"The Final Frontier"
by Bill Bonner
"To go boldly where no man has gone before."
- "Star Trek"
Ardmore, Ireland - "What happened last week? Well, we got (tentative) answers to two important questions.
1. When is the AI bubble going to pop? Answer: this is as good a time as ever. Wall Street Journal: "OpenAI has raised less than half of the $30 billion it had initially targeted for its latest funding round, with market jitters over the AI trade dampening investor appetite for one of the industry’s biggest names. After receiving tepid interest from some large investors, OpenAI has so far secured roughly $11 billion in commitments for the new financing, according to people familiar with the matter. The deal values the company at $1.25 trillion - less than the $1.4 trillion valuation that it had earlier hoped to achieve."
And here’s CNN on the story: "NASDAQ suffers worst month in over a year as AI nerves roil markets."
Investor’s Business Daily, meanwhile, tells us that when AI goes down...the whole market will follow: "Dow Jones futures: Stock market sells off as Apple, Palantir, midterm elections loom; what to do."
In our view, it is extremely unlikely...verging on impossible...for AI bets to pay off. People could spend more on AI toys and tools...but there’s just not enough profit that could be squeezed out of current output to justify all the fertilizer that has been dumped onto the AI seedlings. The only way AI investments could theoretically pay off would be for these little shoots to grow into real wealth that we haven’t seen before - adding trillions in jobs, houses, cars...fuel...meals...and so forth. Could AI do that? There’s no evidence of it. AI can do remarkable things; but, so far, it can’t pay the mortgage.
2: Why don’t we just put our wealth into bitcoin? The argument was persuasive. Bitcoin is cheap to store. Easy to move around. Safe. Secure. Private. As you know, our Bonner Private Research allocation model recommends only a token exposure to crypto - just 1% of the portfolio. Crypto fans suspected that we didn’t understand how it worked...or that we were afraid of such a mysterious form of wealth. They were right on both counts! And now we do see how it works. And the very thing we feared has come to pass. Fox: "Expert warns of ‘AI hacking bloodbath’ following massive Binance cryptocurrency theft."
According to a financial and reputation management expert … the worst may be yet to come. Eric Schiffer, chairman of Patriarch and Reputation Management Consultants, told FOX Business that the scale of the theft underscores the growing cybersecurity challenges facing major financial institutions. “I look at this as one of the world’s greatest thefts of all time, and it’s sad,” Schiffer said.
The Financial Times gave a fuller report on Saturday. It was full of jargon and techie mumbo jumbo...but as near as we could make out the folks at Binance still don’t know how the heist was pulled off...nor by whom. Crypto is a way of keeping track of who owns what. And the crypto guys were sure the ‘information’ was safe and sound. But it wasn’t. And wasn’t it either extreme naïveté or remarkable hubris to think that today’s technology was so advanced that tomorrow’s technology would pose no threat to it? There are always lock makers...and the lock pickers are right behind them.
In other news, the US president continued his anatomical observations. Nicki Minaj has a ‘beautiful ass,’ he remarked. He started ‘studying [Jon Husted’s] ass’ two weeks ago; this last week he noted that the Ohio senator had fingers like ‘sausages.’
Finally, two actors from "Star Trek" died last week. The Independent: "Star Trek" community rocked by two major losses in one week Walter Koenig and Sir Patrick Stewart have died."
That was last week. This week the important thing is probably the US mid-term elections. Who will win? Who will lose? What will it mean? Polymarket:
72% chance Democrats take the Senate
94% chance Democrats take the house
And to what new galaxy will this take us? Stay tuned."
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