According to Cory Doctorow on Pluralistic, financial markets have essentially given up on accurately valuing assets. He illustrates this with Elon Musk: despite his net worth skyrocketing from $20 billion to a trillion dollars nominally, everything he's built since 2020—from Starship failures to the Cybertruck to Twitter—has flopped. Doctorow argues the real economic crisis isn't AI replacing all jobs, but rather capital fleeing from productive research into 'vibes'—witness the defunding of cancer research to bankroll loss-making AI ventures. When markets prize bubbles and memestocks over substance, the economy doesn't just die—it kills what matters.

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