Ray Dalio, the billionaire founder of Bridgewater Associates, delivered one of his starkest warnings yet on the current market environment during a wide-ranging appearance on The Diary of a CEO with host Steven Bartlett, arguing AI enthusiasm has pushed markets into bubble territory reminiscent of 1929 and 2000. His warning arrives just as the market prepares to test his thesis in real time: SpaceX has already gone public in the largest IPO ever and Anthropic and OpenAI are barreling toward trillion-dollar valuations—precisely the kind of speculative issuance surge that market historians treat as a bubble’s clearest warning sign.
Bartlett opened by referencing a prior guest, Jeremy Grantham, who told the show that markets are staring down “the biggest investment bubble in American history.” Dalio’s response was direct: “He’s right,” he said.
That call is consistent with Grantham’s long track record—the GMO co-founder called the Japanese asset bubble before it collapsed in the early 1990s, the dot-com bubble before it burst, and wrote in Fortune in September 2007 that U.S. housing was in “genuine bubble territory” months before the Great Financial Crisis, at a time when even the Federal Reserve was dismissing bubble talk.
