Picture this: It’s Wednesday morning on Paradigm’s editorial team Zoom call — coffee mugs, bad lighting and a Brady Bunch gallery of faces discussing markets, politics and where this cycle goes next.

Then Paradigm’s trading pro, Enrique Abeyta, tosses out to the team: “Fear is the strongest human emotion.”

Most of us nod.

“OK, so what scares you most about the stock market and the economy right now?” Enrique asks.

My answer comes faster than I expected: AI.

Look at what’s happening in the market so far in 2026. Depending on the week, we’ve already seen about a trillion dollars wiped from Big Tech valuations during AI selloffs this year.

But Big Tech keeps shoveling hundreds of billions of dollars into data centers, chips and AI infrastructure.

Some analysts now peg AI-related capital spending by the major “hyperscalers” — Amazon, Alphabet, Meta and Microsoft — at roughly 1% of U.S. GDP, potentially higher if current projections hold.

That’s bubble territory in terms of sheer capital intensity, even if the story ends well.

Meanwhile, investors are getting whiplash. Stocks tethered to the AI narrative soar on announcements of bigger spending plans, then sell off when reality intrudes: payoffs are years away.

The fear for me isn’t that AI is a fad; it’s that we’re building a gold-plated railroad before we know the train’s destination

But the market stuff isn’t what really keeps me awake at night.

I have kids. I’m looking 10–15 years out — well past the next earnings season, the next election cycle — wondering what kind of careers will be available to them.

Which brings me to Elon Musk.

Your Rundown for Friday, February 20, 2026...

Elon Musk: How AI Saves America

In a recent interview with podcaster Dwarkesh Patel, Musk laid out what might be the most consequential argument in favor of AI right now.

It goes something like this: AI isn’t just a technology story. It’s a lifeline for a country drowning in debt.

“Without artificial intelligence and robotics, we’re basically dead because the public debt is piling up at an incredible rate,” Musk says.

The numbers are staggering. The U.S. national debt is pushing toward $38 trillion, and annual interest payments alone now approach — or even exceed — the defense budget.

Musk argues the only way out of a debt spiral this severe — short of default or hyperinflation — is to grow our way out of it via massive, unprecedented economic growth.

And Musk believes the only engine powerful enough to generate that kind of growth, fast enough to matter, is AI and robotics.

Machines that don’t take lunch breaks, work around the clock and can do the jobs of tens of millions of people with a fraction of the overhead.

“We will go 1,000% bankrupt as a country and fail [without] artificial intelligence and robots,” he reiterates. “We just need enough time to build AI and robots so we don’t go bankrupt before then.”

That’s Musk’s optimistic read on AI — not just that it will mint new billionaires or write better code, but that it might be one of the few forces capable of generating enough economic output to keep America solvent.

Here’s the issue — and it’s a genuinely thorny one. Musk also warns (hopes?) that the same AI-driven productivity boom that rescues the debt could trigger serious deflation.

When machines produce goods and services faster than the money supply can expand, prices fall.

Sounds great at the grocery store. Less great on a balance sheet. Deflation makes every dollar worth more — which sounds like a win, until you realize that means every dollar you owe is worth more too.

Meaning, AI might simultaneously be the cure and a complication of the debt disease. That tension is real, and no one — not Musk, not the Fed, not your favorite economist on X — has fully figured out how it resolves.

So I’ll ask you the same question Enrique asked us: When you look at the markets and the economy right now, what worries you most? What scenario keeps you up at night, or what opportunity do you think the crowd is missing entirely?

Drop your thoughts here. We read the same headlines, but we don’t all see the same risks — and that gap is worth exploring.

Market Rundown for Friday, February 20, 2026

S&P 500 futures are down 0.28% to 6,861.89.

Oil is down 0.36% to $66.26 for a barrel of WTI.

Gold is down to $5,046.30 per ounce.

And Bitcoin is up 0.41% to $67,232.14.