Nvidia Slips as Google Surges, Eli Lilly Joins the $1T Club, MAGA World Reels After Trump, Mamdani Meeting, and Robinhood Pushes Into Prediction Markets

25th November 2025

The tech market is rewriting the leaderboard again as Google’s meteoric AI run shakes Nvidia’s dominance. Pharma makes history as Eli Lilly becomes the world’s first trillion-dollar healthcare company. Trump’s unexpected show of harmony with Mamdani has his base unraveling online. And Robinhood is expanding beyond trading, positioning itself at the center of the booming global prediction-markets wave. All this and more in today’s Read It And Eat!

Major Headlines

• Nvidia Shares Drop on Report of Google Challenge in AI Chips

Investors are going gaga for Google. Shares of Alphabet, the search giant’s parent company, are up nearly 77% over the past six months. And, on Friday, Alphabet passed Microsoft to become the third-most valuable US company by market cap (take that, Mico), days after launching its newest AI model, Gemini 3, last Tuesday. Beyond doodling Gemini 3 vaulted over its competitors in the AI chatbot race, surpassing ChatGPT and other models in industry benchmark tests. 

Then, on Thursday, Google launched an updated version of its image-generation tool, Nano Banana Pro, which VP of Google Labs and Gemini Josh Woodward told CNBC is “incredible at infographics” (it also makes slide decks). It’s a long way from 2022, when investors were concerned that Google was falling behind in the AI race. Last quarter, Alphabet’s cloud revenue jumped 32%, and its search revenue grew 15% year over year. As if that weren’t enough, its video-sharing platform, YouTube, has cemented itself as part of the bedrock of the internet. According to a new report from the Pew Research Center on Americans’ social media usage this year: YouTube is the most widely used online platform among both US adults and teens. 84% of US adults say they’ve used YouTube. Facebook came in second at 71%. Nearly half of adults get on YouTube daily.

Google drive: Google subsidiary Waymo has also been firing on all cylinders...figuratively (they’re electric). Waymo is up and running in five cities around the country, with plans to expand into 12 more. The company also announced last week that it cleared the red tape necessary to expand its territory across the Bay Area and SoCal. A federal judge ruled earlier this year that Google broke antitrust laws to boost its ad business, but the remedy likely won’t be known until next year. The government is asking that Google be forced to ditch its ad exchange, which would literally decimate the company. It made $31 billion in 2023 about 10% of Alphabet’s overall revenue, per the New York Times. Yahoo.Finance

• Eli Lilly Reaches $1 Trillion in Value, Buoyed by Demand for Its Weight Loss Drugs 

  
  

Eli Lilly’s market capitalisation hit the $1tn mark in the past week, becoming the first healthcare company in the world to join the exclusive club dominated by technology companies. Buoyed by unprecedented demand for its weight loss drugs, the US drugmaker hit the trillion-dollar mark for the total value of its shares on 21 November. Share price in Lilly closed at $1,059.70 on 21 November, reflecting a 27% increase since January 2025. By trading at market open 24 November, share prices retreated slightly to $1,056.77. 

Eli Lilly now joins Nvidia, Apple, Microsoft, and others, as companies with market caps of $1tn or more, a significant feat for a pharmaceutical company given that tech-centric sectors currently dominate investment landscapes.  GlobalData senior analyst Shehroz Mahmood said: “Eli Lilly’s ascension to a trillion-dollar market capitalisation represents a watershed moment for the pharmaceutical industry.” Lilly breaking through the $1tn market cap ceiling comes as investors have increasingly turned to pharma stocks. The S&P 500 pharmaceutical index has risen by 19% since the start of September as tariff and drug pricing worries in the industry receded amid big pharma company agreements with the White House. 

Eli Lilly owes much of its success to tirzepatide, its flagship weight loss product. Marketed under the brand names Zepbound and Mounjaro for obesity and type 2 diabetes (T2D) treatment, respectively, tirzepatide’s sales have skyrocketed since first coming to market in 2022. Mounjaro generated sales of $6.5bn in Q3 2025, up 109% from the same period in 2024. Zepbound exhibited even higher growth up 185% from Q3 2024,  to bring in $3.6bn. GlobalData analysis forecasts that the two brands will generate a combined $64bn in global sales in 2031.  Mahmood added that Lilly’s tirzepatide franchise has “fundamentally reshaped the obesity treatment landscape”.

Tirzepatide’s growth has helped Lilly gain an edge over Novo Nordisk, its main rival in the glucagon-like peptide-1 receptor agonist (GLP-1RA) market. Despite being first to market with semaglutide, Novo’s share prices have been falling amid the company’s market erosion to tirzepatide. Unlike semaglutide, known under the brand names Wegovy and Ozempic for obesity and T2D treatment, respectively tirzepatide has a dual-action mechanism, which produces better efficacy. Tirzepatide’s performance could also herald a changing of the guard in the wider pharma industry. The drug’s sales have overtaken MSD’s Keytruda (pembrolizumab)  an immunotherapy that has been the top-selling drug globally over the past few years. For comparison, MSD, which specialises in cancer treatment, has a current market cap of $242.6bn. New York Times 

• Maga world heads left spinning by Trump’s warm welcome for Mamdani

  
  

A flurry of social media posts from Maga influencers have laid bare the disorientation felt by members of Trump’s base at the spectacle of Friday’s cordial Oval Office meeting with Mamdani, who the president previously painted as a “communist lunatic”. “Wild to allow a jihadist communist to stand behind the president’s desk in the Oval Office. Sad to see,” wrote far-right activist Laura Loomer, one of Trump’s most fervent online backers. She returned to the theme several times. “I had to drink a bottle of ginger ale today after seeing Mamdani in the Oval Office because it physically nauseates me seeing Islamic jihadists infiltrate our government and continue to get a pass to promote Islamic jihad and anti-American values with zero push back,” Loomer wrote.

In Friday’s news conference, Trump retreated from his previous all-out opposition, forecasting that Mamdani “can do a very good job” as mayor, despite having previously threatened to withhold funds from New York for electing him. Loomer seized on that to predict that the Republicans would suffer catastrophic defeats at next year’s congressional elections and in the 2028 presidential election. “The Democrats will have a landslide in the midterms after today. Mamdani is the face of the Democrat party,” she wrote. “How will the GOP campaign ahead of 2026 if Mamdani and his policies are now considered rational and good for New York?” Elise Stefanik, a member of Congress who is running to be New York state governor next year, had a similar reaction. “We all want NYC to succeed,” she wrote. “But we’ll have to agree to disagree on this one. If he walks like a jihadist. If he talks like a jihadist. If he campaigns like a jihadist. If he supports jihadists, he’s a jihadist.”

Benny Johnson, a pro-Trump influencer, seemed to implicitly condemn the president’s approach by highlighting a hardball question posed by fellow activist, Jack Posobiec, who asked Mamdani if he was planning “race-based property taxes” on white people. But not all Trump supporters were downcast. Steve Bannon, the former White House strategist who has praised Mamdani’s skills and depicted him as a political threat, suggested Trump was using political subtlety. “He’s going to boost Mr Mamdani, whose policies will crater the city,” Bannon said in a discussion with Posobiec on his War Room podcast. “Trump will let him collapse because he’s a Marxist jihadist.” Some Mamdani supporters seemed as disorientated as Trump backers by the show of harmony. Jumaane Williams, New York’s public advocate and a Democrat, called the meeting “pretty shocking”.

“My belief is that it would have went well, just knowing who our mayor is. But I don’t think anyone could have expected this,” he told Spectrum News NY1. “I think the proof is in the pudding. But we may have staved off what was [an] inevitability in just a few weeks. And so the longer we can stave off harmful things to our city, the better.” Bill de Blasio, a former Democratic mayor of New York who endorsed Mamdani’s candidacy, said the meeting reflected his own meetings with Trump in the White House. “I think Trump has actually a lot of respect for Mamdani. As they say, game respects game,” he told CNN. “I had this same exact experience. I went to meet with Trump 10 days after the 2016 election. What I learned is, if you engage Trump and you show him you’re not afraid, he is actually willing to do some give and take.” The Guardian 

• Robinhood is expanding into sports prediction markets

  
  

Trading platform Robinhood Markets (HOOD.O), is open to potential acquisitions in the fast-growing prediction markets space if the right opportunity presents itself, a top executive told Reuters in an interview, as interest in the once-niche asset class surges globally. "We as a firm are going to be looking to see if there is an acquisition that's available," said JB Mackenzie, vice president and general manager of Futures and International at Robinhood. "I'm always looking to see if there's something of interest, if there is, we'll pursue it and see if it's the right fit." "That being said, what we also know is we have really good engineers that build great products here. So what we're going to do is try to balance the two."

Prediction markets saw a surge in popularity during last year's U.S. presidential election and have since evolved into an asset class that lets investors wager on everything from monetary policy to major sports tournaments. Those bets are placed through event contracts. Each contract represents a specific outcome that pays out if it occurs, or expires worthless if it does not. The sector's growth has also drawn startups such as Underdog, which launched event contracts in September, allowing customers to profit from their views on sporting leagues. NYSE-owner Intercontinental Exchange (ICE.N) took a $2 billion stake in Polymarket, underscoring the heating competition in the space.

Robinhood launched its hub for trading event contracts in March, in partnership with prediction marketplace Kalshi, which was valued at $5 billion in its last funding round. It has also partnered with Interactive Brokers Group's (IBKR.O), ForecastEx. Brokerage Piper Sandler estimated that revenues from Robinhood's event contract offering were annualizing at over $200 million in September. "We estimate that Robinhood users account for about 25%-35% of Kalshi volumes on any given day," Piper Sandler analysts said. Robinhood will also consider other avenues for growth, including a joint venture or a partnership instead of an outright acquisition, Mackenzie said. The company's shares have climbed 273% so far this year, through the previous close, lifting its market value to more than $123 billion and earning it a spot in the benchmark S&P 500 index (.SPX). The company has rapidly broadened its offerings and diversified its customer base in a bid to evolve from a retail trading platform into a full-fledged financial services firm. Bloomberg

Minor Headlines 

• Moderna is most shorted stock in S&P 500 as Americans skip jabs Financial Times 

  
  

• Banking Analytics: Unrealized Losses Decrease Again at U.S. Banks Stlouisfed

  
  

• Klimt painting sold for a record $236M in Sotheby's auction CNBC

  
  

• NBA's Chauncey Billups pleads not guilty in rigged poker games case Reuters

  
  

• Kohl's names Bender permanent CEO as retailer presses ahead with turnaround Reuters

  
  

• Jimmy Cliff, reggae music pioneer, dies at 81 Reuters

  
  

• DOGE days are over as Trump disbands Elon Musk’s team of federal cost-cutters TechCrunch 

  
  

• Revolut hits $75B valuation in new capital raise TechCrunch