Remember when your uncle wouldn’t shut up about pets.com stock? Well, buckle up—because Apollo Global Management’s chief economist Torsten Sløk just dropped a bombshell that makes the dot-com bubble look like a minor market hiccup. The top AI companies you use daily are now more overvalued than anything we witnessed before the 2000 crash.
When ChatGPT Meets Market Reality
Sløk’s analysis reveals that today’s “Magnificent Seven“—Nvidia, Microsoft, Apple, Meta, Google, Amazon, and Tesla—are trading at forward price-to-earnings ratios that eclipse even the most delusional dot-com darlings. Unlike those long-dead startups with zero revenue, these companies actually turn profits. Yet their stock prices assume AI will deliver productivity gains so massive they’d reshape civilization itself.
“The difference between the IT bubble in the 1990s and the AI bubble today is that the top 10 companies in the S&P 500 today are more overvalued than they were in the 1990s,” Sløk warned, essentially calling the current market more detached from reality than when people believed every website would print money.
The Hype Machine’s Trillion-Dollar Promise
Your iPhone’s Siri still struggles with basic requests, yet investors are pricing Apple as if artificial general intelligence will arrive next Tuesday. Microsoft’s Satya Nadella recently called out this disconnect, dismissing AI milestone claims as “nonsensical benchmark hacking” until real GDP growth materializes.
The uncomfortable truth
OpenAI continues posting massive losses despite ChatGPT’s popularity. Even Nvidia—briefly the world’s most valuable company—faces shrinking margins despite record chip sales. The math simply doesn’t add up.
Industry veterans aren’t buying the hype either. Alibaba’s Joe Tsai and tech legend Tom Siebel have joined the chorus warning that AI stocks have entered full bubble territory.
What This Means for Your Tech Future
Should these inflated expectations collide with slower-than-promised AI adoption, the resulting crash could dwarf the early 2000s meltdown. Today’s tech giants wield far greater market influence than scattered dot-com startups ever did.
Your next smartphone upgrade, laptop purchase, or smart home investment could be dramatically affected. When reality finally catches up to Wall Street’s AI fantasies, the companies defining your digital life might look very different—assuming they survive the correction intact.