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Google profit soars

Shares of Google’s parent company neared all-time highs on Thursday as cash from its search engine business dwarfed continued losses from its quirky “moonshot” divisions.

Alphabet — which, in addition to owning Google, invests in a hodgepodge of offthe-wall, high-tech “Other Bets” such as self-driving cars — said second-quarter profit surged 24 percent, to $4.9 billion.

Google remains wildly profitable on the momentum of its digital ad-selling businesses. In addition to its namesake search engine, the Mountain View, Calif.-based tech titan’s lucrative units include YouTube and Gmail.

The better-than-expected results propelled Alphabet’s stock more than 5 percent upward in after-hours trades Thursday to as high as $809. That left Alphabet shares poised to break their historic record of $810.35 in regular trading Friday.

“Revenue growth trends seem pretty clear with Google reinforcing its co-hegemonic position alongside Facebook,” Pivotal Research analyst Brian Wieser said.

Facebook earlier this week displayed its digital ad prowess, as quarterly profits nearly tripled on a 59 percent increase in revenue.

At Alphabet, the booming business of selling ads on computers and smartphones easily offset the cost of the company’s “X” divisions.

In the second quarter, operating losses from those divisions, classified as “Other Bets” in Alphabet’s financials, totaled $859 million, widening from $660 million a year earlier.

On the positive side, revenue from Other Bets nearly doubled to $185 million.

Alphabet’s financial chief, Ruth Porat, who has clamped down on spending since she joined the tech giant from Morgan Stanley 14 months ago, deflected questions on moonshots in a Thursday conference call, including one about when driverless cars might become profitable.

“When you look at more than 30,000 car deaths in the US alone” each year, “that’s what really inspired” Google founders Larry Page and Sergey Brin to plow into the futuristic technology, she said.

Astro Teller, the brainiac technologist who supervises the moonshot projects for Alphabet, said in a Thursday blog post that he’s mindful of costs even as he pushes the envelope on cutting-edge tech.

“In short, we try to steer X to be ‘responsibly irresponsible’ as we develop new products,” Teller wrote.