The One Ring to Pump Them All
Trust me, bro! AI profits are coming!
Eric Watson, a New Zealander who made his fortune selling women’s underwear under the brand name Ellie McFersonson Intimates, was once involved in a fistfight in a London hotel bathroom with Russell Crowe. This happened in 2002, in a five-star establishment, for reasons that remain legally and personally unresolved. Watson was the controlling shareholder of a Long Island soft drink company, an “undisclosed control person” who had signed a confidentiality agreement swearing he would not reveal the company’s business plans.
In December 2017, at the peak of the Bitcoin mania, he violated that agreement by slipping his broker Oliver Barret-Lindsay a draft press release announcing that Long Island Iced Tea Corp. was renaming itself Long Blockchain Corp., describing the pivot as “a once-in-a-generation opportunity.” The company had no blockchain engineers, no blockchain code, and a factory that was still, at the moment of announcement, filling pallets with diet mango tea. Barret-Lindsay passed the information to a stock promoter named Gannon Giguiere, who bought 35,000 shares the night before, held them for two hours after the announcement, and walked away with $160,000. The stock spiked 500%. The SEC charged all three men in 2021. A final judgment against Barret-Lindsay came in September 2024. The factory tea went cold. The shares were eventually delisted from Nasdaq.
I tell you this story because it is the purest template we have for what is happening right now with Allbirds, with the data centers going up on Midwest farmland like brutalist cathedrals to computational vanity, with Sam Altman standing in the rubble of his own gate writing blog posts about Sauron, and with the general state of a country that has decided, with extraordinary enthusiasm, to eat itself.
Allbirds was founded in 2016 by Tim Brown, a former New Zealand footballer, and Joey Zwillinger, a biotech engineer, on a premise so perfectly calibrated to the cultural appetites of the Silicon Valley professional class that it deserves to be taught in business schools as a case study in selling identity to people who already had too much of it.
The product was a merino wool sneaker, logo-free, sustainable, carbon-negative in its midsole, priced at $95, worn by Barack Obama at a basketball game, by Leonardo DiCaprio everywhere, by Gwyneth Paltrow and Oprah Winfrey and half the venture capital community in San Francisco.
Time Magazine called it “the world’s most comfortable shoe” on the day of launch. The New York Times declared it part of the Silicon Valley uniform within eighteen months. GQ, by 2020, was asking plaintively whether someone couldn’t send Obama a pair of Jordans. The brand had calcified into a tribe marker for a very specific kind of affluent coastal progressive who wanted their footwear to announce both their income and their conscience, and once that tribe moved on to the next thing, Allbirds had nowhere to go.
The company went public in November 2021 at a $4 billion valuation, shares rising 90% on day one, burning through losses of $101 million in 2023, watching sales fall from $298 million in 2022 to $152 million in 2025, receiving a Nasdaq non-compliance notice in April 2024 for trading below $1 for over thirty consecutive days, closing all its full-price U.S. stores by February 2026, and finally, in March 2026, agreeing to sell the entire brand, the wool, the IP, the sustainability credentials, the Obama adjacency, all of it, to a company called American Exchange Group for $39 million. That figure represents less than 12% of the cash Allbirds raised from the public at IPO. The founders cashed out more than that at the offering. What remained after the sale was a Nasdaq ticker, a $21 million market cap, and an extraordinary amount of audacity.
On April 15, 2026, the rump entity that was Allbirds issued a press release announcing that it would become NewBird AI, pivoting to “AI compute infrastructure,” aiming for the long-term vision of becoming “a fully integrated GPU-as-a-Service and AI-native cloud solutions provider,” and raising $50 million from an undisclosed institutional investor.
The company, now stripped of its shoes, its stores, its staff, its supply chain, and its founding mission, would seek, and that word is doing enormous structural work in this sentence, to acquire high-performance GPUs and lease them to AI developers. The stock closed up 582%. Retail traders poured $5.2 million into it in a single session. William Blair analysts called the $50 million “a drop in the bucket,” which was generous. Nvidia sold out through mid-2026. North American data center vacancy rates had hit historic lows. Fifty million dollars in 2026 AI infrastructure buys you roughly the compute capacity of a well-funded graduate lab, which is to say it buys you very little of anything except a press release and a stock pump.
The company also, in the same filing, asked shareholders to vote on May 18 to remove from the corporate charter all references to environmental conservation as a public benefit. Allbirds had been a certified B Corp since its second year of existence, with the environmental mission written into its Delaware charter as a legal obligation. The new GPU data center business, as the filing candidly acknowledged, would require operating “in the best interests of stockholders, without balancing the best interests of stockholders against the public benefit of environmental conservation.” The shoe that promised to reverse climate change sold itself for $39 million and used the proceeds to buy electricity-hungry server racks, legally excising its conscience in a shareholder vote.
For the early investors who backed Allbirds as proof that climate-conscious retail could scale, the spectacle must have carried a particular quality of grief. For the rest of us, it reads as a monument to what happens when a brand built entirely on moral performance runs out of performance and has to account for what’s underneath.
What’s underneath is the Watson trade. Crypto had blockchain. AI has the word “infrastructure.” The dot-com era required at minimum a functional website, a domain name, the labor of a web developer. The crypto era required a white paper. The AI era requires a press release and a verb. Seek to acquire. You do not need the GPUs. You need the intention of the GPUs. You need the market’s willingness to pay for the proximity to a noun that is currently making other people rich, and you need to execute the paperwork before anyone asks to see the servers. The scam has achieved the efficiency of pure language. Watson, wherever he is, must be admiring the craftsmanship.
While NewBird AI was busy seeking its compute, the cities and suburbs where actual data centers were being built were producing a different kind of news. In Joliet, Illinois, a company proposed a 795-acre facility that at full operation would consume 1.8 gigawatts of power, nearly the entire generation capacity of the Hoover Dam. Hundreds of residents packed the city council chambers. Someone assembled 5,000 petition signatures. The council approved it anyway.
Illinois electricity rates had risen between 47% and 94% since 2021, driven in large part by data center demand that in some areas produced a 595% increase in certain capacity costs, totaling $1.7 billion that utilities passed to residential customers. The Illinois Power Agency projected capacity shortfalls by 2029.
Governor Pritzker proposed a two-year pause on new data center tax incentives. The Illinois POWER Act, which would have required data centers to cover their own energy and water costs rather than transferring them to ratepayers, sat in committee. A poll found 75% of Illinois voters supported it once they understood the details. The bill remains in committee.
In Indianapolis, the company Metrobloks proposed a data center in the Martindale Brightwood neighborhood. Residents opposed it for months. The Metropolitan Development Commission approved it on April 1. Five days later, at 12:45 a.m., City-County Councilor Ron Gibson, a Democrat who had backed the project over the objections of his own constituents, was woken by gunfire. Thirteen rounds hit the front of his home. His 8-year-old son was inside. A note on the doorstep read “No Data Centers.” Gibson told reporters the project was a “done deal” and that violence would not deter him. The FBI assisted with the investigation, suddenly doing what it is supposed to do. Metrobloks issued a statement saying it was “shocked and deeply saddened.”
In Liberty, Missouri, the same Metrobloks announced a $1.4 billion data center project on 568,800 square feet across three buildings, receiving a 25-year tax incentive package. Missouri Governor Mike Kehoe announced the deal with visible pride. It would bring, he said, 30 jobs. That’s not a joke. He really said that. Thirty. A $1.4 billion facility, a 25-year tax abatement exceeding $200 million, and the community would receive $49 million back across that quarter century distributed among schools, libraries, and fire departments.
Missouri was giving up more than $200 million in tax revenue to gain $49 million in payments and 30 permanent employees. The average Walmart, which pays property taxes and doesn’t require a 138-kilovolt substation adjacent to the loading dock, employs 300 to 500 people. The governor called it “a powerful example of momentum.”
The people whose electric bills run $814 a month, who are choosing between paying utilities and buying food, who watch their school districts lose property tax revenue to facilities that employ fewer people than a mid-size restaurant, these people are the operational reality behind every press release that uses the phrase “AI compute infrastructure.” They are the externalized cost of the trade.
When NewBird AI seeks to acquire GPUs, and when the market rewards that seeking with a 582% stock pop, someone in Joliet or Indianapolis or Liberty is absorbing the price difference between what AI infrastructure costs to build and what its developers pay for it, which is frequently nothing, because the tax incentives and ratepayer cost transfers make the math work for everyone except the ratepayer.
Into this environment Sam Altman published a blog post. He had occasion to do so because a 20-year-old named Daniel Moreno-Gama had traveled from Texas to San Francisco, thrown an incendiary device at Altman’s North Beach home at 4 a.m., set the gate on fire, walked three miles to OpenAI’s headquarters, and attacked the glass doors with a chair while threatening to burn the building down. Police found him carrying additional incendiary devices, a jug of kerosene, and a document about humanity’s impending extinction at the hands of AI, alongside a list of other executives’ home addresses. He faces attempted murder charges and potential domestic terrorism designation. Again: suddenly the justice system works.
Altman opened his response with a photograph of his child and husband. He wrote that he had “underestimated the power of words and narratives.” He called for de-escalation. He compared the desire to concentrate AGI power to Sauron’s ring from Lord of the Rings, the ultimate corrupting artifact, and proposed that the solution was to democratize AI so no single entity could hold such power. He said this while his company had just closed a $122 billion funding round at an $852 billion valuation, led by SoftBank at $30 billion, Amazon at $50 billion, and Nvidia at $30 billion, the same Nvidia whose chips OpenAI uses to generate the revenue that flows back to its investors in a loop that analysts had spent months describing as circular, a self-reinforcing deal structure in which Nvidia invests in OpenAI, OpenAI buys Nvidia chips, both parties book the transactions as revenue, and the whole apparatus inflates in value on the assumption that someone outside the loop will eventually pay for it.
OpenAI reported $13.1 billion in annual revenue in 2025 and remained unprofitable. The most powerful AI models, the ones that will “democratize” access to AGI and ensure no Sauron can hold the ring, sit behind a subscription paywall. The company spent $3 million on lobbyists in 2025 to ensure that meaningful regulation didn’t interfere with its ability to keep them there.
Altman closed by asking for de-escalation of rhetoric. He had spent the entire post comparing his own technology to the One Ring, which Tolkien described as an artifact so corrupting that even its creator was destroyed by it, and then expressed surprise that the rhetoric had escalated. The narcissism required to write that post, to genuinely believe that the problem is the words people are using about you rather than the $814 electric bills and the 30 jobs for a $1.4 billion subsidy and the 13 bullet holes in a councilman’s door, is its own kind of artifact. It cannot be manufactured. It has to be grown over years of being told that building abundance for people is a moral obligation, that you are the protagonist of a civilizational story, that the ring must be democratized by the man currently holding it.
The plumber in Ohio who bought BIRD at $17 on a Wednesday watched it collapse within days. He bought a verb. He paid $17 a share for a company’s stated intention to one day potentially seek the acquisition of compute hardware, from a manufacturer that was sold out, using money from an investor it couldn’t name. The stock pumped because “AI” appeared in the company name and the market, which had watched Nvidia become a $5 trillion company and OpenAI reach an $852 billion valuation on $13.1 billion in unprofitable revenue, concluded that proximity to the word was worth something. The plumber is now holding the bag that Goldman Sachs, William Blair, and every analyst who wrote the word “seek” in a research note and moved on handed to him.
Russell Crowe beat Eric Watson in a London hotel bathroom in 2002 and went back to making movies. Watson went back to selling lingerie, then iced tea, then blockchain, and the SEC eventually caught up with him. The cascade from Long Island Iced Tea to Long Blockchain to the SEC complaint to the Nasdaq delisting took four years. The cascade from Allbirds to NewBird AI is already underway. The difference between Watson’s trade and the current one is not moral. Watson needed a factory and a press release. NewBird AI needed only the press release. The scam shed its last physical constraint and achieved the purity of pure narrative. A word. A ticker. A 582% single-session gain. Thirteen rounds fired at a front door in Indianapolis. An $814 electric bill in a house where the heat still works because the family hasn’t missed a payment yet.
The gate is already on fire. Russell, your services are required.
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As someone with bad feet who has been wearing Allbirds for years all I can say is the last two pair I ordered were shite. Total rip-off. So, none of this comes as a surprise.
Another excellent piece, you really get to the heart of these matters.