Someone who invested their money in Amazon on top of the "dotcom bubble" is today 50x times better off than someone who held USD.
If the company achieves a 4-5X growth (15% per year) and 30% margins (instead of 55%) that would place the share price at $176 - 1/4th of what it is today.
Let's look at the addressable market:
The sum of wages in the USA alone is about $100T per year. How much is it worldwide? Let's say $400T.
That is the current TAM when we expect computers to replace humans like cars replaced horses.
Capturing only 1% of that TAM would mean $4T in yearly revenues.
Nvidia's $2T market cap seems tame in face of the size of the opportunity.
But there is another point: A new technology not just replaces an old technology. It 10xes the usage. There are way more cars on the road now than there were horses back then.
The size of the market will grow beyond those $400T. We will build way more stuff when robots carry out all the work. Most of planet earth is unused at the moment. That will change.
But at the end of the day values of money are made up bullshit that attempt to assign a number to scarcity. If we make a world where computers can cheaply (energy/material wise) make all the items humanity needs, that future world is one that is a lot better off then the one we currently exist in. At least if we consider human needs being met valuable.
If science fiction tropes have any connection to reality, us humans may sit around all day in hedonistic gay space communism playing games while robotic/AI systems produce and trade needed resources and energy between each other producing 'value' while humanity itself is just a value sink.
Nvidia is a key player in this. So I would be surprised if they capture less than 1% of that value.
For example, in 1999 I bought food & other goods by delivery to my office and worked with companies selling online, using my handheld computer with a fast wireless connection. Clearly those were ultimately successful ideas, but that didn’t mean that investors in Kozmo, Pets.com, Ricochet, or Handspring got rich.
correct, it needs used for what its true purpose is: paper clip feedstock.
But seriously, what does that comment event mean. The earth isn’t being used? More use would invariably be mean more dystopian, despoiled and privatized, why is that good?
Mind you my personal perspective orients towards the opinion that tech companies do lead the markets more than others through metrics I can't personally rationalise but it's something we all seem to agree with (and I'm ok with if my superannuation/401k is always growing)
Lots of cash doing nothing on the sidelines is risky in the long term because inflation. A "risky asset" is risky in the short term because of volatility.
Just because something may eventually be a profitable investment that doesn't mean that it is the best place for you to currently invest your money.
They didn't just sell books and CDs either. They sold tax free books and CDs. It is easy to forget now that no one paid tax for anything sold online in 1999.
Of course, no one brags about how they bought Borders stock in 1995 today. I am sure if you did you were up huge in 1999 but not so great if you held.
Not everyone can wait X years to get it back
If you imagine a person, say 30 years, who thought in 1980 "Hey, I'm going to hold my savings in tech companies because tech is where the music is" and started accumulating throughout the 80s, 90s, 00s, 10s ... They would have a great time all along. And would be a happy 70 year old now.
Every tech boom in history was kicked off by wild speculation and ridiculous prices. Some of them turn out to be worth it, but practicing hindsight like you're doing is less than worthless. The dot-com boom was followed by the dot-com crash, and this will be no different.
“lol what bubble? Stocks are much higher than they were in 2000.”
“But they still took 15 years to recover”.
Whether it was smart or not to go all in on NASDAQ is not really material.
To address your point anyway, plenty of investment and pension funds were badly hit. Because even if you diversify, when a whole sector of the industry loses 20% in a couple of months, it hurts even people who did not invest themselves. I lived through these years and the ripple effects went much, much further than just some reckless venture capitalists. And broadening the outlook a bit, not everyone can afford to stay illiquid for 20 years, particularly in the US where the social safety net is not very effective.
Also, what about the not-boomers who were not in a state to invest in the 1980s? Plenty of 20- to 30-somethings were wiped out as well. Knowing that the market will be up 20 years from now (and not the stocks you might hold, mind) is cold comfort.
If you don’t remember it or did not live through it, I can tell you that it hurt quite a lot and no amount of hindsight now about what people should have done is going to change that.