Issue #102, Volume #3
AI’s Brave New World – Quality Smothered Beneath Quantity
Inside today's Daily Journal…
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Editor’s note: Today, Porter has turned the Journal over to his longtime friend and colleague Bill Bonner of Bonner Private Research… who shares his thoughts on artificial intelligence – and who will benefit from it, if anyone.
Here’s Bill…
Will AI make us all “very rich,” as President Trump assures us… Will it make anyone rich?
Take the softball first. Will it make us all rich? It will not – and the very asking of the question betrays a mind that has never paused to consider how the world is actually put together.
Rich is a relative thing, not an absolute one. We can no more all be rich than we can all be in the 90th percentile – the word itself would be meaningless. So it is with truth. With good, and with very nearly every adjective a fellow can pull from the dictionary. A battery, to carry a positive charge, requires a negative ground – flip it as you please, but you cannot have the one without the other. And when good or fast or rich floods the land in overwhelming quantity, you may as well have none of it at all.
Consider the tallies of last week. Between the ringing of the IPO bell and his next breakfast, Elon Musk is reckoned to have gained some $400 billion. But the old principle of declining marginal utility tells us that each fresh dollar is worth less than the last. Spread across a whole economy this melancholy truth wears the name “inflation,” and it gnaws quietly at every dollar in your pocket. For a man like Elon, sitting upon roughly $1,400,000,000,000, the next single dollar is worth approximately nothing. So the dollar lying on the sidewalk is not worth stooping to pick it up.
Hold this in mind as we proceed, for it is the very hinge on which the whole contraption swings, and it explains why AI is apt to prove a fat and conspicuous flop. The principle is this: that which is too easily had is not worth having, and that which is already too plentiful is not worth piling higher. In Sweden, a fine bronze tan draws admiring glances. In Senegal, not so much.
Which brings the follow-up question. If not all of us, then who?
At first squint, the prizes would seem to fall to those chasing them – recklessly, even, with great barrowloads of other people’s money. We refer to the hyperscalers, financed by the trusting shareholders of Microsoft, Google, SpaceX, and the rest. If a queue is forming for those destined to strike it rich, surely they stand at the head of it.
But as we saw yesterday, those apparently best placed to seize a new technology are commonly those most thoroughly chained to the old one.
We all remember Kodak – its “Kodak moment” marched straight into common usage. Kodak even invented the digital camera in the 1970s. But it could never coax a profit from it, and slid into bankruptcy in 2012. Today’s Kodaks may meet the same undertaker.
The true Henry Fords of AI may not be those with household names, nor the glittering IPOs. They may not even be Americans. Politico:
People around the world see a winner on AI – and it’s not the U.S.
Respondents in key U.S.-allied countries increasingly see China as the world’s AI leader, while American optimism about the technology continues to erode.
Whatever.
But there lurks a further possibility: that AI may simply turn out to be a dud. It deals in words, designs, fake videos, scraps of information – and it scoops these “ideas” from the internet, where the human race has deposited them in great reeking heaps, like guano upon some forgotten island. A little manure does wonders for the roses. Shovel on too much and they wilt and die. Dollars cheapen as they multiply, and so do ideas. In the stock market, when every last soul is certain a share will rise, one thing alone is sure: it will not rise – for who is left to buy once “everyone” has already laid down his bid?
The machines can ape Shakespeare’s sonnets, draft an airplane, untie a mathematical knot – and do it in an instant. They also work around the clock, without rest. Every 11th-grader now knows AI can knock out a term paper better than the boy himself and trim a screenplay in a wink, and all of it at very nearly no cost at all.
In the time it takes your editor to grind out one of these dispatches, the machine called Claude can produce a hundred – no exaggeration, we put it to the proof. It needs less than five minutes for Claude to write one. In the six or seven hours we spend chiseling a single column into shape, Claude turns out dozens, and they all sound smarter than we do – like a celebrated economist, like a Financial Times editorial, like a man who actually knows what he is talking about. And then – here is the rub – the next iteration of the machine will feed not upon our labors but upon its own, for it has manufactured so many more of them. The Conversation:
More than half of new articles on the internet are being written by AI
The experts now put AI-generated stuff at 80% of the top search results. And since these AI artifacts are groomed and pimped by the algorithms of AI itself, the AI-driven search shows a tender preference for its own offspring. AI-optimized. AI-written. AI-ready. The upshot is that the human sources which once made the machine seem clever are buried in a mounting pile of its own derivatives. AI has stopped imitating human intelligence in other words – it now imitates AI intelligence.
A doubter once accosted Thomas Huxley – the great Victorian naturalist – as he was explaining how the planets wheel about the sun, insisting instead that the world lay flat upon the back of a turtle.
“And what,” asked Huxley, hoping to drive his questioner into an absurdity, “does the turtle stand upon?”
“Another turtle,” said the woman.
“And that turtle – what does it stand upon?”
“No, no, Mr. Huxley, you do not understand. It’s turtles all the way down.”
And so it shall be in the brave new world of AI – a counterfeit world, quality smothered beneath quantity, and humbug all the way down.
Regards,
Bill Bonner
Youghal, Ireland
P.S. When the money goes, everything goes. So how will the money go? Here's how…
Most investors have no principles. They either get blown in a hundred directions and chase terrible ideas, or they buy index funds and tune out altogether. None of those methods are likely to work.
At Bonner Private Research, we're lucky that we have a clear image of the Big Picture to anchor our strategy. We are able to digest the news and the market swings without losing my bearings… or worse, going nuts. It’s served us well from the start.
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3 Things To Know Before We Go…
1. U.S. stock market trading at record valuations. By almost any metric, the U.S. stock market has entered the danger zone of extreme overvaluation. This chart from Bloomberg combines nine classic valuation indicators into a single metric, and ranks it on a percentile basis going back to the late 1800s. Today’s ranking has reached the rarefied air of the 100th percentile, making this the most expensive stock market of all time across a wide swath of indicators.
The Trading Club was built to navigate high-risk markets. We use options to hedge against a potential market crash, while also consistently generating income from stocks we already own – balancing steady income and upside potential, while protecting against downside risks.
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2. Without artificial intelligence (“AI”) and energy, the S&P 500 is down in 2026. Apollo Global Chief Economist Torsten Sløk notes the index's entire market-cap gain since January – on the order of $5 trillion – has come from an 84-stock, AI-related basket plus the energy sector. Collectively, everything else has lost value.
3. Big Oil just became a power company. Chevron (CVX) signed a 20-year deal today to build Project Kilby – a 2.67-gigawatt gas plant in the giant West Texas oil patch, the Permian Basin, feeding a Microsoft (MSFT) data center directly. Chevron generates power on-site, burning Permian gas it’s pulling from the ground. When the grid is overwhelmed, go right to the energy source.
Chart Of The Day… Eli Lilly (LLY)
The weight-loss market has fully inverted: Eli Lilly's (LLY) year-over-year revenue growth has rocketed to a record 55% while Novo Nordisk's (NVO) has fallen negative, near -10%... the two lines crossed almost exactly when we recommended that Complete Investor subscribers sell Novo Nordisk and buy Eli Lilly.
Mailbag
“I Like The Systematic Approach”
Opher L. writes…
Last week, Emmet Savage of MyWallSt expressed the exact reasons why I decided to allocate a not-too-timid portion of my portfolio to MyWallSt’s Prophet. It mirrors how I think and feel about it. We will also get to test its mettle within the next one to three years in a market this system has not yet seen. Personally, I will also get to see how this stock-based system serves as a “disaster protection” device, compared to legacy devices like gold, etc.
I like the systematic approach, the disciplined limit on the number of positions, and concomitant limit on financing requirements, and of course, the performance-backed proof of the pudding, as I compare this portfolio to others I am invested in.
Just wanted to express my appreciation
Regards
Porter & Co. Comment: For those looking to learn more about Prophet – and Porter’s trip to Ireland to discover it for himself, click here.
Porter & Co. Market Snapshot
| Price | Thursday's Return | Year-to-Date Return | |
|---|---|---|---|
| S&P 500 Index | $7,500.58 | 1.09% | 10.2% |
| Gold per ounce | $4,155.71 | -1.29% | -2.5% |
| Bitcoin | $63,770 | -0.13% | -26.0% |
| Oil (West Texas Intermediate) per barrel | $76.60 | 3.51% | 32.5% |
| Berkshire Hathaway (BRK) | $733,609.77 | -0.50% | -2.8% |
| Porter's Permanent Portfolio | - | -0.61% | -2.4% |
| The Better Than Berkshire Index | - | -0.32% | 2.6% |
| Total Return | Annual Return | ||
| Porter & Co's Top Ranked* | 30.4% | 12.5% | |
| Yield | Thursday's Change | Change Year-to-Date |
|
| U.S Treasury 30-Year Yield | 4.90% | -3 bps | 5 bps |
*A Complete Investor risk rating of 1 is defined as a "low risk, high allocation" security, while positions rated closer to a 5 are higher risk. Porter & Co.'s top-ranked positions include those rated either 1 or 2 in Complete Investor portfolio.
Porter & Co. Top Positions
| Publication | Ticker | Description | Total Return |
|---|---|---|---|
| Complete Investor | BWXT | BWX Technologies | 260% |
| Tech Frontiers | QURE | uniQure | 237% |
| Complete Investor | ARM | ARM Holdings | 218% |
| Tech Frontiers | TGTX | TG Therapeutics | 150% |
| Tech Frontiers | ROIV | Roivant Sciences | 139% |
| Complete Investor | BTC/USD | Bitcoin | 134% |
| Tech Frontiers | QURE | uniQure | 131% |
| Tech Frontiers | SGMT | Sagimet Biosciences | 124% |
| Complete Investor | PM | Philip Morris | 121% |
| Complete Investor | WINA | Winmark | 104% |
Prices as of 4:00 pm ET June 18, 2026
Please note: The investments in our “Porter & Co. Top Positions” should not be considered current recommendations. These positions are the best performers across our publications – and the securities listed may (or may not) be above the current buy-up-to price. To learn more, visit the current recommendations page of the relevant service, here. To gain access or to learn more about our current recommendations, call our Customer Care team at 888-610-8895 or internationally at +1 443-815-4447.