BUSINESS

Bill Gates has developed a bold vision of where artificial intelligence will take the world, and he believes it will unfold in two phases.

The Microsoft (MSFT) co-founder, who appeared on NBC’s “Meet the Press” on Sunday, Sept. 27, said that AI will reshape almost every part of daily life, but that society will have to get through a rough 20-year adjustment period first.

Bill Gates helped build the industry that is now driving AI technology. He co-founded Microsoft with Paul Allen in 1975, and the company makes money by selling Windows and Office software, running the Xbox gaming business, and renting out cloud computing power through its Azure service.

Azure powers many of the world’s most popular AI tools, and Microsoft is also the biggest corporate backer of OpenAI, the maker of ChatGPT.

Why the first AI phase will be rough for years

Gates told “Meet the Press” host Kristen Welker that the world has just entered the early part of the AI era, when the technology’s biggest benefits are still out of reach. He believes AI has the power to lower healthcare costs and reduce the high cost of living, but those wins will take years to arrive.

“Yet it will be changing the job market and potentially empowering criminals if we don’t have the right safeguards, so you have a period that’s probably 20 years long where you have this adjustment,” Gates said, according to Business Insider.

For investors, that timeline matters because it provides an outlook to when the real payoff might happen. The companies making money from AI right now, including Nvidia (NVDA) and Microsoft, are still selling the tools other firms need to build their AI systems.

The bigger economic wins Gates is describing could take a full generation to show up.

Bill Gates laid out a two-phase view of AI’s future on NBC’s “Meet the Press” on Sept. 27, 2026.RICCARDO MILANI / Getty Images

The billion-death warning behind Gates’ push for AI rules

Gates warned that AI is “certainly powerful enough to drive events that, you know, cause a billion deaths” if the wrong people get their hands on the strongest models, Axios reported.

His main worry is about individuals who could turn AI into a weapon. “Even though it’s pretty hard to get to 100%, there’s never been a weapon as powerful as the combination of people with ill intent using the latest AI tools,” Gates told Welker.

Related: CrowdStrike’s AI bet just paid off in a big way

That fear explains why Gates keeps pushing for stronger rules.

In a Gates Notes post titled “A turbulent AI era and critical choices to make,” he asked law enforcement and lawmakers to build safety guardrails now.

Tighter rules on data use and model safety could reshape which AI companies win over the next decade, so investors should watch this space closely.

The AI payoff phase and the stocks that could ride it

For the second phase, Gates believes that once advanced AI models are paired with humanoid robots, the cost of everyday goods will drop sharply.

“Once you get through that, then a combination of humanoid robots and AIs will provide. Building houses, growing food, a lot of things,” Gates said. “You could call it an era of abundance.”

That view lines up with where investors are already putting money. Tesla (TSLA) has linked part of its long-term outlook to its Optimus humanoid robot, and startups like Figure AI are racing to bring similar products to the market.

More AI Coverage:

Stifel doubles down on Microsoft stock for investors

Anthropic just handed Akamai a game-changing deal

OpenAI CFO offers calming message amid AI slowdown fears

Chris Lin, who manages the $35 billion Fidelity OTC fund, made a similar long-term point earlier this year.

“Nobody knows how long it will take to play out, but I believe most investors are underestimating how impactful AI will ultimately be,” Lin said. He named Nvidia and Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Company (TSM) as his biggest AI holdings.

How investors can plan for the 20-year AI shift

Gates’ two-phase opinion is a useful reminder that AI investing means playing more than one trade at a time. The near-term winners are the companies selling chips, cloud capacity, and business software. The longer-term winners could be very different, with robotics and biotech AI likely to gain the most once the technology reaches homes and workplaces.

The risks Gates highlighted should also help you build your portfolio. Making big bets on a single AI company can be risky if regulation tightens or the company’s model falls behind a competitor. One way to stay in the trade without depending too much on one company is to spread your money across chipmakers, cloud providers, and cybersecurity businesses.

“That’s for the younger generation to figure out what that looks like,” Gates said when closing his “Meet the Press” appearance with Welker. “My focus is [whether we can] get through this period of turmoil without too much damage.”

For investors, that statement means patience is necessary. The AI shift is happening in stages, and the biggest returns may go to people who stay in the market long enough for the second stage.

Related: OpenAl’s new model is so capable, the company had to lock parts down

On October 29, 1929, America took a hard turn down a very rocky road.

That day, known as Black Tuesday, marked the final and most devastating leg of the stock market crash that brought the Roaring Twenties to a screeching halt and ushered in the Great Depression.

The numbers from that awful time are staggering. 

By 1932, 25% of all American families did not have a single employed wage earner in the household. 

One year later, the U.S. unemployment rate had climbed to an astonishing 24.9%, meaning 12.8 million people were entirely without work.

“Once I built a railroad, now it’s done,” Bing Crosby sang in 1932. “Brother, can you spare a dime?”

Average worker wages plummeted by 42.5% between 1929 and 1933, while roughly 75% of those still working were reduced to part-time schedules. Between 1930 and 1933, roughly 9,000 banks collapsed across the nation.

Breadlines and soup kitchens sprang up in cities, but they were regularly overwhelmed.

“Ten men in our Country could buy the World, and ten million can’t buy enough to eat,” humorist Will Rogers wrote in his Aug. 16, 1931, newspaper column.

‘Hoover Stew’ and ‘Slumgullion’

But people had to find some way to eat, and they resorted to desperate measures to put food on the table. 

Standard fare in working-class neighborhoods included “Slumgullion,” a cheap stew of meat, macaroni, and tomatoes, and “Hoover Stew,” sliced hot dogs cooked with macaroni and canned tomatoes, which was sarcastically named after President Herbert Hoover.

In 1930, James Dewar, a baker at Continental Baking Co., found himself with idle baking equipment when strawberries, a key ingredient in the company’s Little Shortcake Fingers, went out of season.

Dewar filled the shortcakes with banana cream, which was more accessible and had a longer shelf life, creating what would become the Twinkie.

Kraft introduced its macaroni and cheese in 1937, and it became an instant hit since one box could feed a family of four for just 19 cents.

That same year, Hormel introduced Spam, combining pork shoulder with ham to create a cheap product that didn’t need to be refrigerated.

And then there was ice cream.

When Prohibition took effect in 1920, many saloons, bars, and breweries had to change their businesses to survive.

Some turned to soda fountains, while major breweries including Yuengling and Anheuser-Busch (BUD) moved into ice cream production to keep their workers employed.

The Depression slowed ice cream production and consumption compared with the 1920s, but the frozen treat endured.

Maybe people couldn’t spare a dime, but a nickel could buy a scoop of ice cream, giving them an affordable indulgence and perhaps a way to take their minds off all that Slumgullion and Hoover Stew.

Rocky Road is said to have gotten its name during these turbulent times, but like so many origin stories, the truth is difficult to pin down.

One popular version says Rocky Road was created in March 1929 by William Dreyer, co-founder of Dreyer’s Ice Cream, in Oakland, California, just months before the stock market crash.

Rocky road ice cream in an edible waffle bowl

Competing origin stories

At the time, ice cream was commonly sold in three basic flavors: vanilla, chocolate, and strawberry.

Dreyer added walnuts, later replaced with almonds, to his chocolate ice cream. He then used his wife’s sewing shears to cut marshmallows into bite-sized pieces and created the first batch of Rocky Road.

Dreyer and his partner, Joseph Edy, eventually gave the flavor its now-famous name “to give folks something to smile about in the midst of the Great Depression.”

However, another Oakland business has a different story.

Fentons Creamery claimed Rocky Road was developed by George Farren, a candy maker at the company who turned a candy bar into the ice cream flavor.

Farren was friends with Dreyer and Edy, who had an ice cream shop on Grand Avenue in Oakland. According to Fentons, Dreyer soon began making Farren’s recipe for his own customers, using almonds instead of the English walnuts in the original Fentons version.

“Like so much food history, and especially ice cream history, the story of Rocky Road isn’t clear,” said Hannah Spiegelman, creator of A Sweet History. “The first published recipe for Rocky Road was in a Kansas recipe book.”

That recipe appeared in the 1920 edition of Rigby’s Reliable Candy Teacher, published in Topeka, Kansas, nearly a decade before the Oakland origin stories.

It called for chocolate ice cream topped with honey cream whip, almond macaroons, walnuts, pecans, and a cherry.

Then there’s a story from Down Under, with some accounts tracing Rocky Road to the mid-19th century, when damaged sweets arriving from England were supposedly repackaged and sold to travelers and gold seekers.

Australian food historians have questioned that account. Myer department store in Adelaide advertised “Rocky Roads” in 1933, describing them as a combination of chocolate, coconut, and marshmallow.

We may never know the real story behind Rocky Road, but whoever came up with this flavor created a keeper.

Today, Rocky Road ranks 17th on the list of America’s favorite ice cream flavors, just behind blueberry and ahead of Moose Tracks, according to Statista. Chocolate, butter pecan, and vanilla occupy the top three spots.

The connection between Rocky Road ice cream and the Great Depression was such a hot topic recently that it was a heavily trending question on Google and social media on Sept. 2.

“I don’t think there is any concrete evidence that Rocky Road was named for the tough times, but it is a great story,” Spiegelman said. “Whether that was true or not, the flavor today allows people to explore that time in history.”

So, one scoop or two?

Millions of Americans who own an S&P 500 index fund have a stake in the AI boom, knowingly or not. The fund holds Nvidia, Oracle, Micron, and Palantir because it weights companies by market value, and AI has made them heavy.

Michael Burry saw in 2008 what a government rescue is worth to ordinary shareholders. Washington stabilized the banking system, yet Lehman Brothers investors were still wiped out.

Now the “Big Short” investor says Washington has a deep stake in AI. In a Substack chat, Burry wrote that President Donald Trump’s team sees the AI buildout as the economy’s only real engine. “They cannot afford to let it fall,” he added, according to Stocktwits.

Yet Burry has been betting against the boom’s key players, and on Sept. 28 he sharpened those bets. He covered his short positions in Nvidia, Oracle (ORCL), Palantir (PLTR), Nebius (NBIS), Micron (MU) and CoreWeave (CRWV), Stocktwits reported, swapping all but CoreWeave into put options.

A put gains value when a stock falls, but unlike a short sale, it expires. Several of his run into late 2027.

“Fundamentally, I am moving timelines up,” Burry wrote, citing weekend research. He is betting on when, not just whether.

Burry separates political will from policy firepower

His two stances only appear contradictory. Burry thinks Washington wants the boom to survive but may lack the tools to protect it.

Burry argued the U.S. government is in its weakest position in modern history to fight a financial or debt crisis. Its remaining remedies, he wrote, are few and mostly blunt.

The spending data paints a calmer picture. Goldman Sachs Research expects AI investment to reach about 1.8% of U.S. GDP this year, a share it says sits “comfortably within the historical range” of past tech booms. By that measure, spending still has room to grow.

Meanwhile, President Trump’s own accounts sold between $5 million and $25 million each of Microsoft (MSFT) and Amazon (AMZN) stock on July 20, according to a CNBC analysis of his latest disclosure.

The accounts, whose trades CNBC says are made on his behalf, bought back smaller amounts days later. So the stake Burry describes is political and partly personal.

Michael Burry says Trump’s team cannot afford to let the AI boom fall, yet he just swapped his AI shorts for puts and moved his timeline up.Kevin Dietsch / Getty Images

Credit markets are feeling the strain first

The 10-year Treasury yield sat near 5.17% last week, its highest level since 2007, according to CNBC. That makes borrowing costlier for data center builders and for Washington itself, which fits Burry’s warning about blunt tools.

A senior private credit investor told CNBC that financing for neoclouds, GPU rental firms such as CoreWeave, will get harder because they have less cushion.

Related: Michael Burry just put a date on Big Tech’s AI reckoning, and Oracle’s $664 billion lands in crosshairs

Oracle shows how fragile that financing has become. It sent a force majeure notice, a legal warning of possible delays, on Project Jupiter, a New Mexico data center tied to OpenAI. Bankers and investors told Reuters the move unsettled lenders across the trillion-dollar AI infrastructure financing market.

Developer Blue Owl said financial commitments were unchanged. Even so, Washington can speed permits more easily than it can lower what lenders charge an indebted borrower.

Wall Street is on the other side of Burry’s bets

All five stocks he still bets against carry Buy or Strong Buy consensus ratings in S&P Global data compiled by Stock Analysis. Their results over the past 12 months, as of late September, show why analysts stay bullish and where Burry sees cracks.

Revenue grew 21.6% at Oracle, the database giant turned AI landlord, yet its market value has halved in a year. Analysts rate it a Buy, with a $237.97 average target.

Sales jumped 78.9% at AI software firm Palantir, but its shares cost about 99 times expected earnings. Analysts rate it a Buy, with a $195.57 target.

Sales grew about sixfold to $1.4 billion at GPU cloud provider Nebius, yet net income was just $42.4 million. Analysts rate it a Buy, with a $276.26 target.

Net income reached $192.9 billion at Nvidia, the top AI chip supplier, on sales up 83.4%. Analysts rate it a Strong Buy, with a $327.70 target.

Sales grew 167% at memory chipmaker Micron, whose shares trade near seven times expected earnings. Analysts rate it a Strong Buy, with a $1,515 target.

Burry is not alone on the neoclouds. Rothschild & Co Redburn started coverage of both Nebius and CoreWeave with Sell ratings, TipRanks reported. Palantir’s multiple is central to his claim that its valuation outruns the business.

More Michael Burry:

Michael Burry just put a date on Big Tech’s AI reckoning, and Oracle’s $664 billion lands in crosshairs

Michael Burry’s blistering message on economic inequality

Michael Burry sends stark warning on AI hyperscalers

The real question is who gets rescued

Micron reports earnings on Sept. 30, according to Stock Analysis, offering an early read on AI demand as borrowing costs climb. Burry put a date on large AI write-offs in 2028 or 2029 last week, yet most of his new AI puts expire before then.

Index-fund investors own cash-rich spenders and debt-funded builders alike, so the gap between a policy backstop and a shareholder rescue lands in retirement accounts.

The next phase of the AI trade may hinge less on who builds the most than on who can still borrow.

Related: Michael Burry keeps pointing at unloved stocks for a reason

Your phone is now the front door to your money. It holds your banking apps, your two-factor codes, your tap-to-pay cards, and years of photos you’d never want to lose.

Most people treat monthly security updates as routine upkeep. You tap install before bed and wake up to a slightly safer device.

I cover payments and fintech, and I install those patches quickly because they close holes that scammers exploit. That habit still makes sense, but it assumes the update won’t lock you out of the phone itself.

Some owners of Alphabet’s (GOOGL) Pixel phones just learned that assumption can fail, and the way back in can cost them everything stored on the device.

September update breaks PIN and pattern unlock for some Pixel devices

Google’s September 2026 update caused lock-screen failures for a small number of Pixel owners, Notebookcheck reported Sept. 27. The affected phones stop accepting the correct PIN or pattern.

Reports so far cluster around three models, according to Notebookcheck and Android Authority:

Pixel 10 Pro XL, where the unlock pattern resets after only two dots

Pixel 8a, where the phone treats one digit as a full PIN and rejects it

Pixel 8 Pro, where owners report similar PIN failures

One Pixel 10 Pro XL owner tried rebooting, Safe Mode, a connected mouse, and reinstalling the same software. Only a factory reset worked, and it erased the phone’s local data.

A Pixel 8a owner got back in after waiting out the “too many attempts” lockout timer. Google is contacting affected users in Reddit threads but hasn’t commented publicly, Android Authority said.

Google’s September update is locking some Pixel owners out of their phones.TIMOTHY A. CLARY / Getty Images

Why Google can’t bypass a locked Pixel for you

Most of your files sit in encrypted storage that opens only after you unlock the phone, and its keys can’t be released without your PIN, pattern, or password, Android’s security documentation explains. Nobody, Google included, can skip the lock screen to pull out your photos.

That’s why Google’s advice is blunt. “If you can’t unlock your phone, you’ll need to erase it,” Google’s support page reads.

More Technology:

Verizon takes on T-Mobile with new phone plan for customers

Microsoft CEO names one key concern with its AI

Mizuho makes bold call on SpaceX stock before key launch

An erase removes the apps, photos, and music stored on the phone. You can restore data backed up to your Google Account, but only if you know the PIN or pattern that was set when the backup ran, Google added.

The hardware isn’t the expensive part. The Pixel 10 Pro XL launched at $1,199, but unsynced photos and the authenticator codes guarding your bank and brokerage logins can be far harder to replace.

How Pixel owners can protect their photos and bank logins right now

If you haven’t installed the September update, back up your important data first or hold off until Google formally addresses the bug, Notebookcheck advised.

Either way, a short checklist helps:

Confirm your photos have finished backing up to Google Photos.

Turn on cloud sync in your authenticator app, or save backup codes for your financial logins.

List which apps hold payment cards so you can re-add them after any reset.

If you’re already locked out, try waiting out the lockout timer before you erase anything. It worked for at least one owner, and an erase can’t be undone.

Security updates still protect your money, so don’t swear them off. Just make sure a five-minute backup check comes first.

Related: Google is about to make a major change to every Pixel device