At SALT London, investors debated AI, jobs and Elon Musk

The second day of the alternative-investments conference, hosted by Anthony Scaramucci’s SkyBridge Capital at the Chancery Rosewood hotel in Mayfair, featured panels on subjects including crypto regulation, AI safety, sports investing and portfolio resilience. Three themes stood out: the AI bubble debate, the future of work and Musk’s vision of technological abundance.

Jack Selby, a managing director at Thiel Capital and managing partner of Copper Sky Capital, said the AI boom could lose momentum before the end of the year. He described the industry as “outrageously” capital-intensive and said executives had used “outrageous, fanciful storytelling” to raise funds. Asked when the market’s “euphoric” momentum might end, Selby said he “would take the under before the end of this year.”

Selby also questioned why Anthropic was seeking money from public markets. The company’s amended S-1 filing this week showed $2.4 billion in interest income during the first nine months of the year, against an operating loss of about $1.3 billion. It had roughly $96 billion in cash and cash equivalents at the end of September. Selby called Anthropic “basically a bank” and asked why it was rushing to go public. He also said Democrats reclaiming control of the House and Senate in this week’s midterm elections would be a headwind for defense-technology firms such as Anduril, though he described a slowdown as a way to cool what he called a very hot sector.

Curation Capital founder and executive chairman Nick Finegold argued that AI and robotics could generate new work even as some “commoditized jobs” disappear. He said a potential merger of SpaceX and Tesla could precede Musk promoting what Finegold called “the biggest job creation program in the history of the world.” Finegold added that financial services could see hundreds of thousands of new jobs for people who learn to use emerging tools. He also said falling content-production costs could make a $50,000 budget equivalent to $10 million for visual storytelling. His firm’s Curation Connect platform uses AI video tools to turn regulatory disclosures into films and explainers.

Stephanie Link, chief investment strategist at Hightower Advisors, said demand for data centers, power and upgrades to the US electrical grid would continue as AI use expands. She argued that cybersecurity could become “bigger than AI” because of the security challenges AI creates. Link also cited Amazon CEO Andy Jassy’s April shareholder letter, which said the company had more than 1 million robots in its fulfillment centers. She estimated active robots would need to increase around 30-fold, to more than 150 million, by 2035 to meet demand. Link said robotics was even earlier in its development than AI or cybersecurity.