AI Stocks: The New Tech CEOs’ Casino

61% of Americans invest in the stock market, yet 71% of them lose money. 61% of Americans invest in the stock market, more than any other major country in the world. At the same time, we hear in the headlines that tech CEOs are competing for the top spot as the richest man in the world. Larry Ellison has become the world's richest person for the first time, ending Elon Musk's nearly year-long reign. On September 11th, 2025, Larry Ellison became the richest man in the world, surpassing Elon Musk. Founder and top shareholder of software giant Oracle has seen his net worth soar by $70 billion in one day. But there is a reason behind it. 24 hours earlier, his company Oracle had just announced its revenue report, but above all, its future investments in a very popular word lately, artificial intelligence. Oracle is a beneficiary of massive new AI infrastructure spending and is nearing $1 trillion in market cap. But this is not a coincidence. Nowadays, big tech companies have turned Wall Street into their own casino, with launches that, just for having the word AI, speculate with the value of their shares. So how tech CEOs turned AI stocks into a casino? September 15th, 2025, after being dethroned by Larry Ellison as the richest man in the world, Elon Musk bought 2.6 million shares of Tesla for a value exceeding $1 billion. Tesla's shares quickly skyrocketed, filling Musk's pockets with a billionaire amount in just one day. The share price rally added nearly $6 billion to his net worth in a single day, more than covering the cost. In 1929, barely 3% of Americans had money invested in stocks. However, that small proportion was enough to trigger a financial collapse that dragged down the global system. The stock market crash showed how speculation, even with a small number of players, could cause devastating consequences on a worldwide scale. At that time, access to the stock market was limited to wealthy sectors of the population, and investment tools were complex and restrictive. Over the decades, that landscape began to change. In the early 1950s, the percentage of Americans with investments in the stock market barely reached 4%. Nevertheless, starting in the 1980s, that figure skyrocketed. The boom of mutual funds, the expansion of retirement plans, and the perception of the stock market as a legitimate vehicle for wealth accumulation allowed millions of people to start participating. In 1980, approximately 15% of U.S. households owned stocks. By the late 1990s, that proportion had already surpassed 40%. The arrival of the internet at the end of the 20th century accelerated this process. Today, shareholders are going to hope to see some nice, juicy returns, especially after trying to land a whopper of a deal in May 2006. So Morgan Stanley shares are nonetheless moving higher on today's news. Very nice, they're up about 4% right now. Digital platforms facilitated the buying and selling of assets, eliminating many of the barriers that had previously kept investing as an exclusive sphere. At the beginning of the 2000s, the dot-com bubble exemplified the new dynamic. Companies without clear business models, but simply adding dot-com to their names, managed to attract massive amounts of capital. Between 1995 and 2000, the Nasdaq Composite Index multiplied its value fivefold, reaching a historic peak in March 2000. What is the quality of this record high versus the past? Because when I look at what the Nasdaq is doing today, it's headed for another record high. Microsoft, Amazon and Google are leading the way. But this would not last long. On March 10, 2000, just a few days after breaking historic records, the Nasdaq began to plunge more than 75% over the next three years. The Nasdaq index, in freefall, down nearly 10%. It lost a quarter of its value in just one week. The lesson was clear. Unbridled enthusiasm for an emerging technology, without solid economic foundations, could inflate bubbles of enormous magnitude. In the following years, history kept repeating itself with variations. Since 2010, thanks to the popularization of sports betting and online gaming, Americans were spending more than $40 billion a year on gambling by the end of the decade, with double-digit growth rates driven by the digitalization of the sector. However, with the arrival of the pandemic in 2020, dynamics changed drastically. The suspension of sporting events left millions of bettors without space for their usual activity. Lockdowns and an abundance of free time led many to seek alternatives, and the stock market became fertile ground. This is a trend that has exploded because of the pandemic. A new generation of investors, they are young, they are stuck at home with not a lot to do, and they have trading tools where they can do it for free all day long, at least for now. Accessible investment platforms like Robinhood and Charles Schwab saw explosive growth. In 2020, Charles Schwab reported a 58% increase in the creation of investment accounts compared to the previous year, an unprecedented rise. Retail trading volume in the U.S. market doubled within months. By mid-2020, it accounted for around 20% of the total market, compared to the 10% it represented in 2019. This caused investing to stop being perceived as a long-term strategy and to be transformed into a short-term bet similar to a digital casino. The massification of access laid the foundations for the next great speculative wave, artificial intelligence. Artificial intelligence, or AI, is everywhere. It's now part of our conversations about education, politics, social media. Starting in 2022, with the rapid advance of AI applications in sectors as diverse as healthcare, education, and entertainment, the term AI began to acquire an almost magical value in financial markets, and big tech companies saw an opportunity in it. The CEOs of leading Silicon Valley companies began announcing products, services, and strategies linked to artificial intelligence. It was enough for a company to mention the word AI in its quarterly presentations or press releases for its stock price to skyrocket. AI was one major headline out of NVIDIA's quarter, mentioned 28 times on the call. A notable example was NVIDIA. In 2023, the company experienced a stock growth of more than 200% in a single year, driven largely by demand for AI chips. Similarly, Microsoft managed to add more than $500 billion to its market capitalization after announcing the integration of artificial intelligence But the phenomenon was not limited only to established giants. Startups with models still in development managed to attract multimillion-dollar investment rounds simply by associating their proposals with artificial intelligence. Just like in the dot-com bubble, the narrative was enough to generate stock market value. Between 2022 and 2024, more than 50 emerging companies linked to AI reached valuations exceeding $1 billion, although many of them lacked consistent revenues or profitability plans. U.S. AI startups have raised over $104 billion this year, just shy of the total for all of 2024. The magnitude of speculation was also reflected in the indexes. In 2023, the Nasdaq rose 55%, its best performance since 1999, driven mainly by the so-called Magnificent Seven, all of them with strong narratives around artificial intelligence. This concentrated growth generated enormous amounts of wealth for CEOs and major shareholders. Jensen Huang of NVIDIA saw his personal fortune grow by more than $30 billion in less than a year, while Microsoft consolidated its position as one of the most valuable companies on the planet. Retail investor behavior also reinforced the trend. According to Vanda Research data, in 2023, the daily net flow of retail purchases in AI-related stocks exceeded $150 million, a figure higher than that allocated to any other sector. The artificial intelligence frenzy replicated in many ways the logic of betting, risking capital in search of quick returns, without deep analysis of fundamentals. Unfortunately, I do think there's some parallels here to what happened in the tech bubble, you know, in the internet bubble in the 90s. The popularization of artificial intelligence as a magic label that boosts valuations, however, poses significant risks. History offers multiple warnings. The dot-com bubble left losses of more than $5 trillion in market capitalization when it burst. The 2008 crisis showed how financial innovation without proper regulation can drag the global economy down. And today, excessive dependence on the AI narrative could generate unsustainable overvaluation.