Are We In A Massive AI Bubble? How Does NVIDIA Today Compare To The 1990s Dotcom Bubble?
ByBrian Warneron September 29, 2025inArticles›Entertainment
Pop quiz: Name the Bay Area-based tech company that surpassed Microsoft to become the most valuable company in the world after its stock increased 4,000% in under five years.
Here’s another hint: This company earned its fortune selling proverbial “picks and shovels” during a technological “gold rush” that Wall Street and every major corporation on the planet became obsessed with practically overnight.
Did you guess NVIDIA ?
If so… that is… incorrect! The correct answer is actually… Cisco Systems . All the rest is true, but NVIDIA has “only” gained 1,300% in the last five years.
The rise of NVIDIA is extremely similar to the late 1990s rise of Cisco. NVIDIA became the most valuable company in the world because it makes advanced computer chips that power crypto mining, video gaming, and Large Language Model “AI” chat programs like ChatGPT.
Cisco, which derived its name from the city where it was founded, San Fran cisco , became the most valuable company in the world because it made the best network routers, which were crucial to the burgeoning dotcom industry.
Between January 1995 and March 2000, Cisco’s stock price increased 4,000% as the dotcom bubble grew and grew and grew. In March 2000, Cisco’s stock hit an all-time high, and the company’s $500 billion market cap made it the most valuable company in the world, topping Microsoft.
If that sounds familiar, it’s because NVIDIA has done the same thing in the last five years. On June 18, 2024, NVIDIA became the most valuable company in the world when its $3.34 trillion market cap surpassed Microsoft’s $3.32 trillion market cap. On July 9, 2025, NVIDIA’s market cap topped $4 trillion for the first time. As I type this article, NVIDIA’s market cap is $4.45 trillion. Just three years ago, its market cap was $300 billion. That certainly seems… frothy, no?
(Photo by SAM YEH/AFP via Getty Images)
What Happened to Cisco?
Cisco was founded by Leonard Bosack and Sandra Lerner . Leonard and Sandy met at Stanford, married in 1980, and co-founded Cisco in 1984. Cisco went public in 1990 at a market cap of $224 million. Before going public, Cisco’s venture capital funders installed a new CEO and a team of senior-level professional managers.
For reasons I could not ascertain, Sandra did not get along with the professional managers and the new CEO. Six months after the IPO, she was fired. Leonard quit the same day. Soon thereafter, they sold every single share they owned for a pre-tax total of $170 million. A few years later, they divorced.
So, in March 2000, when Cisco became the most valuable company in the world with a market cap of $500 billion, Leonard and Sandra did NOT own any shares. If they did, at that point, their combined equity would have made them the richest people in the world , with a net worth north of $100 billion.
March 2000 would prove to be the peak for Cisco and an entire ecosystem of newly-launched dotcom companies. Then, the bubble burst. By the end of 2002, Cisco’s stock price had collapsed 85%.
Even two decades later, with multiple additional tech revolutions, Cisco is still nowhere near that March 2000 high point. As I type this article, its market cap is around $270 billion. Certainly, nothing to sneeze at, but a far cry from $500 billion and not even a tenth of Microsoft’s current $3.8 trillion market cap.
Could the same thing happen to NVIDIA?
Obviously, anything COULD happen. I have no idea what WILL happen. Consider the following comparisons:
- NVIDIA is currently trading at around 50X one-year forward price-to-earnings ratio. The NASDAQ 100 Index trades at 30x.
- In 2000, Cisco traded at 150X forward earnings. The NASDAQ 100 traded at 200X.
Based on those numbers, one could certainly argue that NVIDIA and the wider tech market are nowhere near being in a bubble right now, at least compared to the 2000s dotcom bubble.
In my opinion, on the other hand, we are in an AI bubble. Admittedly, I’m somewhat biased because I am very perturbed by AI-generated content and chat programs that steal information from websites like CNW and regurgitate it without the need to actually visit or compensate the original source. Beyond my personal biases, what do you think of all this? Do you use AI in any way? Do you enjoy Google’s AI answers? How has AI changed your life? I’d love to be proven wrong.
A 2024 Barclays financial report predicted that companies are about to spend $170 billion on AI cumulatively. Barclays points out that $170 billion is enough to build 12,000 ChatGPTs. If I’m struggling to come up with one solid use for ChatGPT, why do we need to spend the equivalent of 12,000 ChatGPTs?
By comparison, the world was objectively more difficult before the Internet. The advent of websites, instant access to news, eCommerce, email, etc… all drastically improved all of our lives almost overnight. What is the AI equivalent?
Would You Sell?
As NVIDIA’s stock has soared, its employees have gotten extremely rich. Company co-founder/CEO Jensen Huang has seen his net worth increase from $3 billion to over $140 billion in the last few years. He’s currently one of the 15 richest people in the world, and 99% of his net worth is on paper.
Consider these tweets from a year ago. And keep in mind, NVIDIA’s stock has increased 20% since they were published:
If you joined Nvidia 5 years ago as a mid-level product manager with an annual $70K stock grant over four years, just that initial grant would be worth ~$10.6M today. — Ben Lang (@benln) June 19, 2024
And that’s if you took a mid-level job. If you were a superstar developer who was recruited by NVIDIA in 2013, you likely received a 4-year-vesting, $400,000 equity grant. By mid-2024, those fully vested shares were worth $100 million.
In the first half of 2024, NVIDIA employees sold over $700 million worth of their shares , double what they sold in all of 2023. Roughly $100 million of those $700 million worth of sales were done by CEO Jensen Huang through a prearranged stock trading plan.
NVIDIA insiders probably should be selling.
If you were sitting on $10 million worth of NVIDIA shares right now, and that constituted 99.99% of your net worth, what would you do? Let it ride? Or take some chips off the table? FYI: I don’t own any shares of NVIDIA, and this article should not be construed by any means as investment advice. I have no idea what’s going to happen with NVIDIA, but I can tell you what happened with Cisco.
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Larry Ellison Just Leapfrogged Jeff Bezos To Become The World’s Third Richest Person. Next Stop, World’s First Trillionaire?
ByBrian Warneron June 13, 2025inArticles›Billionaire News
This week, Larry Ellison’s net worth increased by $34 billion in roughly 48 hours, thanks to a massive rally in Oracle’s stock price following a blowout earnings report and rising investor confidence in the company’s AI capabilities.
Shares of Oracle soared 13% on Thursday and another 7% on Friday, closing at a record high of approximately $215. The surge added over $100 billion to Oracle’s market capitalization and pushed Ellison’s personal fortune to $235 billion, up from around $201 billion earlier in the week.
That gain vaulted Ellison into the third spot among the world’s richest people, leapfrogging Jeff Bezos and now trailing only Elon Musk and Mark Zuckerberg.
Current Top 5 Richest People in the World :
- Elon Musk – $368 billion
- Mark Zuckerberg – $241 billion
- Larry Ellison – $235 billion
- Jeff Bezos – $234 billion
- Bill Gates – $180 billion
For Ellison, this marks not only a financial milestone but also a historic turning point in one of the tech world’s most iconic rivalries.
Larry and Bill (Photo by Sean M. Haffey/Getty Images)
Oracle went public on March 12, 1986 — just one day before Microsoft’s IPO . From that moment forward, Ellison and Bill Gates were locked in a decades-long battle for software dominance. While Oracle specialized in enterprise databases and cloud infrastructure, Microsoft exploded into consumer and enterprise software, capturing a far larger share of the market, and for most of their careers, Gates dramatically outpaced Ellison in terms of wealth.
As you probably know, Bill Gates was the richest person on the planet, with only a few brief interruptions, from 1997 until 2017. During those years, Larry was largely out of the spotlight in terms of wealth rankings.
Even a decade ago, Ellison’s net worth hovered around $30–40 billion, while Gates stood at roughly $80 billion.
Much of the difference comes down to how the two men managed their equity. Gates, who owned 45% of Microsoft at IPO, gradually sold off nearly all of it over the decades. His current stake in Microsoft is down to around 1.4% , and while that was a wise move in terms of diversification and philanthropy, it limited his exposure to the company’s staggering growth. With Microsoft now worth $3.5 trillion, a hypothetical 30% stake would be worth $1.05 trillion — enough to make Gates the world’s first trillionaire .
Ellison, by contrast, never let go of the wheel. Four decades after the IPO, he still owns roughly 41% of Oracle. As Oracle’s market cap climbed to $600 billion for the first time this week, Ellison’s patience and concentration have paid off in dramatic fashion.
What Would It Take to Top Marky Mark & The Zucky Bunch?
To surpass Mark Zuckerberg and become the world’s second-richest person (assuming Zuckerberg’s net worth holds steady at $241 billion), Larry Ellison would need Oracle’s stock to climb from $215 to around $220 per share, or its market cap to increase by roughly $15 billion. A 2.5% increase in Oracle’s stock would do the trick. Very possible — maybe even by Monday.
Could Larry Ellison Become a Trillionaire?
Believe it or not, that’s not entirely out of the question. At a 41% ownership stake, Ellison’s net worth rises roughly $41 billion for every $100 billion added to Oracle’s market cap. To reach $1 trillion, Ellison would need his Oracle shares alone to be worth that amount — which would require the company’s market cap to hit about $2.44 trillion.
That’s more than four times its current size — but not unthinkable. Oracle’s market cap was just $60 billion in 2005 and $180 billion in 2015. On Friday, Oracle’s market cap ended at $600 billion for the first time. As further evidence, Microsoft, Apple, and Nvidia have already crossed the $3 trillion threshold, and Oracle is aggressively positioning itself as a key player in AI infrastructure, a sector that could see exponential growth in the coming years.
For now, Ellison is the third richest person in the world, and perhaps the greatest living example of what patient, long-term ownership can achieve.
Disclosure: The author owns shares of Oracle Corporation in a retirement account. This article is for informational/entertainment purposes only and should not be considered financial or investment advice.
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