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When Thomas Edison stood in his Menlo Park laboratory and let a carbon filament glow for 13.5 hours, the skeptics who had spent two decades calling electric light a parlor trick were immediately silenced. Within ten years, electricity went from being a curiosity for the rich to wiring the streets of Manhattan. Within twenty years, the gas men were extinct.
Right now, Wall Street is having its Menlo Park moment.
The AI boom isn’t a story anymore… it’s a number. A very large, very specific, very inconvenient-for-skeptics number.
For two years, every rally has been dogged by the same whisper: what if it’s just hype? Every capex headline came with a “but where are the earnings?” footnote. Bears built entire theses on the gap between AI promises and AI profits.
