AI companies rarely describe their products in modest terms. Executives talk about software built to replace most jobs and reshape how people spend their free time. Those promises outrun what the products do because a stock price rewards the size of the future a company describes. Writer and critic Cory Doctorow traces the mechanism in his book, The Reverse Centaur’s Guide to Life After AI.
In a December 2025 talk, later part of the book, he lays out how investors value two kinds of business. A mature company earns steady profits, so its stock trades close to what those profits are worth. A growth company might earn little, but investors pay for the much bigger business it could become, so its stock trades far above its earnings. A business the market still counts as a growth company can pay for acquisitions and staff with its own stock instead of cash. That stock works like a currency created by typing more zeros into a spreadsheet.
Two carmakers show both kinds, in figures 24/7 Wall St reported in July 2026. A share of Tesla cost about 346 times the company’s earnings per share, while a share of Toyota cost about 10 times its own. Yet Toyota sold more than eleven million vehicles in its latest fiscal year, against 1.6 million for Tesla, and earned several times more profit. Investors treat Tesla as a growth stock and Toyota as a mature one.
Uber chased the same treatment before the AI wave. As Doctorow told the War on Cars podcast, its paperwork for going public described its market as every ride anyone takes in a vehicle. That target was far larger than its ride-hailing business.
At Facebook, user growth stalled once nearly everyone who might want an account had one, and the stock risked being priced like a mature company’s. So the company renamed itself Meta and promoted a virtual world reached through headsets. The pitch was built to make the end of a growth story look like the start of something enormous. That push had run up close to 88 billion dollars in losses by mid-2026, and Meta has moved its growth story onto AI.
An AI company that admits its product mostly speeds up drafting and summarizing risks being priced like Toyota. One that promises to remake work itself gets priced like Tesla, for as long as investors keep believing the story.
