Hello! Welcome to Slate Money, your guide to the business and finance news of the week. I'm

Felix Salmon of Bloomberg. I'm here with Elizabeth Spires, this New York Times.

Hello.

I'm here with Emily Peck of Axios.

Hello, hello.

And we are going to talk about Google this week because I was very impressed by the amount

of money that Alphabet, the parent company, made in the first quarter.

It was an astonishing amount of money.

We will also talk about Bill Ackman, who went public or had another vehicle that went

public this week. Not particularly

successfully, I have to say. We are going to talk about the nexus of corporate merch and corporate

retreats and what is going on with that. We have a slate money segment on biz fluences and all of the

young women who are making TikToks about their day in

the life at an investment bank. It's all coming up on Slate Money.

So I want to talk about corporate earnings to lead off this show.

And we don't do that very often because corporate earnings are mostly boring and we can mostly ignore them.

And every single public company comes out with corporate earnings every single quarter.

And there's lots of public companies and there's lots of quarters.

And when you read these earnings reports in the paper, your eyes just glaze over

and you're like, why do I care? This one, I think, is worth bringing to broader attention because

it is absolutely batch it. And the number is $62 billion. That is the net earnings, the net profit of Alphabet in the first quarter of

26. Alphabet, of course, being the company we know and love as Google. And never in the

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