How Much Wealth an AI Stock Market Crash Could Destroy

60% of Americans cannot meet their basic needs on their income. They simply do not have enough income and cashflow to get exposure to the capital markets. No amount of education fixes a system structured to extract. We took pensions away saying they were unaffordable (they weren't, those contributions just go to shareholders now), took wages away through globalization and more corporate power, and then blame the human as if this was their fault. "Have you tried eating less avocado toast?"

More people crowdfunded for basic needs like food and housing in 2025, GoFundMe reports - https://www.pbs.org/newshour/nation/more-people-crowdfunded-... - December 9th, 2025

Most [bottom 60% of U.S. households] Americans don't earn enough to afford basic costs of living, analysis finds - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44119317 - May 2025

Wow, you weren't kidding. My impression of the market is outdated!

Japan is facing real inflation in the last 3 years, at rates not seen since the 1990s. https://www.statista.com/statistics/270095/inflation-rate-in...

However, it only owns 3% of US debt; they are the largest non-US holder, but still a marginal holder. Basically, they deseated China for that spot of "Biggest But Still Small US 'Lender'". Both together are dwarfed by pensions, 401ks, and other US buyers and institutions. https://www.visualcapitalist.com/charted-heres-who-owns-u-s-...

It's so blatantly tied to who's likely to lose the most money. The unreal part to me is that the major news outlets are so much more obvious in their framing now.

AI has a lot of rich people riding on its success, and this time's different for, IMO, two major reasons...

- First, the companies most invested in AI are perfusing it everywhere. Many parts of these big businesses, if not the business as a whole, is invested heavily in the success of LLM-based products. Microsoft is probably the poster child for this, where you can't use practically any of their modern products without copilot or some such being shoved in your face. OpenAI and Anthropic are both companies whose existence is predicated only by a viable LLM-based product. Nvidia and (as of their last-week's announcement) Micron are both now also heavily invested in the success of this technology, though they're also surely not the only companies in the hardware sector to be following this path to some degree.

- Second, the actual individuals behind these companies are the world's richest people, and much of their fortune comes from stock in these companies, and loans taken out against that stock.

  They stand to *personally* lose a significant-even-to-them sum of money if the bottom falls out of this thing. If this weren't the case, I'm absolutely certain we wouldn't be seeing as much reporting about how an AI crash would hurt the average household. When smaller crashes happen (even those that affect more average households), it's inevitable, or it's good for the economy in the long-term (it's a correction, after all -- how could that possibly be bad?), or it's the consequence of people's personal choice to invest one way or another, but because the uber-rich were spared, it's *not really that bad.*

This is a disgusting turn in the state of journalism. I don't pretend know what comes next, or how this can be remedied. Crowdsourced news is as prone to manipulation as "traditional" centralized news, so that's not it, and I don't think people have the depth of knowledge to use something purely fact-based (like bellingcat) for every domain of day-to-day life (which is less an effect of the US education system being in continuous decline over decades, and more an effect of the cognitive load it takes to be familiar enough with everything to be able to draw reasonable conclusions about it.

Maybe. It's hard to say for sure.

Tesla for example: its stock price has fluctuated down 50%, then up 100% (relative to the dip), in this year alone. Clearly, that's market speculation, not capital + earnings. So how much of that speculation is AI-dependent? Depends on how much coffee investors drink before reading Musk's latest tweets, I guess.

Apple is HEAVILY invested in AI, but you're right: it's earnings are dependent more on iPads than AI right now.

> ...are you really deciding whether or not to buy based on their AI-ness?

Buy APL stock, or buy an iPhone?