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Newbird.AI! Or Loony.AI
Every speculative era has its favorite suffix. In the 1960s it was “tronics.” In the 1990s it was “dot-com.” Today, of course, it is “AI.” Nothing typifies a crazy, gambling, speculative degenerate economy like our present moment than what happened to Allbirds today.
The San Francisco maker of wool sneakers, once valued at more than $4 billion, sold its brand and intellectual property last month to brand management company American Exchange Group for $39 million. The stock had fallen more than 99 percent since its 2021 Nasdaq IPO. And then it decided to pivot to AI compute infrastructure, with a new name: NewBird AI.
An unknown investor did a $50 million convertible. Every filing and press release describes the counterparty only as “an institutional investor.” Maybe we will find it in the proxy statement, due before the May 18 shareholder vote. The press release itself reads like the white papers accompanying the turds called Initial Coin Offerings. You forgot about them, did you? (Good friend Brian reminded me of the rebrand of Long Island Iced Tea Corp to Long Blockchain Corp.)
The stock surged more than 700 percent in a single session. (At one point shares touched $21.76, giving the soon-to-be shell a market cap north of $180 million.) I am sure people are profiting off this instant hit, but in the end a lot of people are going to suffer. Pigs, as they say, will get slaughtered. I appear cynical because I have seen this movie before.
If you added dot-com to anything in 1999, even the penny stocks, it would pop. And I watched it happen. I covered it. And now I am watching it happen again, with a different two-letter suffix doing the same speculative work. It was thanks to a lot of what went down on message boards like Raging Bull and Yahoo. These days it is way more instant (and easier) thanks to social media. Everyone is a pundit on X.
In A Random Walk Down Wall Street, Burton Malkiel pointed out the “tronics boom.” From 1959 to 1962, companies plastered some garbled version of the word “electronics” into their names, regardless of what they actually made. Here are some names from that era: Astron, Dutron, Transitron, Powertron Ultrasonics. The products were almost beside the point. The suffix was the investment thesis.
The key observation Malkiel made then still holds now. Buyers of these issues did not really care what the companies made, so long as the name signaled adjacency to the future. That is the rhyme with today. “AI” is doing exactly the same work that “tronics” and “.com” did before it. Suffix is a signal. It attracts capital. Nothing else matters. Day trading, momentum trading, gambling. It is just all the same.
The pattern is not new and it is barely even interesting anymore. Why does it keep working? What does it tell us about how markets behave when fear of missing out overwhelms judgment? What does it say about the pervasiveness of the gambling instinct in a society that is even more economically stratified? Does it remind you of the 1920s?
Somedays I wake up and wonder if we are all being trolled.
You do not have to build something transformative at first. You only have to position yourself close enough to the narrative. Add “AI” to the pitch deck, sprinkle in “agents” and “GPU-as-a-Service” for polite company, and suddenly you are not a failed shoe company liquidating its assets. You are selling adjacency to the future.
These jokers started out selling shoes made out of wool. They could not turn that into a profitable business. And they think they can compete with hyperscalers who have more money than god these days? A shoddy shoemaker that has proven to be a disaster as stewards of investor dollars thinks it can make a go of it with a new name and a new game.
I know what I would call this game. For now, it is suffice to say, NewBird AI is more like Loony.AI.
PREVIOUSLY
April 15, 2026. San Francisco
uh, yup. 💯
I wish I could even share my true rage.
The market gods have a sense of humor! They are letting people short this turkey again.
Fair enough. 🙂
Reminds me of Long Blockchain Corp. fka Long Island Iced Tea Corp.
And they say this isn’t a bubble.
Now we are talking. I was trying to remember their name. Thank you.
Even if they raise $2B, would they know how to run a Compute-as-a-Service business? You may be able to buy GPUs, but you can’t put them to use or attract the developers without having the tools and libraries to put them to use. As you say, some folks will unknowingly get lucky and many will get slaughtered.
They know how to torch money, so that is one good way for them to really burn the billions 🙂
I’m not at all offended at someone trying to take advantage of a mania to enrich themselves. I’m offended by the people buying these shares, propping it up, and hoping to flip it to a bigger fool. It’s just plainly and utterly obvious that this isn’t going to work well. So why then are they buying the shares?
One word: greed