> I have some faith it could go another way.

I wonder how they felt during the .com era.

Contact is a hard problem to solve and there's some tangential softwares that do it well within the FEA space. I'd be curious to know how this does with materials/geometries of vastly different stiffnessess and if it produces realistic reaction/contact forces (one cheap way to manage contact is to jack up the contact stiffness, which will prevent penetration, but drive some unrealistic forces at those interfaces).

> Is he that skilled an operator, negotiator, or manipulator or something?

He probably has everything every politician has ever asked chatgpt index and ready to be emailed out at any given time?

> How did we get here?

Stonks

> But if you are an investor you take a risk that the money you invest can one day just vanish with zero return.

Do such risks truly exist for modern mega corps? Do we even still think the underlying stocks of these companies trend with performance only?

Your sentiment comes from a wholly different investment era, where investing was primarily done by professionals and ETFs did not exist.