You really think the biggest technological breakthrough in human history won't create a bubble?
Come on.
There just ain't no fucking way.
That is the thesis behind this website. Not that AI is fake. Not that the technology is overhyped nonsense. Not that the future is bleak. Almost the exact opposite: AI is so obviously important, the future it points toward is so obviously enormous, and the amount of economic value it could unlock is so large that people are going to lose their minds trying to own a piece of it.
Some will get rich. More people will see them getting rich. Then still more people will decide that they should be getting rich too. Prices will rise, confidence will compound, companies will issue stock into that demand, and leverage will make the whole thing more fragile than it looks.
That is how we get a stock-market bubble wrapped around a very real technological revolution.
This post is a snapshot of how I see that process unfolding today. I expect parts of it to be wrong. The point of the Four Horsemen is not to give me a prophecy. It is to give me a framework for watching the evidence as it changes.
The technology is real
Hell, an AI interviewed me to help write this piece.
AI also helped me build the website you are reading. Could I have built this site without it? No—not in anything close to its present form. Could I have developed the argument without AI? Yes, ish. It would not have been as good, and I probably would not have gone through the effort of publishing it.
This has been a beer project, not an obsessive, can't-sleep-until-it-is-finished project. That distinction matters. AI lowered the cost of turning an idea in my head into something other people can actually use.
Today the most visible example is coding. It is already spreading into design, research, analysis, and ordinary knowledge work. OpenAI reports that its coding tools are being used beyond software engineering for research, data analysis, workflow automation, finance, legal work, and recruiting. That is a company describing its own product, so take the marketing discount you think is appropriate. Then look at what people are actually building and decide for yourself.
Soon enough, AI will be helping with your taxes and much, much more. If artificial superintelligence arrives, its consequences will be literally unimaginable in the strict sense of the word: we cannot confidently picture the economy on the other side of something smarter than us.
Our future is bright. That is the future I am betting on.
But a transformative technology and a good investment are not the same thing. Ray Dalio has made this distinction directly: AI can be in a bubble even though the technology will endure and transform the world. Michael Burry has likewise compared the recent rise in technology stocks with the final phase of the dot-com bubble. Credible people can be early. They can be wrong. They can also be worth listening to without being treated as oracles.
The underlying technology can win while many of the investments made in its name lose. The internet already taught us that.
The Netscape problem
Leopold Aschenbrenner's Situational Awareness essays laid out one of the most compelling versions of the bullish AI future. The core claim—that rapidly improving systems could drive an extraordinary industrial and geopolitical buildout—is not hard for me to believe. The revenue is no longer imaginary, either. Anthropic said in May that its run-rate revenue had crossed $47 billion while announcing a financing round that valued it at $965 billion.
But I keep returning to Netscape.
Netscape was how millions of people first got onto the web. Its 1995 IPO is often used as the opening bell for the dot-com bubble. Yet being the gateway to a technological revolution did not mean capturing most of the value created by that revolution. Microsoft bundled Internet Explorer into Windows, Netscape lost the browser war, and AOL acquired the company in 1999.
OpenAI and Anthropic could become two of the most valuable companies in history. They could also be our Netscapes: the products that show everyone the future while the durable economic value ultimately accumulates somewhere else. I do not pretend to know which outcome we will get.
The historical analogy also needs to be handled honestly. Netscape did not mark the top. Its IPO came in August 1995; the Nasdaq did not peak until March 2000. The final phase came years later, amid extraordinary IPO activity and first-day returns. There was no single, clean event that everyone agrees popped it.
That is useful humility for the comparison I am making today. A landmark IPO can be an ignition point, a phase transition, or a culmination. It does not come with a label ahead of time.
The Four Horsemen
The Four Horsemen are my way of reading the cycle. They are not a mechanical trading formula, and all four do not need to arrive on matching horses at the same moment. I am watching the headlines to see how often these forces appear and how strongly they reinforce one another.
Are prices unreasonable?
Anthropic's $965 billion private valuation sounds extreme beside $47 billion in run-rate revenue, but its growth has also been extreme. A high multiple alone does not prove a bubble. It does tell us that an astonishing future is already being priced into the present.
Does everyone know it is expensive—and buy anyway?
This is where an investment thesis mutates into greater-fool behavior. “I know it is not worth that, but Joe Schmo is making money” is not fundamental analysis. It is a bet on the next buyer.
In May, Cboe reported that call purchases made up more than 52% of retail opening activity in ten mega-cap technology names—the highest level since the pandemic meme-stock era. The psychology is no longer theoretical.
Are companies supplying shares into eager demand?
SpaceX is the first major event in the procession. Its shares began trading June 12, 2026, and the company says the offering raised roughly $85.7 billion after the underwriters exercised their full option.
And then there is the valuation. SpaceX came public at roughly $1.77 trillion after reporting $18.7 billion in revenue and a $2.6 billion operating loss for the prior year. Comparing trailing revenue with Anthropic's run-rate revenue is not apples to apples, but SpaceX's valuation is, frankly, even more insane than Anthropic's.
Anthropic announced its confidential filing June 1. OpenAI announced its own confidential S-1 submission June 8, while saying it had not decided on timing. One IPO can be a company. A procession is a market regime. SpaceX is the dress rehearsal. Anthropic is a precursor. OpenAI is, in my current working theory, the final boss.
Are new participants stampeding in?
Every bubble eventually needs buyers who were not already in the trade. This is the cab-driver-stock-tip stage—not because cab drivers are uniquely foolish, but because the story has escaped the world of specialists and become common social currency.
I am not seeing the full version of that in my own life yet. That absence matters. It is one reason I think there may still be a lot of hype cycle left.
My current tripwire
My plan today is to remain long for now and go substantially to cash roughly three or four weeks before OpenAI's actual IPO—not its filing, not a rumor, but a credible trading date.
I expect tremendous demand around that event. I would also expect prices could continue rising after the IPO. I am not trying to capture the tippy tippy top. That is too close and too risky for me. I would rather leave some upside on the table than pretend I can identify the exact final print.
This is a working theory, not a blood oath. The sequence could change. OpenAI could delay. The market could break first. The IPO could begin a new phase instead of ending one. What finally pops the bubble? Beats me. Bubbles don't send a calendar invitation.
My thesis is that the procession of enormous IPOs will pull more demand, more bubble belief, and more issuance into the same window. The Horsemen are how I will judge whether the headlines are confirming that thesis.
I am not basing the other side of this plan on a predetermined percentage decline. Maybe the drawdown is 50%. Maybe it is only 20%. Maybe this cycle releases some pressure and an even larger bubble forms afterward. A round number on an index will not tell me whether the dangerous part of the system has actually cleared.
What I will be looking for is evidence in the headlines that leverage is being unwound: collateral demands, forced portfolio sales, a major leveraged firm failing, or some other event showing that people who expected to wait are no longer being given that choice. The Horsemen help me read the buildup. Forced unwinds help me read the damage.
If I step aside, I will give myself no more than six months before buying back into the market. That is not a forecast that the decline will end in six months. The unwind could take a year or two, and I may buy back only to ride part of it down. The rule is a fail-safe against permanent exile from the market.
I am not planning to short the United States, the stock market, or the AI future. I am trying to participate in the boom, step aside from some portion of the damage if my read is right, and then force myself back into the bright future I believed in from the beginning.
What not to do
Charlie Munger liked to invert a problem. In his 1986 Harvard School commencement speech, he borrowed Johnny Carson's approach: instead of pretending to have a formula for happiness, identify the behaviors that guarantee misery.
I cannot tell you exactly how to navigate a stock-market bubble. I can tell you how to improve your odds of getting burned.
Use leverage
If you want to go broke, use leverage.
Leverage multiplies a decline, but the larger problem is that it can take away your ability to wait. In simplified arithmetic, 2x exposure against a position that falls 50% wipes out the investor's starting equity before financing costs.
Nobody forces you to sell when you are up. You get forced to sell after the position has moved against you, when patience would be most valuable.
Aschenbrenner is the current textbook example—not because his AI thesis was stupid, but because intelligence does not repeal arithmetic. His fund reportedly produced extraordinary gains using leverage. Then AI-linked stocks fell. Reporting indicates the fund suffered heavy losses, faced collateral demands, and sold or transferred most or all of its public-equity portfolio while retaining private investments.
You can be one of the smartest people in every room you enter. You can be directionally right about the most important technology in the world. Leverage can still fuck you.
Sell because you are afraid
The person who stays unleveraged and stays in the market is not necessarily burned by a temporary 50% decline. The person who watches a life savings fall by half and sells at the bottom out of fear has turned that decline into a permanent loss.
A stock-market crash will not prove that AI was fake. Do not confuse a collapse in price with the collapse of the underlying technological thesis.
Remain unafraid. Our future is bright.
Stay out forever
If you decide to step aside, decide in advance how you will return. Maybe you will sell too early. Maybe you will buy back too early. Maybe the market will never give you the crash you expected.
The amateur fail-safe is not elegant, but mine is simple: I am not going to miss this forever. The objective is not to win an argument with the market. It is to remain solvent and participate in the long-term future.
Go investigate for yourself
The Four Horsemen are not commandments. They are four doors into the research: valuation, bubble psychology, issuance, and inflows. Follow the sources. Read people who disagree. Decide whether the evidence fits the framework or breaks it.
Then send this to the friends you already argue with about this stuff.
You really think the biggest technological breakthrough in human history won't create a bubble?This is a personal market thesis and a record of my own thinking, not individualized financial advice. I can be wrong, and markets can remain irrational longer than any plan expects.