For a billion dollars more

John Wayne meets Sam Altman on Wall Street

For months now, everyone’s become an analyst, calling for an “AI bubble.” A crash. A correction. And sure, there’s speculation everywhere. But the whole debate misses the point. So, as someone who builds strategy around AI for marketers, let’s explain it the only way that makes sense: with John Wayne. Hang-tight.

The mid-late 1800s Wild West and its railroad companies

It’s the 1850s. America is drunk on steel, gold, and ambition. Any book or movie from the era featured a railroad company. Usually the villain. The unstoppable force of progress. The company that bought outlaws, crushed small towns, or simply paid its way across the continent.

In the rare stories that show how those railroads were built, it’s absurd: any lunatic with a map and a telegram connection could raise money to build tracks to somewhere. Say “transcontinental” and you’ll get funded.

Saloons doubled as boardrooms. Bar fights were shareholder meetings. Speculators bet entire towns on the chance that rails would pass through someday. It was chaos. It was glorious. It was what progress always looks like before it has a plan.

And then, almost all of them vanished.

Erie. B&O. Pennsylvania Railroad. Union Pacific. Central Pacific. Northern Pacific. All gone, folded, merged, or bankrupt before the tracks even rusted. Entire towns disappeared because no one bothered to check where the routes actually led.

Who’s got the money?

You already know. Vanderbilt, Hill, Harriman. The ones who bought the wreckage for pennies, stitched the lines into networks, and ran them efficiently.

But the real winners? They never laid a single track.

Rockefeller, Carnegie, Western Union. They made fortunes on top of the rails. Oil, steel, and telegraph. They controlled what moved on the infrastructure.

That’s where the American century began: not in invention, but in standardization and leverage. The nowadays romanticized American Exceptionalism wouldn’t have happened without this.