Every Bubble in History Ends the Same Way. Is AI Next?

Is AI a bubble? To answer that, we go back 400 years, because every great bubble in history followed the same five steps. In 1637, one Dutch tulip bulb was said to be worth a canal house in Amsterdam, until buyers stopped showing up in Haarlem. In 1720, Isaac Newton sold his South Sea shares at a profit, watched his friends get rich, jumped back in near the top and lost around £20,000. In 1929, Irving Fisher promised a "permanently high plateau" days before the Wall Street crash, and the Dow fell 89%. In 2000, the dot-com boom sent the Nasdaq above 5,000 before it fell 78%, yet Amazon survived. Today, big tech plans to spend around $650 billion on AI in a single year, Nvidia is worth more than $5 trillion, and the top ten companies make up more than a third of the S&P 500. We look at the signs of a bubble, the one big difference from the dot-com era (real profits), and why a bubble doesn't mean the technology is wrong. Figures are as of September 2026. This is history, not financial advice. Chapters 0:00 Newton's big mistake 0:49 Chapter 1: Flowers Worth a House (tulip mania, 1637) 2:07 Chapter 2: The Genius Who Lost (South Sea Bubble, 1720) 3:42 Chapter 3: The Permanent Plateau (the 1929 crash) 5:09 Chapter 4: Dot-Com to Dot-Bomb (2000) 6:19 Chapter 5: Is AI Next? Which step do you think we're on? Tell us in the comments. Sources: Anne Goldgar, "Tulipmania" (University of Chicago Press); Andrew Odlyzko, "Newton's financial misadventures in the South Sea Bubble" (Notes and Records of the Royal Society, 2019); Federal Reserve History (the 1929 crash and the Great Depression); Nasdaq and Dow Jones historical data; Bloomberg and company guidance on 2026 AI capital spending; CNBC reporting on Sam Altman's August 2025 comments. #AIBubble #StockMarket #History