American capitalism has taken an apocalyptic turn

In 2024, Sam Altman raised seven billion dollars to build advanced chips, promising that this technology could save us from an existential threat. Not from an economic crisis or a competitor, but from the end of the world. Here's the point: today, the business stories that raise the most money are the ones that promise to save us from the apocalypse. For decades, we thought that American capitalism was based on optimism, visions of growth, and dreams of wealth. But the new currency of power is catastrophic fears — and those who can best articulate them attract capital, talent, and attention. Elon Musk talks about colonizing Mars not as a conquest, but as a plan B for humanity. Sam Altman turns artificial intelligence into an existential risk, and so every investment seems like a survival policy. It's no longer about building something useful, but about convincing the market that without you, the future doesn't exist. In 1841, Charles Mackay wrote a book on collective madness and crises created by fear. Today, those who want to understand Silicon Valley no longer study only financial bubbles like the Tulip Mania, but the "epidemic of doom terror" that Mackay spoke of. Altman, Musk, but also Peter Thiel and Jeff Bezos: they all have a personal story to tell that involves the fear of extinction. Musk, for example, often mentions his childhood in South Africa, where he saw the fragility of social balances, and says: "We have to be a multiplanetary species if we want to survive." Altman, on the other hand, has stated that his anti-apocalypse bunker, with stocks of gold and weapons, is not a fantasy: it is a rational precaution. One fact: according to PitchBook, in 2023, more than 30% of new American venture capital funds were invested in technologies that promise to manage existential risks — from autonomous AI to geoengineering, to food security in the event of a global collapse. But this obsession with the apocalypse doesn't come out of nowhere. It is a response to a context where crises — pandemic, climate change, wars — have become the norm. Thus, the question that matters is no longer "who can innovate the most," but "who can convince us that without him we would be doomed." There are also those who reject this logic: some entrepreneurs, such as Yvon Chouinard of Patagonia, are betting everything on repairing the present instead of escaping from the future, saying that "the real revolution is to fix what we have, not to run away to Mars." Yet today, it is the apocalyptic narratives that dictate the rules of fundraising. The aspect that is almost always missing in these discussions is the question of what happens when fear becomes the currency. If everything is an emergency, nothing really is — and the risk is that true innovation will be stifled by organized panic. The bottom line is this: Silicon Valley no longer sells just dreams, but above all fears — and whoever knows how to cash in on them best will change the fate of American capitalism. If, while listening, you thought that this idea concerns you, you can indicate it on Lara Notes with I'm In: it's not a like, it's your way of saying that this perspective now belongs to you. And if tomorrow you find yourself telling someone about how Musk and Altman use fear to raise billions, on Lara Notes you can tag those who were with you using Shared Offline — the trace of the real conversation remains. This Note comes from an article in The Economist and saves you 2 minutes.