"Did you hear the one about the huge bubble threatening to take down the economy?"

Normally, you would expect investors to be more easily spooked as talk of a bubble became increasingly ubiquitous, but whatever the investors of 2025 are, it is certainly not skittish. Even the worst economic or political news only chases them away for, at best, a day.

Of course, this is not a normal bubble in any sense. Its magnitude dwarfs even the dot-com bubble. It was preceded by a level of gods-or-ashes hype unlike anything I've ever seen. The people behind it have unprecedented wealth and power. It is hitting a market that has run out of “next big things” and is desperate for the next one. Perhaps most important, the executives running the world's largest companies have decided to pump trillions of dollars into the technology.

Whatever the reason, we have now reached the point where the idea that OpenAI, Nvidia, etc. are a bubble has become so widespread that you can see it everywhere—from stories in The Wall Street Journal and The Financial Times to segments on late-night talk shows.

 

For fans of Adam Ruins Everything, Adam Conover also covers much of the same material bu in greater depth. 

In the late 1920s, having your doorman offer stock tips was famously an indicator that it was time to get out of the market. Perhaps in the 2020s it's having comics use the bubble as a punchline.