2026 VIS – Whitney Tilson Calls the Top of the AI Bubble; SpaceX Most Overvalued Large Cap Ever

Few presenters at the 2026 Value Investing Seminar covered as much ground as Whitney Tilson, who moved from Eli Lilly’s weight-loss drugs to aircraft engine leasing to the case against SpaceX in a session that ranged across his career, his newsletters, and his conviction that AI mania has produced one of the great mispricings in market history. Tilson is Editor at Stansberry Research and a co-host of the seminar, having previously founded and run Kase Capital Management for nearly two decades. A Baker Scholar with an MBA from Harvard Business School, he is also co-author of The Art of Value Investing and author of a personal advice book he discussed at the session.

His core argument at this year’s conference was  that the the AI bubble is obvious and dangerous in its pure-play form, OpenAI will never IPO and may be worth close to nothing, SpaceX is the most overvalued large-cap stock of all time, and yet the established technology platforms that actually use AI to compound revenues are genuine buys. Meanwhile, a separate universe of beaten-down consumer, software, and specialty finance stocks is trading at extraordinary discounts that have nothing to do with the AI narrative

From Hedge Fund to Newsletter: A Career in Cheap Stocks

Tilson opened with a brief account of his trajectory. He launched a hedge fund out of his bedroom with $1 million, with Bill Ackman and his father among his first investors. He navigated the internet bubble, the housing bubble, and the financial crisis well, growing assets to over $200 million. But he was never a believer in the bull market that followed, accumulated cash, ran a short book, and sold stocks whenever they doubled. After eleven years of beating the market, he spent several years trailing it. In 2017, after eighteen years, he returned capital to investors. He moved into the investment newsletter business at Stansberry Research, where he writes the free daily Stansberry Research newsletter and manages paid services, describing the model as similar in structure to Substack: strong free content with premium tiers available. He was candid that his best financial advice has nothing to do with stock picking: be steadily employed, live below your means, max out retirement accounts into an S&P 500 index fund, and avoid the proliferating world of scams, zero-DTE options, and message-board pump schemes.

Calling the Top of the AI Bubble

The centerpiece of Tilson’s presentation was a direct call on the AI bubble. His slide was unambiguous: wild speculation, absurd valuations, unproven business models, massive losses, and circular investments define the pure-play AI names. OpenAI, in his view, is losing ground to Google’s Gemini and Anthropic’s Claude, will never successfully IPO, and could ultimately be worth close to zero.