I lost my job during the dot com bust (it preceded the GFC) and since that shook me, I was very skeptical of properties making people rich overnight but they literally were!
"There's no free lunch!", I told myself, but it was becoming increasingly hard to ignore my barber, the cashier at the grocery store, my dentist, my landscaper - all who had bought highly leveraged properties and had actually made profit. I'm not ashamed to say I started to look into it myself - I was even ready to purchase some leveraged properties myself but kept getting outbid by even crazy offers.
Then 2008 happened. It happened suddenly. First it was on the news. Then quietly, people began to stay at home. Then move out.
It was both unsettling but also reassuring. My home value halved overnight (it's 800% up now so I'm doing OK) and mu neighborhood went mostly empty (bankruptcies, foreclosures).
Now again in 2026, my barber, the cashier at the grocery store, my dentist, my landscaper - all cannot stop talking about Grok Bot, about "Chat" (they usually mean ChatGPT or Gemini).
Maybe this time I can get in and get out in time, get real rich!
Consumer. Their usecases seem pretty valid - the landscaper is using it to drum up more business, has agents responding to incoming emails and texts, just like my dentist and barber.
The cashier uses GrokBot to transcribe notes to her manager. Her company has a very bad inventory app (I don't want to name names but it's a very large nationwide chain) so she literally exports inventory into an excel and feeds it into GrokBot as a way to run queries.
I can see nothing wrong in them just like I could see no wrong in buying properties and flipping them for a profit because there was so much demand at that time.
If you weren't buying houses 2003-2009, you have no idea how crazy it was. People would buy homes unseen in Olathe, KS.
It's likely just me but it just feels eerily familiar. I hope we are all wrong this time around.
uh, there's a huge difference between using an AI agent(s) to make yourself more efficient in your line of work, v.s. buying leveraged properties valued in the hundreds of thousands of dollars.
because, in a rational market, if a competitive edge is gained from a 3rd party service (GrokBot) that won't refuse to sell to the landscaper's competition, then the landscaper's competition will also use GrokBot the same way where that competitive edge is no longer there.
In other words, all the landscapers are equally efficient and unless they collude on pricing, the then pass on savings to their customers.
Which means any landscaper who doesn't use "GrokBot" will lose customers to those who do and have lower prices. For every landscaper, other than the first one to adopt "GrokBot" and lower their prices, there is ROI.
correct. As long as one landscaper has an edge, they will likely have a ROI for that window of time. However, when you calculate ROI, you don't do so over weeks or months, but rather years unless the specific job itself is very short lived.
For back office operations, one calculates ROI over 5 years or so as upfront investments are rather large (less for turnkey SaaS but that's a whole another discussion and not what's happening here. Here the owner is building their own solution).
Your theory is sound. What you're missing is in a rational market, 3rd party edge only provides an initial boost until the rest catch up. That's why companies invest in in-house talent, so they own and control it.
Yes it is. Pulling a simple permit takes months and thousands of dollars. Building a new house is practically out of the question.
The SF Bay is deeply supply constrained but just because tech billionaires here can buy up a dozen homes while offering millions over asking, the city gets their taxes and so they are not incentivized to improve things.
> Well, since you seemed to know what you needed to do back then (but didn't take action), what do you think you need to do now to "get rich"?
You give me too much credit. I didn't know how to "get rich" back then and neither do I, now.
I didn't take action because I didn't know. I kept getting outbid because I didn't know how I would pay $1M for a home that I would struggle to rent out for more than $800/mo.
My answer, as always, is: Organize as workers against our capitalist exploiters, and overthrow this system of capitalism in favor of a system which rewards us workers for the wealth we create and not our capitalist exploiters who’s only contribution is rent seeking on the wealth we create.
Capitalist countries are the ones with the highest standards of living, and formerly communist countries like China gained immense wealth with pro-market reforms, so perhaps the reason people on HN may not support a revolution is that they're actually more informed on this inconvenient reality than you assume.
The market reforms got China’s GDP from 1000 CNY to 7000. The communist reforms got China’s literacy rate from 20% to 80%.
I know you capitalist love money more then anything, but the rest of use like to live healthy lives and enjoy things like good books and spending time with our friends and family.
> but the rest of use like to live healthy lives and enjoy things like good books and spending time with our friends and family
If you're in the U.S., what's stopping you from doing that? Some of my coworkers in tech retired to the country, raise their own chickens, goats, grow their own food and are all on solar. They seem to be loving their life.
What precisely are you accusing them of? As a gesture of good-faith, I'll put my subtext-cards down on the metaphorical table first: I believe the quippy-looking retort is actually a dud once we open it up and look inside.
For example, is it one of these?
1. "Being a regular here necessarily means you cannot actually have that opinion, so you are lying to us."
2. "You may believe that, but posting it here is not logical because nobody here will be receptive to it."
3. "You may believe that, but posting it here is an immoral offense against the management."
The only anger I am sensing in the replies, and the only anger I feel towards your post, is about the cliché debate tactic “posted on an iPhone ... gotcha”.
Everything on this board is controlled for the purpose of making billionaires richer. None of your three things are true. Here's 4: "the fact that you are posting about the revolution on Make Billionaires Richer Inc and not on Anarchist Graffiti Dot Onion is a sign that the billionaires have thoroughly won and the revolution will not happen"
The revolution won‘t happen on Hacker News, that is for sure. However, Hacker News is one of the biggest social platform of tech workers, and GGP might not like it, but when so many workers in a single industry come together, there will be solidarity, particularly against our bosses. And among workers in any industry there is always a radical (usually me) talking about the revolution.
NFTs. I was listening to this one podcast The Million Dollar podcast where they tried to turn 10k into a million dollars. They started a bit late and lost most of it when NFTs and NBA trading cards lost their value pretty quickly. They had some really smart-sounding theories about great stock picks to make boat loads of money too!
I believe that was Joseph Kennedy, father of JFK and RFK. He realized that he didn't understand what was going on in the stock market at all, and so he got out, a few weeks before the 1929 crash.
Off topic: I first wrote "2029" instead of "1929" because habit. Wow, the start of the Great Depression was 97 years ago? I find that surprising.
> Well what did you and them do after "getting rich"?
I never got rich as I never ended up buying a property for investment. I just kept on getting outbid by others. I kept getting outbid because I didn't know how I would pay $1M for a home that I would struggle to rent out for more than $800/mo.
The others reinvested their profits into the next purchase until the music stopped. Everyone but my dentist got wiped out.
My dentist just made a payment everytime he got a late notice which was like once every 4-6 months as the note changed hands, often getting lost in the chaos. He refinanced all the properties around 2012-2013 and invested the proceedings all into one multi storey clinic which is doing very well.
a lesson there is definitely relevant for Y Combinator startups (and I assume YC teaches): know your actual obligations, not what the people you're obligated to wish they were. Avoid spending large amounts of money unless you actually have to.
Ponzi schemes are extremely profitable if timed correctly. But statistically, it's impossible for the majority of people to have correct timing. You have to be twice as likely to lose $200k as to make $400k because the whole system averages out to zero.
If you have the right heuristic for when to get out of the scheme you can become an overnight millionaire. I don't have it. Statistically, few people can.
> Now again in 2026, my barber, the cashier at the grocery store, my dentist, my landscaper - all cannot stop talking about Grok Bot, about "Chat" (they usually mean ChatGPT or Gemini).
I mean, they should be. It's a transformative technology that is doing something that was science-fiction five years ago, and it going to make a few people trillionaires, and it's not entirely clear where it will leave the rest of us.
That doesn't mean that you should, like, be rushing to be a bagholder.
I agree that there's much wild speculation, but some of the speculation is pretty mild in comparison. Micron trades at a forward P/E multiple of approximately 4.3 x to 5.0 x based on consensus forward earnings estimates. Those aren't bubble numbers. Those aren't even utility numbers anymore.
I think everyone is worried and, at least in this case, being cautious.
Countrywide traded at like 6x earnings in 2005. The market not putting a high multiple on peak earnings for a cyclical is better than the alternative but it doesn’t imply there’s no bubble.
And because everybody sees the risk, it is already priced in.
The stock market is unpredictable precisely because everybody is trying to guess what is going to happen next. Dollar cost averaging takes the guessing away.
The bubble can't pop until most investors believe it's not a bubble, it's the new normal. As long as they believe it's a bubble they'll have money on the sidelines to throw in whenever it goes down.
Or at least it can't pop for purely financial reasons. It might still pop if, say, Anthropic and OpenAI both announce they've hit the scaling wall, or Iran somehow bombs TSMC, or a court rules they have to pay a royalty to every book author every time they answer a prompt.
Developing the habit of investing at frequent regular intervals eliminates the desire to time the market. And that's what threads like these are about, for most people.
I think the system is more fragile than that. Infra providers even now have to raise money with junk rates meaning that are entering a debt spiral. If that compute doesn't come online because the infra providers are bankrupt Anthropic/Open ai can't hit their growth projections and Nvidia sales will drop as well.
And I am not even speculating if the growth/revenue projections are realistic in the first place, which, if not, would be another trigger
"There's no free lunch!", I told myself, but it was becoming increasingly hard to ignore my barber, the cashier at the grocery store, my dentist, my landscaper - all who had bought highly leveraged properties and had actually made profit. I'm not ashamed to say I started to look into it myself - I was even ready to purchase some leveraged properties myself but kept getting outbid by even crazy offers.
Then 2008 happened. It happened suddenly. First it was on the news. Then quietly, people began to stay at home. Then move out.
It was both unsettling but also reassuring. My home value halved overnight (it's 800% up now so I'm doing OK) and mu neighborhood went mostly empty (bankruptcies, foreclosures).
Now again in 2026, my barber, the cashier at the grocery store, my dentist, my landscaper - all cannot stop talking about Grok Bot, about "Chat" (they usually mean ChatGPT or Gemini).
Maybe this time I can get in and get out in time, get real rich!
Maybe this time it's different!
reply