the tech world. On January 12, 2026, Apple and Google officially announced their collaboration. This major strategic shift in AI not only pushed Google's market capitalization past the $4 trillion mark but also revealed how industry leaders consolidate their dominance through 'ecosystem acquisition' in the battle for AI supremacy. For investors, this is not just a change at two companies, but a paradigm shift in AI investment logic for 2026.