What I Talk About When I Talk About Money

The Bored King and the Space Between Stars

I often compare life to the stock market. How much a company’s rises and falls look similar to life. It doesn’t need to be a big scale. From small-cap companies to hyperscalers, everybody rises and falls. The stages of a company’s growth mirror life.

Startup companies are infants, screaming for attention and resources. Then you grow up to be toddlers, then teens—wild, volatile, full of promise and danger—as the company’s size gets bigger. Mid-cap to large-cap, a few hundred million to a few billion… then you reach the peak of your life. Strong career moves. Confident. Feeling like you’re invincible. Everyone wishes that feeling would last forever.

But when there is a rise, there is a fall. Before the fall, you stay big for a while. You feel like a bored king, sitting on a throne that has become too comfortable, until you get pushed out by a new boss in town.

Where am I at now? Where do I go from here?

I sat in my chair, listening to the hum of the refrigerator, thinking about Frank Sheeran in Scorsese’s The Irishman. There is that final shot—Frank sitting alone in the nursing home, the door left slightly ajar. He isn’t dead, but his era is. He was a player in the biggest game in town, a “large cap” enforcer in a world of unions and mobs. He rose, he peaked, he grew powerful. And then, slowly, the world rotated away from him. The specific violence he traded in became obsolete. He became a legacy asset, depreciating in a quiet room.

Today, the stock market feels like it is watching that same door left ajar.

1. The Bored King Stumbles: Broadcom

Broadcom ($AVGO) is the Frank Sheeran of the semiconductor world—efficient, brutal, and historically reliable. Today, it is down ~8%.

Why? It didn’t fail. In fact, it grew its AI revenue by 74%. It has a backlog of $73 billion. In any other era, these numbers would be a coronation. But today, the market looked at Broadcom and saw a bored king. The expectations were set for perfection, for immortality. Broadcom merely delivered greatness.

The investors, like fickle courtiers, found flaws: “You rely too much on Google.” * “Your margins are slipping because memory is expensive.”* They are rotating their loyalty. The money is moving out of the “invincible” AI conquerors and drifting into the mundane—the “value” stocks, the cyclical companies that have been ignored like old furniture. It’s a “Great Rotation.” The bored kings are being sold to buy the peasants.

2. The New Boss: OpenAI’s Price Hike

While the old guard stumbles, the new boss is flexing. OpenAI released GPT-5.2 a day early, like a young upstart punching the old champion in the face before the bell rings.

They raised their API prices by 40%. In a normal world, raising prices is risky. In the “invincible” stage of life, it is a power move. It says, “We are essential. You will pay.” They announced a massive deal with a Spanish bank, cementing their place not just as a toy, but as the new infrastructure. The “AI Bubble” fears were quieted today, not by cheaper products, but by the sheer arrogance of pricing power.

3. Escape Velocity

And then, there are those trying to leave the lifecycle entirely.

The market is obsessed with Space today. Not sci-fi space, but industrial space. Stocks like Rocket Lab and Redwire are surging. The narrative is shifting: Earth is too crowded, power is too scarce. To keep growing, to avoid the fall, we must build data centers in orbit.

It feels desperate and beautiful, this desire to escape gravity. It’s the refusal to accept the “fall” part of the cycle. If we run out of room on Earth, we will simply conquer the sky.

Conclusion

I watched the ticker symbols scroll by, red and green blinking lights in the Los Angeles morning. Broadcom is falling. OpenAI is rising. The space companies are trying to leave the atmosphere.

We are all just trying to keep the door ajar. Trying to prove that we are not yet the bored king, that there is still one more rise left before the screen fades to black. Perhaps that’s where I am at, for now, to make one last rise out of me, challenging the bored king called “Life.”

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Disclaimer: I am not a financial advisor. I am just a man watching the seasons change through a window in a city that has no seasons. Do your own research.