BUSINESS

Bridgeman’s win capped a week that brought Asheville’s golf history full circle, spotlit Skyview’s legacy and highlighted Explore Asheville’s $2.4 million tourism bet.

The largest Ethereum-centric treasury firm kept buying, while its chairman argued ETH’s strong third quarter could push institutions to increase crypto exposure.

Bessent pushed back against a bearish assessment of the U.S. economy highlighting strong growth, foreign demand for American assets and continued dollar dominance.

For two weeks in September, the most powerful people in technology argued in public about whether their own products might kill everyone. Almost all of them had money riding on the answer.

Alexis Ohanian does not. He co-founded Reddit in a college dorm back in 2005, resigned from its board in 2020, and now runs the venture firm Seven Seven Six. He told CNBC on Wednesday, Sept. 16, that the industry has done a “pretty tone deaf job” of explaining AI to the public.

His objection is not that the danger is invented. It is that the version being sold is the wrong one, and that it is drowning out the version investors can actually price.

Ohanian said the risks are “more benign, or they’re more banal than people are thinking.” He pointed to agent swarms, where multiple AI agents coordinate on one complicated task, rather than the Terminator and Skynet scenarios dominating social feeds.

He compared AI to nuclear energy, which is powerful enough to do real damage or real good, depending on how it is handled.

Ohanian was sharper about the tone of the debate. “The doomer tweet was discouraging,” he said, and called it “frustrating” when “the slogans are actually not real things.”

Everyone else in the AI doomsday debate has a position

The argument he walked into started on Sept. 8, when Anthropic researcher Jacob Coxon resigned and warned that the labs are “gambling with our lives.”

CEO Dario Amodei followed on Sept. 12 with an essay urging labs to slow capability gains by one to two years. Sam Altman and Elon Musk backed him.

Then the rebuttals landed. Jensen Huang and Mark Zuckerberg both rejected coordinated pacing at Salesforce’s Dreamforce conference on Sept. 15. “Run as fast as you can,” Huang said, according to CNBC. President Donald Trump had called AI safety concerns “a hoax” a day earlier, Axios reported.

Read the roster and the pattern is hard to miss. Nvidia sells more chips when the industry moves faster. Meta runs an open-source program that prefers light regulation. Anthropic and OpenAI are the two heading towards public markets, and Michael Burry has publicly argued that a slowdown mostly protects incumbents.

Ohanian sells none of it. That’s what makes his read worth checking.

Google pays Reddit roughly $60 million a year and OpenAI about $70 million for AI training access, with both licensing deals now up for renewal.stockcam / Getty Images

Reddit is the ultimate test case

Reddit (RDDT) is the company he co-founded and the clearest public example of the mundane danger he describes. It runs a network of interest-based forums, earns most of its money from advertising, and licenses its archive of human conversation to AI developers.

Reddit posted second-quarter revenue of $805 million, up 61% year over year, with net income of $253 million, according to its Q2 earnings report.

Related: Anthropic CEO sounds the alarm on AI risks

Both figures beat Wall Street estimates. The stock fell anyway after management flagged volatile search referrals.

That is the banal risk working in real time. Google’s AI Overviews answer the question, the user never clicks through, and a business built on search traffic loses readers without any model going rogue.

Alphabet, OpenAI licensing renewals are key

The second exposure is a contract. Google parent Alphabet (GOOGL) pays Reddit about $60 million a year for training access, and OpenAI pays roughly $70 million, with both deals up for renewal, said Baird analyst Colin Sebastian, according to InsiderMonkey.

Wells Fargo estimated in June that renewed terms could push combined licensing revenue toward $550 million a year, StockTwits noted. In July, the same firm warned that walking away from Google would cost Reddit about $500 million and hurt user growth.

DA Davidson trimmed its price target to $185 from $200 on Sept. 18, according to TheFly.

Shares traded near $158 on Sept. 16, down from a record $282.95 set in September 2025, and have shed roughly a third this year. For shareholders, the entire AI story arrives as signed terms rather than a catastrophe.

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The AI pause talk has not paused anything

Six days after Amodei’s “Pace the Frontier” message that asked the industry to slow down, Reuters reported on Sept. 18 that Anthropic is weighing a new model to counter OpenAI’s GPT-6 Astra, released Sept. 3.

The company has also pushed its IPO to November at a valuation investors discuss near $2 trillion, according to The Wall Street Journal, with annualized revenue topping $65 billion by the end of July, Reuters reported.

Nothing on that calendar looks like a pause. It looks like a product cycle wearing safety vocabulary.

That is Ohanian’s complaint, and it carries a cost. Extinction headlines cannot be priced, so markets discount them and look away. The real AI repricing is happening in traffic logs, renewal negotiations, and enterprise switching costs, one quarter at a time.

Reddit is the test case because both halves of the trade run through one company. Its archive grows more valuable to AI every year.

Its traffic becomes less valuable every time a model answers instead of linking. Watch the renewal terms, because they will say more than any manifesto.

Related: Anthropic researcher resigns and his reason is a warning to us all

Eaton Corporation’s (ETN) stock rose last week. Shares of the Dublin-based power management company closed at $424.77 on September 18, a gain of about 7.9% over five trading days. The stock is now up close to 30% for the year, giving Eaton a market value of around $165 billion.

What drove the increase was Morgan Stanley’s 14th Annual Laguna Conference on September 16, where Eaton CEO Paulo Ruiz presented a stronger picture for the company’s data center business than most investors were expecting. His message caught Wall Street’s attention and caused several banks to lift their price targets.

Eaton plays a major role when it comes to building AI facilities. Ruiz highlighted how much revenue that role could deliver in the next few years.

Ruiz’s Laguna comments sparked a fresh look at Eaton

Ruiz, who took over as CEO in June 2025 after leading Eaton’s Industrial Sector and occupying senior positions at Siemens, walked investors through the company’s 2026 guidance history. 

Eaton originally forecast 8% organic growth, raised the range to 9%–11% after first-quarter results, then lifted it to 11%–13% after the second quarter. At Laguna, Ruiz said Eaton is now targeting the high end of that current range and pointed to a “very strong” July and August performance.

“We see that the best years for this business are still ahead of us,” Ruiz told the audience, according to a transcript published by Seeking Alpha. He said he expects Eaton will have added roughly $10 billion in revenue in the past three years, between 2024 and 2026, or about 10 times the top-line growth of the prior decade.

“I’m really confident there’s a new Eaton taking place, because the strategy we have in place today is designed to do both top-line growth and margin expansion at once,” he added. Data center demand is responsible for most of that growth, with orders climbing about 85% and revenue rising roughly 65%. 

Boyd Thermal, owned by Eaton, had its projected 2026 sales raised to $1.8 billion from $1.1 billion the previous year, a scale-up Eaton’s management tracks separately from the broader Electrical Americas’ (a major operating segment of Eaton) data center ramp.

Eaton shares closed at $424.77 on Sept. 18 after CEO Paulo Ruiz laid out a stronger data center outlook at Morgan Stanley’s Laguna Conference.Cheng Xin / Getty Images

How Eaton fits into the AI power buildout

Eaton makes the electrical equipment that carries power from the grid all the way to the chips inside AI servers. That includes switchgear, uninterruptible power supplies, busways, transformers, and now liquid cooling systems through the $9.5 billion Boyd Thermal acquisition that closed in March. Roughly 75% of Eaton’s revenue comes from its electrical segments, with the rest split between aerospace and vehicle businesses.

The company’s second quarter of 2026 set several records. Revenue increased 21% year over year to $8.53 billion, with adjusted earnings per share hitting $3.15. Segment margins came in at 23.1%, above Eaton’s own guidance, and orders and backlog climbed sharply across its Electrical and Aerospace business.

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Ruiz told investors at Laguna that the globally announced project pipeline Eaton is tracking has accelerated to 342 gigawatts, up from the 307 gigawatts management pointed to on the second quarter earnings call. That figure covers the industry-wide opportunity Eaton is competing for.

Eaton also announced a partnership with Trane Technologies in August to build integrated thermal and electrical systems for the NVIDIA Rubin DSX AI Factory Reference Design, giving it another shot at converting spending per project.

Wall Street is raising price targets

Analyst reaction to Eaton’s second quarter results and the Laguna remarks has been mostly positive. Baird initiated coverage with an Outperform rating and a $500 price target, stating that Eaton is still early in securing AI-driven orders, with cloud demand still making up most of data center sales.

Related: Jim Cramer reveals 6 AI stocks to watch in 2026

RBC Capital raised its target to $512 from $484 after Eaton’s earnings report and pointed to what it described as roughly 15 years of U.S. data center construction backlog. Evercore ISI upgraded Eaton to Outperform from In Line and raised its target to $502 from $453, citing lower execution risk and accelerating earnings.

BMO Capital moved to $487 and Citi to $485. Eaton has an average 12-month price target of $510 with a Strong Buy rating built on 10 buy calls and 1 hold recommendation, with no sell calls. 

The risks investors should still weigh

Anyone thinking about buying the stock should consider a few things. Eaton trades at a P/E of 43, which is expensive for an industrial company that has historically traded closer to 20 times earnings. Much of that premium valuation reflects the AI outlook, so any pullback in hyperscaler spending would hit Eaton faster than rivals.

Ruiz also said 16 of Eaton’s 24 planned manufacturing facilities are now in the launch phase. He described the fourth quarter of 2025 and first quarter of 2026 as the most disruptive period so far. If margins fall during the remaining rollout, its earnings outlook might become uncertain for the rest of 2026 and into 2027.

Investors should also watch the planned Reverse Morris Trust separation of Eaton’s Mobility business that is supposed to close in the first quarter of 2027. The separation is designed so the company can focus on its higher-growth Electrical and Aerospace segments. These two segments sit closer to the AI and defense spending cycles that Eaton’s management expects to drive earnings for the next several years. 

The safer approach for now is to observe order flow in the third quarter earnings report before adding money.

Related: Nvidia just sent a strong signal to AMD and Intel investors

A major risks now is that diesel prices stay high — and continue to put upward pressure on inflation.

The St. Louis Cardinals placed a veteran infielder back on the open market with just a handful of games left in the season.

The tech giants’ job listings could indicate that they are separately pursuing experts in stablecoins and tokenized deposits for future projects.

It’s the first week of bitcoin purchases for Strategy in about three weeks.

Most people think Buffett’s approach only works if you have a lot of money. He has said the opposite. His framework for building wealth started when he was young, broke and working with small amounts. He has also said what he would do today if he had to start over.

At Berkshire Hathaway’s 1999 annual shareholder meeting, someone asked Warren Buffett what he would do if he were getting out of school with just $10,000 to invest.

His answer covered three principles that still apply to anyone building a portfolio in 2026, according to Moneywise.

Rule 1: Only buy what you actually understand

“You have to buy businesses, or little pieces of businesses called stocks, and you have to buy them at attractive prices, and you have to buy into good businesses,” Buffett said.

This is what Buffett calls the circle of competence. You do not need to understand every company in the market. You need to understand the ones you own well enough to answer a few basic questions. How does this company make money? What could threaten its profits? Does it have something that makes it hard for a competitor to take its customers?

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If you cannot answer those questions, you do not own the business. You are just holding a ticker symbol.

Buffett has also said investors should be ready for their stocks to fall sharply even when they are right about the business.

At Berkshire’s 2020 annual meeting, he said you should be prepared for a stock to drop 50% after you buy it and still feel comfortable holding it. If that kind of decline would push you to sell, that is a sign you do not understand the company well enough to own it.

Rule 2: Start early and let compounding do the work

“We started building this little snowball on top of a very long hill,” Buffett has said. “We started at a very early age in rolling the snowball down, and of course, the nature of compound interest is that it behaves like a snowball.”

Buffett bought his first stock at age 11. That head start gave his investments decades to grow. One of the most straightforward ways to illustrate this is with a simple example.

If you invest $10,000 and earn an average annual return of 8% without adding another dollar, that money roughly doubles every nine years. After 30 years, it becomes around $100,000. After 40 years, it is closer to $217,000.

The numbers look ordinary until you understand what they mean in practice. Starting at 25 rather than 35 is not just 10 extra years. It is often the difference between having a comfortable retirement and a difficult one. The earlier you start, the less you have to contribute later to reach the same outcome.

The corollary is that waiting for the perfect moment usually costs more than it saves. Nobody times the market perfectly. Getting in early with a reasonable plan tends to beat getting in late with a great one.

Buffett bought his first stock at age 11.Daniel Zuchnik / Getty Images

Rule 3: Look for smaller companies others are ignoring

“I probably would be focusing on smaller companies because I would be working with smaller sums, and there’s more chance that something is overlooked in that arena,” Buffett said.

Large institutional investors often cannot build meaningful positions in smaller companies. If a fund manages $50 billion, a $10 million stake in a small company barely moves the needle. So large funds skip them. That creates a gap that individual investors can use.

Small companies also get less analyst coverage. Less coverage means less scrutiny, which means mispricing happens more often. A patient individual investor willing to do their own research can occasionally find something that institutions have not touched yet.

Buffett used this approach throughout his career. Berkshire Hathaway bought Nebraska Furniture Mart while it was still expanding beyond its home state. It bought See’s Candies when the business was generating roughly $4 million in annual profits.

Neither was a widely followed name at the time. Both became foundational holdings.

The strategy carries real risk. Smaller companies often have thinner margins, less diversified revenue and more vulnerability in a downturn.

The same due diligence applies: understand the business, check the balance sheet, assess the competitive position and make sure the price makes sense.

What Charlie Munger said about getting started

Charlie Munger, Buffett’s longtime business partner, added his own piece to this framework. He said the hardest part of building wealth is getting to your first $100,000.

“The hard part of the process for most people is the first $100,000,” Munger said.

His point was not that everything becomes easy after that. It was that reaching a meaningful pool of capital requires combining investing returns with savings discipline.

Returns compound. But you need capital to compound. The investors who get to $100,000 fastest tend to be the ones who earn more than they spend and stay rational when markets get difficult.

That is a point Buffett has echoed too.

These three rules only work if you actually have money to put into them. Savings rate and spending habits are not glamorous topics. But they determine how much capital you have available to invest, which drives everything else.

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