Tech's Big Winners of 2025: Google, Musk and ByteDance

We’re heading into the holidays, when a look back at 2025 seems natural (and a good way to make up for the relative lack of news!). Let’s start with Google’s amazing turnaround in 2025. Not only did it emerge mostly unscathed from the antitrust litigation regarding search, it made a giant leap forward in the AI market. Conspiracy theorists will see a significance in the fact that those two things happened in that order. Indeed, it’s hard to imagine they would have happened in the reverse order. 

Consider that when Amit Mehta, the judge in the search antitrust case, decided to impose relatively light requirements on Google to remedy its monopoly, he made it clear that the emergence of AI chatbots such as ChatGPT influenced his thinking. The perception that ChatGPT threatened Google’s dominance of search ended up working to Google’s advantage. It may not just be coincidence that once the threat of a more onerous remedy ruling was removed, Google suddenly emerged as a more successful force in AI. Did Google deliberately hold back its AI efforts to avoid being perceived as too powerful in AI, which could have prompted the judge to take more drastic action to weaken its search position?