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It is a peculiarity of this new age that value can exist detached from substance. Gold, a metal to be held in the hand, a tangible inheritance. Land, a physical presence, rooted in the earth. Stocks, representing the labors and profits of enterprise. These possess an inherent gravity. Cryptocurrencies, however, are different. Their price is not anchored to the solid ground of production or utility, but floats upon the shifting winds of demand and supply. They are, in a sense, a pure expression of faith – a belief in the future, or perhaps, a fleeting infatuation with the novel.

The market, of course, merely shrugged. A mere 3% uptick after hours, quickly evaporating like a particularly weak gin fizz. One wonders if investors are simply jaded. Or perhaps they’ve developed a taste for genuine drama, and a relentless surge in profits is simply… tiresome.

The anxieties surrounding this entity are manifold. The sluggishness of the employment market, a phenomenon as predictable as the tides, casts a shadow upon its payroll processing core. More recently, the specter of generative artificial intelligence – a digital golem threatening to automate the very act of calculation – has induced a tremor of unease. Investors, it seems, fear not the absence of growth, but the manner of it – a transition from predictable increments to unpredictable leaps, a disturbance in the established order.

The filing shows Icahn scooped up 30,467,595 shares in the fourth quarter. That brings his total holding to a cool 549,400,539 shares. Which, quick math, is a lot of shares. The value of the stake actually decreased by $221.44 million, which is corporate-speak for “we’re not entirely sure what’s happening.”

By the close of tradin’, the price had gone and done climbed higher than a Mississippi steamboat smokestack. A right impressive sight, I’ll grant you, but let’s not mistake motion for progress. Seems these days, a company can promise the moon and folks will hand over their hard-earned dollars before askin’ if there’s actually a rocket built.

The prevailing narrative—that Bitcoin is a sealed vault, impervious to time—requires a subtle correction. The protocol, it appears, is not carved in granite, but rather assembled from a series of contingent arrangements, susceptible to alteration should the circumstances demand it. And a circumstance, spectral yet insistent, is indeed approaching.

Recently, however, the stock has taken a bit of a tumble. About 26% down from its peak, which, in the grand scheme of things, is merely a polite correction. A gentle reminder that even empires, built on lines of code and quarterly earnings reports, are subject to the whims of… well, everything. Sell-offs of this magnitude are unusual for Microsoft, yes. But then, so is finding a genuinely honest accountant.¹

The enterprise software specialist, a name that sounds as dry as parchment, announced two new offerings, each a small universe of code and intention. They called it the Autonomous Workforce, a framework of “AI specialists” – a phrase that evokes images of tiny, tireless automatons – capable of executing tasks with an authority that borders on the spectral. The intention, they said, was to free humans for more “strategic problem solving” and “personalized service,” but one couldn’t help but wonder if it wasn’t also a subtle attempt to outsource the very soul of labor to the machines. It was a bold move, a gamble with the currency of time and attention, and the market, ever fickle, responded with a surge of optimism, pushing the stock price almost 5% higher.

It appears Micron has stumbled, quite fortuitously, into the artificial intelligence arena. Their dynamic random-access memory (DRAM) and NAND flash memory, bless their little silicon hearts, are proving rather essential to these newfangled AI accelerators. From graphics cards to central processing units – a veritable bonanza, wouldn’t you say?