The Day the Future Crashed — And the Dreamers Who Built It, Sold It, and Lost Everything
On March 10, 2000, the NASDAQ closed at 5,048.62. Nobody rang a bell. Nobody announced that this was the top. The traders who bought that day thought they were catching a dip. They were catching a falling knife.
This is the story of the dot-com bubble — not the cartoon version with sock puppets and stupid money, but the human version: the inventors who gave away trillions, the dreamers who believed the rules had changed, and the millions who bet their savings on a future that was real but arrived on a different schedule than they expected.
It begins on October 29, 1969, when a graduate student named Charley Kline tried to type "LOGIN" from UCLA to Stanford. The system crashed after two letters. The first word ever transmitted on what would become the internet was "LO." As in lo and behold. As in the beginning of everything.
Follow the thread through Paul Baran's packet switching — rejected by AT&T because it would destroy their monopoly. Through Tim Berners-Lee at CERN, who on April 30, 1993, released his invention into the public domain: HTML, HTTP, URLs. He gave away what would become the foundation of trillions in value because he believed the web should belong to everyone.
Meet Marc Andreessen, a twenty-one-year-old programmer earning $6.85 an hour at a supercomputing center in Illinois, who built Mosaic in his spare time — then watched it become Netscape, whose IPO on August 9, 1995, turned into the starting gun for the greatest financial mania since the 1920s. A company with no profits closed its first day at $71 a share. The rules, it seemed, had changed.
Meet Jeff Bezos, who quit his Wall Street job because of something he called the "regret minimization framework," drove across the country, and built Amazon in a garage with desks made from doors. He told his early investors there was a 70 percent chance they would lose everything.
Watch Alan Greenspan warn about "irrational exuberance" on December 5, 1996 — then do nothing as the markets ignored him and kept climbing. Watch the analysts at Morgan Stanley and Merrill Lynch issue buy recommendations on companies they privately called disasters. Watch day traders quit their jobs to trade from home, certain they had discovered a machine that printed money.
See the madness at its peak: Pets.com spending $17 million on a Super Bowl ad for a company that sold dog food at a loss. Webvan raising $800 million to deliver groceries and burning through it in eighteen months. Pixelon throwing a $16 million launch party featuring The Who and Kiss — for technology that didn't actually work.
Then watch it end. April 14, 2000: the NASDAQ falls 9.7 percent in a single day. By October 2002, it has lost 78 percent of its value. Five trillion dollars in market capitalization — gone. Pets.com, Boo.com, Kozmo.com, Webvan, eToys — gone. The sock puppet sells at auction for a fraction of what the ad campaign cost.
And yet. Amazon survived, barely. Google was founded during the wreckage. The infrastructure built during the bubble — the fiber optic cables, the data centers, the habits of online commerce — became the foundation for everything that came next.
This is the story of how the future arrived, got ahead of itself, crashed, and then quietly came true. The visionaries who saw it clearly. The hucksters who exploited the chaos. The ordinary people who believed them both. And the question that every bubble forces us to ask: How do you tell the difference between a delusion and a dream that just needs more time?