2026-06-25 / updated 2026-06-25 / tags: ai, anthropic, openai, spacex, quick reads

Elon Musk (SpaceX), Sam Altman (OpenAI), Dario Amodei (Anthropic), and a whole bunch of their buddies in and around the billionaires club are in the final stages of pulling the rug. The AI bubble has worked like every other bubble has: convince a lot of people that something is worth way more than its actual value; rake in a lot of money promising unlimited future growth; and make sure someone else holds the Beanie Babies before everyone realizes they're not going to autonomously cure cancer or end civilization.

If your bubble gets big enough, and you have enough insiders in on the racket, then you get to [rewrite the rules to the Nasdaq index](rewrite the rules to the Nasdaq index) to force passive investors to buy those shares of a company from the egomaniacal grifter who brought us the wildly successful Hyperloop whose official stance on its path to profitability is "we are going to launch data centers into space".

Uh huh. Sure.

A lot of people have been suckered into believing that this technology is as revolutionary as the three men I named at the beginning of the post, and countless AI boosters on LinkedIn, are claiming. Well, sure, if you can get past the fact that the AI companies have been navigating diminishing returns for nearly two years already, they've started charging you to use the models based on how much they actually cost to run, and as a result everyone is flipping out about how much money they're lighting on fire. The simple fact is that the fundamentals are not there.

Speaking as someone who worked at a financial firm: Wall Street does not know better than you. They are being conned like every other C-suite exec that gets a call from an OpenAI or Anthropic rep, getting pitched a miraculous technology that replaces 90% of their workers (who they'd love to fire and keep all that sweet, sweet salary money for themselves), and is accurate enough to increase the business' productivity. Meanwhile, actual, real businesses that invest heavily in AI just end up wasting more and more of their own resources trying to justify the sunk cost, and on and on it goes.

People want to believe the hype and bury their heads in the sand. This has proven throughout history to be a wildly ineffective strategy for accomplishing anything other than getting run over. We must be clear eyed about what is coming, and prepare and protect ourselves to the extent possible, dominant narratives of "too big to fail" be damned. Right now, in my humble opinion, one important piece of that is being very careful and thorough about zeroing out exposure to SpaceX (and, when they IPO, OpenAI and Anthropic) stock, including via funds that hold shares in those companies, and minimizing exposure to the tech sector more broadly.

Large language model technology is useful. It is interesting. It is categorically not useful and interesting enough to warrant OpenAI, Anthropic, and SpaceX to be currently valued at what is likely upwards of $5 trillion combined^[1], a number I expect to show a further rise before a precipitous crash. We are all going to suffer when that basic truth can no longer be avoided. A sinking tide lowers all boats; make your plans accordingly.

Update 6/25/2026: I got feedback on this post that inspired me to add some clarification. I do not mean to say that anyone should sell all their stocks and hold cash, which is also called "timing the market" and "a bad idea". What I am saying is that it makes sense for folks to consider reallocating their equity holdings to funds that track a different index, like the S&P 500. In a retirement account, selling holdings is not a taxable event, but in a regular brokerage account it is, so keep that in mind as well. At the end of the day, I am not a financial advisor or fiduciary, just someone who can see the cracks crawling up the foundation. If you have someone to help you navigate your personal financial situation, absolutely trust them over me with those matters.