Another explanation might be that tech companies are doing poorly in general at the moment, and Google is one of the few companies that hasn't done mass layoffs yet.
TCI, who do not actually run the business, are threatening the CEO (addressed to Sundar) that they will move their money if Google doesn't do what they say - namely cut costs etc...
Is it more likely that TCI investors know how better to run Google than Google does or that they don't care and are blindly seeking alpha with no care for the people that run it?
This group of investors however can compel Google to do things differently and as George Carlin once said: "It's a big club, and you ain't in it"
You can generalize that to say the average HN reader knows how to run anything better.
90% of management is equal to or worse than calling random() to make decisions. If the margins are large enough, and the competition is asleep, anyone can be a successful CEO.
What does "move their money" technically mean in this situation? Google is not a bank, they don't keep TCI's money. Is this a threat of tanking the stock price by selling all $6B at once? TCI would hurt themselves too if they do that.
Sell GOOG and buy META (or whatever)
>Is this a threat of tanking the stock price by selling all $6B at once? TCI would hurt themselves too if they do that.
The act of liquidating their position is what reduces the price. So they drop their ask to the lowest bid price that liquidates their position net positive and in theory that action would cause a price cascade. It's a threat, not a guarantee.
Larry and Sergey own 51% of GOOGL. Owning GOOG doesn't give you any control over the behavior of the company.
Why would Google care? This fund owns Google stock; it isn't giving money to Google, it gave money to whoever it bought that stock from.
Selling a fraction of a percent of the total in the market might move the stock price a little, but probably not much.
'Moving their money' just means transferring that stock to someone else who may have more faith in the company's strategy.
The story seems about the same everywhere: When money was pouring and people were spending more time on their devices than usual, the projection was that people will just resign from the physical world and live in VR so hire as many people as possible but that projection looks silly now.
This creates a pressure on Google to try and raise their profitability, and one way to do that is cut on areas where it seems wasteful.
The letter mentioned above is just a trailing sign of this in my opinion.