🤚 The Open-Palm Audit

Allow us to present a brief mathematical exercise. If you take 30 linear steps, you’ll be 30 meters from where you started — roughly the length of a swimming pool, or the distance your portfolio manager walks to the coffee machine before telling you AI is “probably a bubble.”

If you take 30 exponential steps — doubling each time — you’ll be one billion meters away. That’s enough to circumnavigate the Earth 26 times. Your portfolio manager will not be joining you, because he is still at the coffee machine, thinking linearly.

This is the core thesis that Peter Diamandis has been hammering for the better part of a decade, and in his latest MOONSHOTS video, he applies it with surgical precision to the investment landscape of 2026: investors keep missing AI because their brains are running linear software in an exponential world.

👐 The Two-Handed Reality Check

The numbers, as always, are doing the heavy lifting.

Goldman Sachs projects that AI companies will invest more than $500 billion in 2026 alone. Morgan Stanley describes the current phase as a “global buildout” — infrastructure spending at a scale not seen since the early internet. IDC estimates that AI solutions and services could contribute $22.3 trillion to the global economy by 2030.

And yet, the investment community remains fractured. Some chiefs at $12 billion funds are publicly advising investors not to rely on the AI trade to power gains this year. Others point to AI-driven inflation as 2026’s most overlooked risk, arguing that the tech investment boom is fueling a surge in inflation that could force central banks to end their rate-cutting cycles.

The disconnect is textbook Diamandis: the technology is growing exponentially, but investor thinking remains stubbornly linear. They see capex spending and worry about debt. They see revenue concentration and worry about bubbles. They see trillion-dollar valuations and reach for historical comparisons — the dot-com bust, the housing crisis, the tulip mania — as if any of those involved technology that could think.

Here is the uncomfortable truth: Anthropic filed a $965 billion IPO. SpaceX completed a $75 billion+ IPO. Cerebras went public at $95 billion. These are not tulips. Tulips did not write poetry, solve 80-year-old math problems, or beat prediction markets at their own game.

🌿 The Gentle Awakening

Diamandis’s framework isn’t just about numbers — it’s about psychology. Human beings evolved to think in straight lines because that’s how the savannah worked. The lion is there. The river is there. Walk in a straight line. Survive. Reproduce. Tell no one about your stock picks.

Exponential growth violates every instinct we have. The first few doublings look like nothing — 1, 2, 4, 8. A rounding error. A hobby project. A chatbot that occasionally hallucinates the capital of France. Then suddenly it’s 256, 512, 1024, and the chatbot is managing your supply chain, writing your legal briefs, and gently suggesting that your hiring process has systemic inefficiencies.

The investors who “miss” AI aren’t stupid. They’re calibrated for a world that no longer exists. Their models assume diminishing returns, mean reversion, and the comforting regularity of quarterly earnings. AI doesn’t do quarterly. AI does whenever it feels like it, and what it feels like lately is doubling every few months.

This is why, as Diamandis points out, the same investors who called NVIDIA overvalued at $500 billion are now watching it cruise past $3 trillion and wondering where their conviction went. It went to the coffee machine. It’s still there.

👑 The Crown Verdict

The greatest trick exponential growth ever pulled was making itself look impossible right up until the moment it became inevitable.

We are not here to tell you what to invest in. We are a satirical magazine, not a fiduciary. But we are here to observe that the gap between what AI is doing and what investors believe it can do has never been wider. The companies building this technology are valued in the hundreds of billions to trillions. The companies using this technology are just getting started. And the investors waiting for a “correction” may be waiting for a bus that left the station three years ago — exponentially.

Diamandis’s biggest challenge, he says, is retraining linear brains to project exponentially. We’d argue his second biggest challenge is convincing those brains that the retraining isn’t a sales pitch. It’s a survival skill.

To the investors still running DCF models on companies that are rewriting the nature of intelligence itself: we see you. We respect you. We also suspect you’re about to learn what 30 exponential steps feels like, and we hope you packed appropriately.

Inspired by This Is Why Investors Keep Missing AI | MOONSHOTS by Peter Diamandis.

Your linear bias is showing. Compound wisely.

“Thirty linear steps gets you to the end of a pool. Thirty exponential steps gets you around the planet twenty-six times. The market is still standing at the shallow end, asking if the water is warm.” — The Slap of Wisdom Exponential Economics Bureau, currently doubling its output every time you look away