The giants of Silicon Valley are having a midlife crisis over artificial intelligence

Middle age hits hard—even for the Kings of Silicon Valley.

- Tim Higgins

One minute you're upending established industries as the young disrupter. The next, you're staring into the abyss, eating glass—as Elon Musk likes to say—watching the disruption at your door.

Most, if not all, of the Magnificent Seven are in that position—weirdly trying at the same time to figure out the threat of artificial intelligence to their kingdoms.

That dynamic has been on display the past few weeks: Alphabet's stock dropped more than 7% Wednesday after a senior Apple executive disclosed that Google search-traffic on its devices using Safari fell for the first time in 20 years. (Google later clarified it continues to see overall search growth, even from Apple devices.)

For his part, Apple Chief Executive Tim Cook is trying to buy time for his company, pushing investors during his latest earnings call to be patient with the iPhone maker's delays around AI features.

Then there is Facebook co-founder Mark Zuckerberg's attempt to paint a bright future for his ad-dollar juggernaut as something of an AI-buddy for the lonely.

Even Musk seems to be sweating things as he returns from his DOGE sojourn to Tesla, seeking to counter a slide in the electric carmaker's stock price with promises of deploying driverless cars. "We're not on edge of death—not even close," Musk told analysts recently.

His protests sounded like that "Monty Python and the Holy Grail" character about to be thrown on a pile of corpses: "I'm not dead!...I feel happy!"

To be fair, none of these giants are dead—yet. And they have lots of reasons to feel happy—they are wildly profitable pillars of corporate America and together represent around $7 trillion of market value.