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I just finished watching Andrew Ross Sorkin’s latest interview on 60 Minutes, and I have to be honest. When I saw him standing on the floor of the New York Stock Exchange, drawing a straight line from the AI boom of the 2020s to the catastrophic crash of 1929, I felt a jolt—not of fear, but of profound disagreement. Sorkin is brilliant, one of the sharpest financial minds out there, but I believe he’s using the wrong map to navigate a completely new world.
He sees a bubble. He feels the anxiety of unsustainable prices and draws parallels to the credit-fueled speculation that wiped out a generation of wealth. He’s looking at the frenzy of investment in artificial intelligence and asking, "Is this a gold rush or a sugar rush?" It's a fair question. But what if it's neither?
What if what we're witnessing is something far more fundamental? Imagine the 1840s. Investors are pouring insane amounts of money into a radical new technology: the railroad. They’re laying down thousands of miles of iron track across empty land, fueled by speculation, hype, and a dizzying amount of debt. Many of these companies went bust in spectacular fashion. It was a bloodbath for investors. Was it a bubble? Absolutely. But when the dust settled, the tracks were still there. They became the foundational infrastructure of a new industrial age, connecting a continent and creating a century of unprecedented economic growth.
This is the kind of breakthrough that reminds me why I got into this field in the first place. We are not just speculating on abstract financial instruments. We are funding the construction of the cognitive infrastructure for the 21st century.
The Anatomy of a Revolution, Not a Bubble
Let’s get one thing straight. A purely financial bubble, the kind that defined 1929, is built on leverage and psychology alone. It’s a house of cards. The AI boom, for all its froth, is fundamentally different. It’s a technology-driven investment cycle—in simpler terms, it’s a period of massive, chaotic spending to build something real and transformative.
The hundreds of billions of dollars Sorkin mentions aren't just vanishing into the ether. They're being converted into tangible, productive assets: vast data centers humming with GPUs, foundational models that can write code and design molecules, and a global talent pool being trained in a completely new discipline. Yes, many of the startups receiving this funding will fail. Many valuations are absurd. A painful correction—a "crash," as Sorkin guarantees—is not just likely; it's a necessary and healthy part of the process. But to compare that to the systemic collapse of 1929 is to mistake a forest fire that clears out the undergrowth for an extinction-level event.
The dot-com bust of 2000 wasn't the end of the internet; it was the end of the beginning. It wiped out the Pets.coms of the world so that the Amazons and Googles could emerge from the ashes, built on the very fiber-optic cables the "bubble" had laid. What are we really asking when we worry about an AI bubble? Are we worried that intelligence itself is a fad? That the ability to automate complex cognitive tasks is a fleeting trend? It’s a ludicrous proposition.
The real debate, the one Sorkin touches on with BlackRock’s Larry Fink, is about who gets to participate in building this new world. The conversation around "democratizing finance" by opening up private markets and 401(k)s to riskier assets is fraught with peril. The guardrails Sorkin correctly notes are being removed were put there for a reason: to protect people from ruin. And we absolutely have a profound ethical responsibility to ensure we don’t repeat the sins of the past by luring everyday people into gambles they don’t understand.
A New Kind of Power Player
But the alternative—keeping these opportunities locked away for the elite—is just as dangerous. It risks creating a permanent techno-financial aristocracy, where the people who get in on the ground floor of the AI revolution become unimaginably wealthy while everyone else is left behind. This isn't a simple replay of 1929's bankers selling stock on margin; this is about access to the single greatest wealth-creation engine in human history.
This is where the recent news of BlackRock CEO Larry Fink appointed as WEF interim co-chair becomes so fascinating. Think about this for a moment. Fink, the CEO of the world's largest asset manager, a man whose firm just months ago forced the gates of mainstream finance open for Bitcoin with its spot ETF, is now helping steer the agenda at Davos. The speed of this convergence is just staggering—it means the lines between Wall Street, Silicon Valley, and global policymaking are blurring into a single, powerful feedback loop where digital assets and AI are no longer fringe topics but central pillars of the future economy.
When you see a figure like Fink step into a role like that, you realize the game has changed. The old world isn’t just adapting; it’s being reconfigured from the inside by the architects of the new one. This isn't a sign of an impending collapse. It’s a signal of consolidation and the dawn of institutional legitimacy on a global scale. Are we prepared for what that means? Do we have the frameworks to ensure this new power structure is aligned with humanistic values? These are the questions we should be asking, not just whether the NASDAQ is overvalued.
This Isn't a Bubble, It's a Launchpad
Andrew Ross Sorkin is right about one thing: a crash is coming. But it won't be the end of the story. It will be the painful, messy, and ultimately productive moment when the hype dies down and the real, enduring value becomes clear. It will separate the speculators from the visionaries.
The anxiety of 1929 was the fear of an ending—the end of a party, the end of an era of prosperity. The anxiety we feel today is different. It’s the vertigo of standing at the beginning of something so enormous we can’t yet see its edges. We are not at a peak, staring down into the abyss. We are at the base of a new mountain, looking up. And the climb is just getting started.