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The .COM bubble was more than a divot because .COMs in so many industries employed so many people. There was amazon.com, but also pets.com, lowermybills.com, gateway.com. But if our economy somehow loses access to AI (rationing due to wartime efforts? sabotage by a foreign nation? simply not enough grid power to turn them on at the price people are willing to pay?) I would probably need to hire more coders to get the equivalent work done.

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AI is driving trades, materials, real estate, all sorts of downstream stuff.

The rest of the economy is dead. Oracle is dead without OpenAI. Remember that unlike the dotcom, none of these companies are public. So when it pops, you’ll see private credit and PE funds implode, which could bring down banks with unhedged exposure. The headlines talk about JP Morgan (which likely has the risk managed), but regional banks got into that nature in the last couple of years in a big way.

Did amazon.com go bust? Seems like I heard they were still in business as of a couple of years ago at least.

The point was that Amazon wasn't independent from the frenzied, leveraged land grab that characterized the .COM bubble. Like many other companies, they were hiring aggressively until the bubble burst. Whether or not the companies went bust, a lot of people lost their jobs in a short time.

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