Most companies would make a big deal if they found an extra $8 billion in their couch cushions.
Google is not one of those companies.
Tucked away at the bottom of Google’s earnings’ release Thursday is this note bit of accountantspeak: “OI&E of $11.2 billion for the three months ended March 31, 2025 included an $8.0 billion unrealized gain on our non-marketable equity securities related to our investment in a private company.”
Translated: We invest in private companies and one of them is worth a lot more now than it was before, so we’re noting that here.
On the one hand: Even for Google, adding an extra $8 billion of paper profit matters. It helped push the company’s net income to $35.5 billion in the last quarter, up from $23.7 billion a year earlier.
On the other hand: No one seems to care. At least on Wall Street, anyway. I just listened to Google’s earnings call and there wasn’t a single question about the $8 billion. No one seemed remotely interested to know which of Google’s investments had just zoomed up.
That makes some sense. If you’re in the business of analyzing Google, you want to know what’s happening to its core business — selling ads. The fact that an unrelated business it took a flyer on is worth much more doesn’t really figure into your analysis.
Also, the analysts likely figured that Google wouldn’t say anything if they asked, anyway. Which is what happened when I asked Google comms to shed some light on that gain — specifically, which company they were talking about.
But I care! So I did some quick looking around and came up with four likely suspects that Google has invested in and which have gained value:
Anthropic. Google owns a reported 14% stake in the OpenAI rival. And Anthropic’s value, like other AI platforms, has been rocketing recently. At the end of last year, a funding round valued the company at $41 billion, per Yahoo’s private company tracking service. But a new round valued the company at $61.5 billion in March 2025.
SpaceX: Google invested in Elon Musk’s rocket company — making a $1 billion investment, along with Fidelity, in 2015. A funding round in late last year valued SpaceX at $350 billion. Its valuation the year prior was $175 billion.
Databricks: This is one of those companies that no one outside of Silicon Valley knows about, but people in tech are definitely tracking, because the analytics platform also has a crazy funding trajectory. At the end of 2024, a $10 billion funding round valued the company at $62 billion, up from $43 billion in the fall of 2023.
Stripe: This one’s a bit of a wild card. The online payments company has been enormously valuable for a long time, and is a perennial IPO candidate. But Stripe also doesn’t seem that interested in going public anytime soon. Its valuation isn’t driven by funding rounds, but by secondary sales that let existing investors and employees cash out. The value of those deals is up and to the right, too, though: The most recent ones reportedly peg Stripe’s value at $91.5 billion, up from $50 billion a couple of years ago.
