Jokes about boomers who don't understand that you can no longer save up for a down payment in coastal California by "putting aside some money" for a couple of years or pay for a year of college from a summer working retail are now the same age as most millennials: in their fourth decade.
Amid spiking home prices and a rising cost of living, the most viable way for many to break the barrier to building wealth is to invest in companies that may or may not take off — in 2023, the bets are increasingly on different AI companies.
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The latest iteration of the joke came up in the WallStreetBets subreddit, the maverick investing community behind the 2021 GameStop meme stock craze that once sent GameStop (GME) and AMC (AMC) shares soaring.
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'Just Spent $8,000 On C3.Ai Stock...'
Created by one of the community's members, the post is a finance take on the famous "me vs. my parents" meme meant to show what people of different generations could once afford.
"We saved up $8,000, let's buy a home," say the cartoon people from the 1950s in front of a $7,900 home ad. As the average home in the U.S. reached $436,800 in 2023, the joke is that the only way someone with that money can buy a home today is to put it towards an emerging company (that, as the stock market shows, also many not work.)
The example used in the meme, AI company C3.ai, closed at a 8.96% loss on March 31 and a 13.22% loss on June 1. Earlier in the month, stock has been surging amid a rush of investors seeing the astronomical interest in ChatGPT and trying to find the next company that many expect to replicate its success.
Launched out of California's Redwood City in 2009, C3.ai went public in 2020 and got caught up in the “AI mania” of investors trying to find the next company to mirror the meteoric rise of ChatGPT.
Instead, C3.ai's stock took a tumble after it reported a full-year revenue outlook below Wall Street's expectations. The company expects to bring in somewhere between $295 million and $320 million while Wall Street analysts expected $317.1 million on average.
This Is Why The AI Stock Has Been So Volatile Lately
Shares of other artificial intelligence companies such as BigBear.ai (BBAI) have also taken a tumble.
"The stock market is currently in a state of flux, with many companies seeing their stock prices fluctuate up and down," Reddit user /VisualMod wrote in a comment.
"C3.ai Inc is one such company whose stock price has been on a roller coaster ride over the past few weeks."
The artificial intelligence sector has, in general, been subject to some pretty extreme volatility amid rising periods of hype/doubt and overall uncertainty around whether expectations of continued growth are exaggerated.
"This is a somewhat rare technical pattern reflective of rising volatility often due to investor disagreement in the valuation or potential for growth in an underlying security," Stephen Guilfoyle wrote for TheStreet's Real Money. "These patterns often follow a sharp move, which was true for this stock."
