Alphabet just had the kind of week that makes CFOs cancel their weekend plans. The company shed roughly $269 billion in market capitalization on June 22, with shares dropping about 6.8% to $343, marking one of its steepest single-day declines in the past year.
The catalyst wasn’t a missed earnings report or a regulatory crackdown. It was something harder to fix: people leaving.
Two departures, one very expensive week
The selloff traces back to two resignation announcements that landed within days of each other. On June 18, Noam Shazeer, a VP of engineering at Google DeepMind and co-lead of the company’s Gemini AI models, announced he was heading to OpenAI. Two days later, John Jumper, the DeepMind engineer who co-won the 2024 Nobel Prize for his work on AlphaFold, revealed he was leaving to join Anthropic after roughly nine years at the lab.
Shazeer’s departure is particularly notable because of his direct involvement with Gemini, the flagship AI model family that sits at the center of Google’s generative AI strategy. Jumper’s Nobel Prize-winning work on protein structure prediction was arguably DeepMind’s single greatest scientific achievement. Having him walk across the street to Anthropic sends a signal about where top researchers think the most interesting work is happening.
