Silicon Valley has officially “lost its mind,” The Times UK reports, as startup and big-tech pay packages skyrocket amid the AI gold rush—mirroring the dot‑com mania of the late 1990s.
In just 30 months, Nvidia’s stock has surged twelvefold, pushing its valuation past a staggering $4 trillion and turning some 80 percent of its employees into millionaires. Meanwhile, startup valuations have eclipsed reality: The Times UK highlights Mira Murati’s five-month-old Thinking Machines Lab, backed by $2 billion at a $10 billion valuation, despite having no product or revenue. Similarly, Ilya Sutskever’s venture, Safe Superintelligence, has drawn $2 billion at a $32 billion valuation—also pre-revenue.
These eye-popping figures have resurrected memories of the dot‑com bubble. Back then, over-optimism and investment fever swept through companies with questionable fundamentals—and the same is happening today. Venture funding reached nearly $50 billion in California last year through 850+ deals, fueling a compensation war among elite coders.
That competition includes rumored $100 million–plus bonuses. Meta’s CTO, Andrew Bosworth, refuted a claim that the company had offered $100 million to every engineer, but admitted the market is “hot.” Reports also emerged of $200 million offers like the one Apple allegedly extended to AI expert Ruoming Pang.
Meta itself has deployed massive capital, spending $14.3 billion to acquire a 49 percent stake in Scale AI—merely to “acqu‑hire” engineers. This deal brought in founder Alexandr Wang and other top talent through multimillion-dollar buyouts.
Startups with no products—like OpenAI, Anthropic, and Safe Superintelligence—have reached valuations of $300 billion, $60 billion, and $32 billion respectively. OpenAI projects $13 billion in revenue by 2025, despite its products only debuting in the past few years.
Yet this rapid ascent has parallels with the dot‑com crash: for every ten funded startups, only one emerges successfully. Industry leaders like Reid Hoffman and Peter Thiel caution that while AI likely transforms industries, much of today’s overvaluation may evaporate as market expectations reset.
In the words of The Times UK, “No revenue. No product. No problem.” But as Silicon Valley’s AI fever reaches fever pitch, the underlying question looms: will this boom create enduring innovation—or collapse in a spectacular bust?
