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Hello and welcome back to Better Offline.

I'm your host, Ed Zittron.

Better Offline. Thank you. and this is the third part of our series and why the AI bubble is worse than the dot-com bubble

and today we're going to focus on a question what actually burst the dot-com bubble i should also be clear

there is no clear answer to any question like this. It's kind of a

difficult thing to pull apart, but to start we're going to need a comparison. And really,

the invidia of the dot-com bubble would be the companies making and selling the fiber optic cables

themselves and the associated hardware. In July 2000, Corning, which made and still makes far more than just optical cables,

became the largest supplier of fiber optic wires and ended 2000 with 7.1 billion in revenue

on a net income of 422 million. That's profit, baby. I know we're not used to that because we talk

about AI all the time. By April 2001, Corning had revised its earnings

estimates down three times, estimating revenue for the year to be between 7.8 billion and 8 billion.

Corning would eventually reveal net sales of $6.27 billion with a loss of $5.498 billion for the year.

They tried to grow a little too fast, they took out loans,

they did the thing that everyone does in this kind of era. Fiber optic cable from firm JDS

Uniface, a conglomerate of different optical companies merged in 1999, would go on an acquisition

sprit to dramatically expand its fiber optic offerings, eventually crowning itself,

and this is from their own press release, the number one supplier of fiber optic components,

and revealing net earnings of 208 million in January 2001. In July 2001, it would announce a 35%

decrease in sales quarter of a quarter and a $44.8 billion decrease in the value of companies

...