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Notes -
So I made a successful tech play and I am trying to decide whether to (1) cash in; (2) re-balance; or (3) let it ride.
The background: I normally invest in boring Vanguard style mutual funds, but a year or two ago a buddy convinced me to take a modest chunk of my overall investments and basically make an AI play. The thinking was that this is analogous to the dot com bubble and people who got in early on "infrastructure" type investments as well as the leading companies ended up doing very well. Some of the investments fizzled, some did rather well, and some did extraordinarily well. Probably the best example is Sandisk which went up more than 50-fold. The upshot of this is that my tech portfolio is now worth a little less than $4 million. It's no longer a small chunk of my overall portfolio but instead is a slight majority of the total value.
At this point, the obvious thing to do is to take some chips off the table, but the tricky part is that part of me thinks that AI is more than just a bubble, that it will have economic impacts which make the Internet seem like pet rocks, hula hoops, and Dutch tulip bulbs. So basically I am left with a question that has been kicking around here for a while: investing in a situation where there is a huge range of possible outcomes, up to and including the possibility of a full on technological singularity. Thoughts?
Honest question - what's your number to retire today? Because for me a least, $4 million is fuck you money. Do you really need more?
I'm already semi-retired in the sense that the business I run has stopped accepting new projects, at least temporarily and possibly permanently. The other wrinkle is that I am engaged and my fiancee is from a wealthy family so she may end up being on the high-maintenance side of things. But anyway, my question is more about making the most of the big changes which seem to be on the horizon as opposed to budgeting for retirement.
I'm pretty confident that absent some doom type scenario, we'll all end up collecting UBI. My concern is that there is going to end up being some kind of permanent or semi-permanent aristocracy. Which would kind of suck, but if there's going to be an aristocracy, I think I'd rather be one of the aristocrats.
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