Today's AI boom looks a lot like the 1999 dot-com bubble, and the warning is that ordinary investors will be the ones left holding losses when it pops.

• The same billionaires from the dot-com era — Reid Hoffman, Vinod Khosla, Marc Andreessen — are now the ones funding the AI boom.
• Nvidia today looks like Cisco in 2000: real hardware sales, huge demand, but priced so high it only works if the money keeps flowing.
• Much of the cash just loops between a few connected companies — venture firms fund AI startups, startups pay Nvidia and Microsoft, which then report it as growth.
• Insiders like Bezos, Zuckerberg, and Jamie Dimon quietly sold billions of their own stock in early 2024 while publicly staying upbeat.
• Small traders are propping up prices, many making risky same-day options bets, so they absorb the selling without realizing it.

Outlook: The bigger players are lobbying for AI rules that lock out competition; once those pass, expect a shift to cost-cutting and layoffs, and a slow, years-long market drop rather than a quick crash.