It took 15 years to recover from the last tech bubble
| Investor’s Daily brought to you by Nickolai Hubble | June 5, 2026 |
In March 2000, the dot-com bubble popped.
The companies were real… the technology was real and the internet turned out to be every bit as transformative as the believers said it would be…
But the revenues were not real… and that was enough.
It took 15 years for the market to fully recover.
A generation of investors who planned to retire in the early 2000s didn’t. They watched their portfolios collapse and went back to work.
Here’s the question worth sitting with today.
What actually makes AI different?
The technology is impressive. The potential is genuine. But when you follow the money — when you ask where the actual commercial revenue is coming from — the answer looks uncomfortably similar to the dot com era.
Microsoft has invested billions into OpenAI. OpenAI uses that money to buy computing power from Microsoft’s Azure platform. Microsoft books that as AI revenue.
The money circles back. The same capital, moving between two companies, being reported as proof that the AI boom is real.
In 2000, investors learned that “users” and “eyeballs” were not the same thing as revenue. The market had built trillion-dollar valuations on top of that confusion.
Right up until March 2000, the people buying believed the story. Build it and they will come. The valuations would be justified.
It never happened.
My colleague Jim Rickards believes we are in the AI version of that moment right now… and that by 26 August the AI Bubble will pop.
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