Fed Hesitates on Tariffs, The New Mag 7, Death of VC, Google's Value in a Post-Search World

Philippe Laffont is launching a hybrid Coatue interval fund seeded with $1 billion from the Bezos and Dell family offices. It will mix public stocks, private companies and cash, charge about 1.25% management and 12.5% incentive fees, and lower the normal barriers to long-duration private-tech investing.

Laffont’s real goal is to own the next “Magnificent Seven” before the market recognizes it. He expects roughly 25 core holdings across public and private markets, names SpaceX and Stripe as obvious candidates, and says he will wait until he has roughly 75% confidence in a category leader before paying up.

Laffont believes AI demand has become more important to tech markets than tariffs, summarizing his view as “tokens >> tariffs.” He cited Microsoft processing 100 trillion AI tokens in one quarter, half in March alone, while Coatue’s public and private companies were reporting shortages of chips and compute capacity.

The market is now treating AI cannibalization of Google search as a real financial risk. Apple’s Eddie Cue said its search volume fell for the first time in 20 years as users shifted toward AI tools, while Google countered that total queries from Apple devices were still growing.

Google is spending roughly $75 billion a year on AI while protecting the extraordinarily profitable search product those models threaten to replace. The panel argued that incremental rollout preserves today’s cash machine, but aggressive Gemini integration may be necessary before OpenAI captures the much larger market for AI-assisted work.

Sergey Brin appears to be back in operating mode at Google, not merely advising from the sidelines. The hosts said he is working roughly 70 hours a week, going into the office daily and discussing granular Gemini, Google Local and YouTube product decisions—founder-level involvement during Google’s most consequential product transition in years.

Laffont thinks consumer pessimism is currently a poor guide to the underlying U.S. economy. He said company earnings and payments data showed spending remained unexpectedly resilient through the tariff shock, leading him to treat sentiment as a lagging indicator that worsens after markets fall and improves after they recover.

The long decline in IPOs and acquisitions is changing what counts as a complete technology portfolio. Laffont argues that companies such as SpaceX and Stripe can remain private for years because sophisticated secondary markets provide liquidity, making a public-only portfolio structurally unable to own some of the most important technology companies.