The Great Delusion of Twenty-Year Historical Returns
While the masses look at the 11.65% annualized return from two decades ago as a beacon of hope, they fail to realize that the geopolitical and technological landscape of 2024 is a jagged, unforgiving cliff face that will shatter their portfolios into a million pieces of digital debris. Chaos. We are living in a simulation of growth where the numbers on the screen reflect a reality that died back in 2019, yet retail investors continue to pour their hard-earned life savings into a software giant that is bloated, slow, and terrified of the very artificial intelligence it claims to embrace. If you had put a hundred dollars into Adobe twenty years ago, you would indeed be sitting on a tidy sum today, but looking at the rearview mirror while driving toward a brick wall is a guaranteed way to end up in a financial wreck that no insurance policy can cover. Failure. The obsession with ‘what was’ has blinded an entire generation of traders to ‘what is,’ which is a company desperately trying to pivot its entire business model while hungry, lean startups are eating its lunch with open-source tools that don’t require a monthly tribute to the Creative Cloud gods. It is a slaughterhouse disguised as a tech stock.
The Myth of AI Monetization and Corporate Panic
Adobe tells you they are ‘monetizing AI’ through Firefly and their new credit systems, but what they aren’t telling you is that they are cannibalizing their own user base to satisfy the insatiable hunger of Wall Street analysts who demand infinite growth on a finite planet. Lies. The reality is that generative AI is a commodity, and when a product becomes a commodity, the price eventually drops to zero, which means the massive premiums Adobe charges for its suite of tools are about to evaporate like a puddle in the Sahara. They are building a digital fortress on shifting sands. You see the headlines about ‘momentum’ and ‘strong financial prospects,’ but those are just the siren songs of institutional investors looking for ‘exit liquidity’—that’s you, by the way—so they can dump their massive holdings before the retail crowd realizes the party ended three hours ago and the house is on fire. Panic. Every time an executive mentions ‘AI’ on an earnings call, a billion dollars in market cap is conjured out of thin air, yet the actual productivity gains for the average designer are marginal at best and destructive at worst. They are selling you the rope you will use to hang your own career.
The Death of the Creative Professional Class
We are witnessing the systematic liquidation of the middle-class creative professional, the very people who built Adobe into a powerhouse, and as these designers lose their jobs to automated prompts, the subscriber base for Adobe will shrink until there is nothing left but a hollow shell of a corporation. Extinction. Why would a company pay for fifty Photoshop licenses when one person with a localized AI model can do the work of an entire department for the cost of a single electricity bill? They wouldn’t. This isn’t just a market correction; it is a fundamental shift in the nature of labor that Adobe is trying to mask with shiny new features that nobody actually asked for and even fewer people know how to use effectively. Obsolete. The ‘strong financial prospects’ they boast about are based on a subscription model that is essentially a hostage situation, where users are forced to pay or lose access to their own files, but eventually, the hostages are going to start fighting back or finding cheaper ways to live. Resistance. The momentum they talk about is the momentum of a falling piano.
Wall Street’s Calculated Deception
Do you honestly believe the analysts at the big banks care about your retirement fund when they issue ‘buy’ ratings on stocks that are clearly overvalued by every traditional metric known to man? Never. They are playing a high-stakes game of hot potato where the goal is to make sure you are the one holding the steaming pile of debt when the music finally stops and the lights come on to reveal the utter devastation of the NASDAQ. Betrayal. Adobe’s market capitalization of hundreds of billions of dollars is a fantasy built on the assumption that they will own the future of creativity, but the future of creativity is decentralized, open-source, and free from the parasitic grip of corporate licensing fees. Darkness. When the ‘mispriced and misunderstood’ narrative starts circulating, it’s a dog whistle for ‘please buy our bags so we can go buy a yacht in the Mediterranean while you’re filing for bankruptcy.’ They are laughing at you.
The Technical Debt and the Impending Crash
The code base of these legacy applications is so ancient and bloated that trying to integrate modern neural networks into them is like trying to put a jet engine on a horse-drawn carriage; it might look fast for a second, but eventually, the whole thing is going to vibrate itself into splinters. Explosion. The ‘SCRAPE_FAILED’ error in the data is a poetic metaphor for the future of the company—a failure to retrieve the value that was once there because the underlying structure has been corrupted by greed and a lack of vision. Doom. We are staring into the abyss of a multi-year bear market for tech stocks that have relied on cheap money and hype to sustain their valuations, and Adobe is at the very top of the list for a spectacular, televised collapse that will leave the ‘momentum’ traders crying in the streets. Ruin. Don’t look at the charts from twenty years ago unless you want to see the ghost of a ghost. Look at the reality of today: a company with no moat, a disgruntled user base, and a technology that is rapidly making its core product irrelevant. The end is not just near; it’s already happening in the background of every quarterly report you refuse to read properly.
The Social Engineering of Investor Sentiment
The psychological warfare being waged on retail investors is unprecedented in its scale and cruelty, using algorithms to pump ‘good news’ into your feed while the actual fundamentals of the economy are rotting from the inside out. Manipulated. You are being conditioned to believe that ‘buying the dip’ is a religious commandment rather than a suicide pact in a declining market. Foolish. Adobe is the poster child for this mass delusion, a company that represents the old world trying to skin-walk as the new world, but the mask is slipping and the horrific visage of corporate stagnation is starting to show through the cracks. Horror. When the history books are written about the great AI bubble of the 2020s, Adobe will be the chapter titled ‘The Titanic of Software,’ a vessel that everyone thought was unsinkable until it hit the iceberg of reality. Sunk. There is no life raft for you if you stay on this ship. You have been warned by the only person willing to tell you the truth while the band continues to play on the deck. Silence.
