CNBC Daily Open: Magnificent Seven competition heats up

CNBC Daily Open: Magnificent Seven competition heats up


A man walks past the Google signage outside the US tech giant’s Ananta office in Bengaluru, India, on Jan. 5, 2026.

Idrees Mohammed | Afp | Getty Images

There’s movement going on in the Magnificent Seven group of stocks.

Shares of Alphabet, the parent of Google, rose 2.4% on Wednesday, to give the firm a market capitalization of $3.89 trillion. Meanwhile, Apple, the parent of the iPhone (so to speak), retreated 0.8%, and ended the day with a capitalization of $3.85 trillion.

It’s the first time since 2019 that Alphabet has overtaken Apple in valuation, and another sign of how the Cupertino-based company is falling behind in the artificial intelligence race. Apple’s promised launch of a smarter Siri, its AI voice assistant, in 2025, was delayed, and still lacks a concrete release date.

Meanwhile, Alphabet’s quickfire deployments of new AI models and generators have earned it more users and investor cheer, making it the best-performing stock among Big Tech last year.

Movement, on a more literal level, was a point of contention for Tesla and Nvidia. Jensen Huang, CEO of the semiconductor behemoth, announced Alpamayo, an AI reasoning model for developing self-driving vehicles, at the CES conference Monday.

While Tesla CEO Elon Musk acknowledges it as “maybe a competitive pressure on Tesla,” he added that it’ll only be a challenger in “5 or 6 years, but probably longer.”

For what it’s worth, it’s not the first time Musk has dismissed competitors. In October 2011, he said in an interview, “I don’t think [BYD has] a great product.” In 2025, BYD overtook Tesla as the world’s biggest seller of electric vehicles.

What you need to know today

And finally…

Sermitsiaq Mountain looms behind a row of houses in Nuuk, Greenland, on March 4, 2025.

Odd Andersen | Afp | Getty Images



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