Market Extra
The blogger who helped spark Nvidia’s $600 billion stock collapse and a panic in Silicon Valley
Jeffrey Emanuel says Wall Street banks that are bullish on Nvidia ‘have absolutely no idea what they’re talking about’
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Last Friday afternoon, Jeffrey Emanuel sat down in his Brooklyn apartment and started writing a blog post. For hours, he pounded away on his keyboard while his wife kept their young children occupied and brought him food. Emanuel worked late into the night, and by early Saturday morning he had written nearly 12,000 words.
Emanuel’s manifesto made the case for shorting the hottest company in the stock market, Nvidia Corp.
But then the post started to go viral.
By Saturday night, Emanuel could see that 1,500 people across the world were reading his blog post at a given moment. Well-known venture capitalist Chamath Palihapitiya shared Emanuel’s post on Nvidia’s short case with his 1.8 million X followers. Successful early stage investor Naval Ravikant shared the post with his 2.6 million followers. Jared Friedman, a partner at venture-capital firm Y Combinator, referred to it in a post that was reposted by the official Y Combinator account. Morgan Brown, a vice president of product and growth at Dropbox, pointed to it in a thread that was viewed over 13 million times. Emanuel’s own X post got nearly half a million views. He also quickly gained about 13,000 followers on the platform, going from about 2,000 to more than 15,000 followers.
In an interview with MarketWatch, Emanuel said that at one point the traffic crashed his website, so people started sharing an archive link, which his website-analytics tool couldn’t track.
But one thing it did pick up was that by the end of the night, the city with the most concurrent readers was San Jose, Calif. — near where Nvidia’s corporate headquarters is located.
Emanuel’s argument shook Silicon Valley not because he claimed that the big U.S. technology companies were misleading or deceitful. His main point was simply that they were nowhere near as smart and efficient as Wall Street was touting them as. The big tech companies had built and trained their artificial-intelligence breakthroughs using tremendous amounts of data and advanced compute resources that required them to pay for Nvidia’s data-center hardware, which is sold at very high gross margins. Emanuel pointed out that a China-based company, DeepSeek, had recently launched its own top-notch AI product using fewer expensive chips. In other words, DeepSeek had achieved what the big AI companies had, but with far less money. What countless Wall Street firms and investment analysts had seemingly missed was being pointed out by some guy in his apartment.
Then on Monday things got real. Nvidia’s stock plummeted about 12.5% at market open and continued falling from there. By the end of the day, the slide had wiped out nearly $600 billion from Nvidia’s market capitalization — the largest single-day market-cap drop to date for any company. Matt Levine, the prominent Bloomberg News financial columnist, noted the online chatter that claimed Emanuel’s post “was an important catalyst” for the stock-market selloff and said it was a “candidate for the most impactful short research report ever.”
Emanuel spent the rest of the week booked solid as hedge funds paid him $1,000 per hour to speak on the phone and give his take on Nvidia and AI.
“I’m so exhausted, I’m losing my voice practically,” said Emanuel. “It’s been the most surreal experience of my life.”
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