What I Talk About When I Talk About Money

The Hum of the Golden Prometheus

He bought a pack of cigarettes at a bodega on 48th Street, even though he had quit three years ago. He didn’t light one. He just held the pack in the deep pocket of his trench coat, turning it over and over with his thumb, feeling the sharp corners against the lining. It was a grounding technique. A small, tactile ritual to remind him that his hands were still there, even if the rest of him felt like it was dissolving into the gray, static mist of the city.

New York in December possesses a specific kind of loneliness. It is a loneliness that is loud, illuminated by millions of LEDs that offer visibility but no warmth. He had been walking for hours, looking for something he couldn’t quite name. Maybe he was looking for her—the woman who had left a half-finished cup of coffee on his table and vanished into the subway system—or maybe he was just searching for the hidden logic of the city itself.

He turned the corner and there it was. Rockefeller Center.

The famous Christmas tree stood as a towering pyramid of artificial joy. Below it, the ice skaters moved in endless counter-clockwise circles, carving white scars into the frozen surface. To him, they looked like particles in an accelerator, spinning, waiting to collide.

He stopped in front of the golden statue of Prometheus. The Titan floated there, holding fire in his hand, offering it to mankind. A gift. Or perhaps, a curse.

“He looks tired,” a voice seemed to say.

He turned his head. There was no one there. Just a tourist adjusting a scarf, and a security guard checking a phone. The voice had come from inside the hum of the city itself.

He looked back at Prometheus. And then, past the statue, his gaze drifted up to the looming limestone tower that John D. Rockefeller had built. The ghost of the old man hung thick in the air here. Rockefeller was a man who understood silence. He didn’t scream; he calculated.

He knew that the world didn’t run on dreams. It ran on fluid.

In 1870, that fluid was oil. Rockefeller didn’t gamble on finding it; he simply controlled where it flowed. He built the pipes, the refineries, the tanks. He owned the blood of the industrial age.

As the man stood there, clutching the unsmoked cigarettes, the mystery of the missing woman faded, replaced by a much larger, colder mystery. The city wasn’t just a collection of buildings. It was a hungry mouth.

The hum. He could hear it now, rising from the subway grates, vibrating in the glass of the skyscrapers. It wasn’t the sound of traffic. It was the sound of 183 Terawatt-hours of electricity being devoured, chewed, and swallowed.

He closed his eyes, and the numbers began to scroll behind his eyelids, glowing like neon signs in a rainstorm. The narrative of the city rearranged itself in his mind.

The New Oil is Invisible

The realization hit him with the quiet force of falling snow. The world was standing in 1911 again. But the oil wasn’t black sludge anymore. It was the electron.

The Artificial Intelligence that everyone talked about—the ghost in the machine—was not a brain. It was a stomach. And it was starving.

• The Hunger: In 2024, the data centers hidden in these buildings consumed the same amount of power as the entire country of Pakistan. By 2030, they would eat 12% of everything the United States produced.
• The Bottleneck: He looked at the lights flickering on the tree. The grid was old. It was a circulatory system built for a human, now trying to keep a god alive. The veins were bursting.

The “mystery” he was solving wasn’t about who had left him. It was about what was coming. The smart money—the Rockefeller money—wasn’t betting on the thoughts the AI would think. It was betting on the meal it had to eat.

The Three Clues

He took the cigarette pack out of his pocket and set it on the ledge of the fountain. It was an offering to Prometheus. In exchange, he took the three names the city whispered to him.

1. The Source (The Nuclear Heart): The wind and the sun were too fickle for a machine that never sleeps. The machine demanded the splitting of the atom. Constellation Energy (CEG) and GE Vernova (GEV). They were the new standard oil wells. Microsoft wasn’t buying power; they were buying certainty. They were restarting Three Mile Island not for nostalgia, but for survival.
2. The Veins (The Grid): You cannot beam the power. You have to carry it. Quanta Services (PWR). They were the ones digging up the streets, replacing the old, brittle arteries with something that could handle the heat.
3. The Fever (The Cooling): The machine burns. Vertiv (VRT) is the ice. Without them, the brain melts.

The skaters kept spinning. The tree kept shining. But the scene had changed for him. He no longer saw a holiday display. He saw a massive, desperate machine gasping for air.

Rockefeller’s ghost wasn’t haunting the plaza. He was nodding. He who controls the flow, controls the world.

The man pulled his collar up against the wind. The woman wasn’t coming back. But the lights? The lights were going to get brighter. And someone had to pay for the electricity.

He turned away from Prometheus and walked back into the dark, humming city. He knew exactly where to put the money now.

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. The markets are like cats; they do not care about your plans, and they will go where they please. The numbers on the screen are real, but the future they promise is just a reflection in the glass. Do your own research, before the lights go out.