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This is The Takeaway from today’s Morning Brief, which you can sign up to receive in your inbox every morning along with:
One of the most defining moments from the “blockchain era” was when the company “Long Island Iced Tea” changed its name to “Long Blockchain” in 2017 and sent its stock upward 197% instantly.
It didn’t really work out. The company was delisted, and there were some investigations. But the absurdity remains as a marker of a wild era of speculation and hype: two things that today’s investors are familiar with.
This week, the AI-juiced markets got a fresh dose of absurdity: The company Allbirds, done with selling Silicon Valley’s clichéd footwear, is pivoting to AI services. On its face, it makes us think of Long Blockchain, Kodak (KODK) launching an altcoin, or GameStop (GME) becoming a bitcoin treasury company.
What should we call a struggling consumer brand attempting to glom onto Wall Street’s trendiest narrative? In this case, it looks like AI capital appropriation. And at least in the very short term, it’s working exceedingly well.
The stock of the footwear maker surged as high as $23, or 700%, as the announcement of an AI pivot boosted the company, which was trading at less than $3 a few days ago.
Being obvious isn’t always bad. And chasing investor excitement with the promises of greater returns is a sensible move. It’s also patently ridiculous. But as transformative as AI technology might be, absurdity is what the day calls for — especially if you’re trying to woo meme stock enthusiasts. Completely overhauling a business and diving headfirst into a pit whose depth isn’t really known is also what the tech giants are doing. So what if you don’t have AI experience? At least Silicon Valley investors know your company’s name and probably wore the shoes.
It would be unfair to compare Mark Zuckerberg’s $1.7 trillion operation to the maker of the Men’s Wool Runner, which recently sold its footwear assets to American Exchange Group for $39 million and whose stock had cratered up until Wednesday, failing to fend off rivals. But Allbirds is riffing on the same rationale that’s powered the AI trade thus far: Invest in AI infrastructure and capture some of the seemingly insatiable demand for chips and data centers.
Investors don’t have to buy into it, of course. But the biggest names in tech are operating as if their futures depend on it, and to some extent, so is the US government. So as peculiar and opportunistic as the pivot may seem, it might be, if you squint hard enough, a rational business decision in a post-ChatGPT economy.
