Is the AI boom just the dot-com bubble all over again? The numbers say the setup looks very different. In 1999, the seven largest companies in America traded at roughly 66 times earnings, a group led by Microsoft, Cisco, Oracle, Intel, Lucent, Dell and Sun Microsystems, based on Fidelity and FactSet data. Behind them, most of the hot internet names had little or no profit at all. About 78% of IPOs during the 1999 to 2000 bubble were unprofitable, according to University of Florida professor Jay Ritter's IPO data. Today, the Magnificent Seven driving the AI trade, Nvidia, Microsoft, Apple, Alphabet, Amazon, Meta and Tesla, trade at around 23 to 27 times earnings depending on the measure. Goldman Sachs put the group at 26.8 times forward earnings versus 52 times for the tech leaders of 2000. And these companies generate real cash. Alphabet, Amazon, Meta and Microsoft alone produced about $200 billion in free cash flow in 2025, while Apple has topped $129 billion over the trailing 12 mont...