Two Golden Calf Stocks for the Faithful Fools

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They say one grand illusion can change a man’s life – not for the better, perhaps, but enough to make him sell his dignity and buy a stock ticker instead. The future, they whisper, is being built. Great engines of progress hum in server farms and code caves, and the prophets on Wall Street hand us parables about multibaggers. All we must do is believe. And pay. And wait. While the machinery feasts on our patience, our data, and our delusions.

So here, in solemn offering, are two chosen idols: a pair of companies raised high on the altar of artificial intelligence. Their graphs climb like prayers. Their promises are endless. Their impact on the lives of those who flip burgers, answer calls, or patch firewalls? Less clear.

1. SoundHound AI

SoundHound AI (SOUN) has soared – 455% in three years, they say – lifted not by human voices, but by the silent, synthetic cadence of voice assistants it teaches to say “Your order has been processed” without irony. It has spent two decades tuning machines to understand hunger, not the soul’s kind, but the kind that calls at 8 p.m. to ask if Red Lobster still has cheddar biscuits. This is its triumph: a billion queries per month, most of them variations on “repeat my last order.”

They call it a leader now – lauded in some IDC MarketScape report, a forest of jargon where real needs go to die. Revenue tripled to $43 million in a quarter? Good. But let us not confuse volume with value. The money flows from royalties, subscriptions, and advertising – the three sacraments of the digital age. Profitability, they promise, by 2025. A priest could not be more confident of heaven.

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It spreads now – beyond restaurants, into healthcare, retail, banks – wherever profit grows faster than ethics. Every automated voice that answers instead of a person widens its moat. Every frustration bottled in a caller’s sigh becomes a data point, refining its cold, precise mimicry. A billion questions a month, and not one of them truly human.

Market cap: $8 billion. Addressable market: over $100 billion. The math compels. But ask the waitress whose job vanishes when the AI handles reservations. Ask the coder in Bangalore patching its flaws for a fraction of a Silicon Valley bonus. The future is profitable. For someone.

2. Cloudflare

More than 20% of the web passes through Cloudflare (NET), a silent bouncer scanning every digital guest before they enter the club. It stops bots, filters hate, and routes traffic – all while gathering an empire’s worth of metadata. Its stock? Up 292%. Not because it makes the web kinder, but because now, it protects the new gods: AI agents trading data like contraband across the borderless dark.

Its power lies in steel and sand: 335 cities dotted with servers, a network so vast that efficiency becomes dominance. Growth? 28% year over year. A $15 million deal with a hungry AI startup for its Workers AI product – which allows models to run on the network’s edge, closer to the people, closer to the data.

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Soon, they say, AI agents will transact autonomously – buying, selling, deciding – without human hands. Cloudflare will guard the gate. And take its cut. Analysts predict 24% annual earnings growth. Who could doubt such arithmetic?

But walk the streets. Talk to the overworked admin typing passwords into portals. The freelancer whose site crashes because a protection rule misfired. The village somewhere where the internet is slow, and this global network feels like tyranny disguised as speed. Progress, yes – but always downhill, toward the profit line.

The golden calves still shine. The faithful still pray. And somewhere, a gig worker updates an AI training log for $3 an hour, hoping tomorrow might be better. 🐂

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2025-10-14 03:22