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Every NVIDIA Flagship and Its Launch Price (1999-2026)

27 years of NVIDIA flagship GPUs on one timeline, with launch MSRP in nominal and inflation-adjusted USD. The story: the flagship didn't just get more expensive — the definition of 'flagship' itself was re-engineered three times.

AMD vs Intel: The War Over Your CPU (2011-2024)

Mainstream desktop CPU flagships stayed near four cores and roughly $330 through most of the 2010s. Ryzen broke that shape: first by making eight cores normal, then by pulling twelve and sixteen cores onto the normal desktop socket, while Intel answered with mainstream i9 and hybrid designs.

The Cost to Sequence a Human Genome (2001-2024)

The Human Genome Project cost $2.7 billion and took 13 years. Today a human genome costs a few hundred dollars and a day. Plotted against Moore's Law on one log curve, sequencing didn't just keep pace with computing - it left it behind.

How AI Learned to See - The ImageNet Collapse (2010-2017)

In 2010, the best machine vision got 1 in 4 images wrong. By 2017 it was 1 in 44 - passing the trained human in 2015. Each drop down the curve is a landmark paper, and together they're the proof-of-concept that scaling deep learning works: the bet that powers the modern AI era.

The iPhone Got CHEAPER? Every Flagship Price (2007-2025)

Eighteen years of top-tier iPhones on one timeline, at launch price, in nominal and inflation-adjusted dollars. The twist: tracked as the base flagship and adjusted for inflation, the most expensive iPhone wasn't the newest one - it was the 2018 XS Max, and the flagship has drifted cheaper since. The deliberate foil to the NVIDIA episode, where the flagship really did ~4x.

NVIDIA's $13,250 GPU: A Price Surge, To Scale

NVIDIA's flagship workstation GPU — the 'RTX PRO 6000' tier — just jumped 55% overnight, from $8,565 to $13,250, with no announcement. This is that surge against 16 years of its own lineage: Quadro to RTX A to RTX PRO. Pad height encodes NOMINAL launch MSRP. The story: the price was flat for a decade, even fell once — so 2026 is a memory-shortage shock, not a trend.

Childhood Leukemia: From a Death Sentence to 90% (1962-2024)

In the early 1960s a child with acute lymphoblastic leukemia had about a 1-in-25 chance of living five years. Today it's about 9 in 10. The rise wasn't a single miracle drug - it was Total Therapy and a generation of cooperative clinical trials. The famous names (Gleevec, CAR-T) arrived AFTER the curve had already climbed.

The Metal Tech Can't Quit: Silver, To Scale

In January 2026 silver broke a record that had stood since 1980 - then crashed. Underneath the frenzy, a quieter story: technology, and solar above all, quietly turned silver into an industrial metal, and the world has used more than it mined for five straight years. But the deficit didn't cause the spike - and telling the structural story apart from the speculative one is the whole point.

The Price of a Gigabyte, To Scale

In 1980 one gigabyte of storage cost about $580,000. By 2023 it was a few cents - one of the steepest, longest price collapses in the history of technology, ~7.7 orders of magnitude. Then, for the first time in decades, it reversed: AI data-center demand pulled fab capacity away from consumer storage and prices ticked back up.

The Price of Insulin (1923-2024)

The discoverers sold the insulin patent for $1 'so it would belong to the world.' A century later the list price of a flagship analog had climbed ~13x to almost $300 a vial - until 2022-23 caps and ~70% maker cuts snapped it back near $66. Plotted on one linear curve: the gift, the climb, the hidden rebate gap, and the cap.

NVIDIA: What It Earns vs What It's Worth (1999-2026)

From ~30 days from bankruptcy (1997) to ~$5 trillion (2026). Two lines on one log axis: NVIDIA's revenue (what it earns, SEC filings) and its market cap (what the market thinks it's worth). The gap between them is the AI valuation premium.

Every iPhone You Bought, or the Apple You Didn't — To Scale

Sixteen flagship iPhones over eighteen years cost about $14,800. The same dollars, put into Apple stock on each launch day, would be worth more than $135,000 today — about 9x. The gap between the two lines is the cost of the upgrade habit, priced in the company that sold you the habit. Split-adjusted (not dividend-adjusted) Apple close; conservative (skips the un-priceable 2008-2010 phones, which were the cheapest entry points).

Bitcoin vs. The Power Bill to Mine It (2010-2026)

Two things on one log axis: the price of one Bitcoin (a clean line), and the estimated electricity cost to mine one - drawn as a BAND (cheap industrial power at $0.04/kWh up to retail power at $0.15/kWh), because the cost depends entirely on whose power you assume. When the orange price line dips INTO the band, the retail-power miner was underwater - spending more on electricity than the coin was worth. It almost never crossed the cheap-power floor, which is exactly why the network never died: difficulty adjustment kept resetting the race.

You Picked the Wrong One: Gold vs Bitcoin vs NVIDIA

The same $10,000 in gold, Bitcoin, and NVIDIA — three wildly different outcomes on one timeline.

Every AI Chip Stock Made You Rich — First It Crushed You (To Scale)

How far each major AI-chip stock fell in drawdown before it soared.

Ozempic: From Lizard Venom to $30 Billion (1986-2026)

Semaglutide sales went from near-zero in 2018 to roughly $30 billion a year - one of the fastest revenue ramps in pharma history. But the science behind the 'overnight miracle' is ~30 years old, and starts with a peptide isolated from Gila monster venom in 1992. Plotted to scale: decades of quiet biology on the left, the money spike on the right, and the US-vs-world price gap as the twist.

Moore's Law, Backwards: Why a New Drug Keeps Getting Harder (To Scale)

Eroom's Law — the cost to develop a new drug has risen ~80× since 1950, the inverse of Moore's Law.

Why Solar Got 500× Cheaper — On a Schedule (To Scale)

Swanson's Law: solar module prices fell ~500× as cumulative capacity grew — a learning curve to scale.

Why It Costs $400 Million to Train One AI (To Scale)

The training-compute cost of frontier AI models, from AlexNet (2012) to today's $400M runs.

The Day Crossing the Atlantic Got Slower (To Scale)

Transatlantic crossing times across four eras — and the day, after Concorde, that the Atlantic got slower.

NVIDIA Went Up 12×. Did It Get More Expensive?

NVIDIA's share price vs. its earnings per share, 2019-2026, to scale. The vertical gap between the two lines is the price-to-earnings ratio. The stock rose ~12x over the AI boom while its P/E FELL from ~240 to ~31 — because earnings grew even faster.

The 1936 Law Behind Cheap Everything (and the One Thing It Couldn't Fix)

Wright's Law across solar, batteries, storage, sequencing and drugs — the 1936 rule behind cheap everything.

AI Keeps Getting Cheaper — So Why Is NVIDIA Exploding?

Why cheaper AI compute drives more demand, not less (Jevons paradox) — and NVIDIA's data-center surge.

The Same Prompt, Every AI Image Model (2022 → 2026)

The same prompt through every major text-to-image model, 2021 → 2026 — the pace of generative-image progress.

How Much Silver Buys One Ounce of Gold? (5,000 Years, To Scale)

The gold-to-silver ratio, to scale: how many ounces of silver buy one ounce of gold — near 15-to-1 by law for centuries, floating free after 1873, down near 32 in 2011 and a record ~126 in the March 2020 panic.

$1,000 in Gold vs. Stocks Since 1971 — Who Actually Won? (To Scale)

$1,000 in gold vs. $1,000 in the S&P 500 from the day the dollar left gold, to scale: the winner flips four times depending on when you start the clock — and dividends, not prices, decide the race.

The "Reusable" Rocket That Cost the Most to Reach Orbit

Launch price to low-Earth orbit, to scale ($/kg, constant 2021$): the Space Shuttle cost the most, the plateau barely moved for ~40 years, then reusable Falcons broke the curve — with Starship's target still lower.

How the Trillion-Dollar Club Filled Up

Ten companies crossed a $1 trillion market cap in about eight years — Apple's 42-year climb, Aramco's and SpaceX's straight-inside debuts, NVIDIA's run to five trillion — drawn to scale, asterisks included.

You Own 500 Stocks. 7 Are a Third of Them.

Seven stocks — Apple, Microsoft, Nvidia, Amazon, Alphabet, Meta and Tesla — are now about a third of the S&P 500, the most top-heavy the US market has been since 1932: how it happened, and the honest two-sided truth underneath it.

AI Is About to Use More Power Than Japan

Global data-centre electricity, to scale: about 415 TWh in 2024 (more than the whole UK), and the IEA projects roughly 945 TWh by 2030 — about as much power as all of Japan uses today — with honest error bars on the forecast.

Gold's "Record High" Is a 45-Year-Old Lie (To Scale)

Gold's real record was set in January 1980 — worth roughly $2,500–3,600 in today's money — and no nominal "record high" beat it in inflation-adjusted terms for about 45 years, until 2024–25. A dollar story, not a gold story.

The Dollar Has Lost 97% of Its Value Since 1913 (To Scale)

A 1913 dollar is worth about 3 cents today by CPI — and about half a cent measured in gold, the money the dollar used to legally be: the dollar's purchasing power drawn to scale from the Fed's founding to 2026.

Is the World Running Out of Silver?

Silver supply vs demand, to scale: five straight deficit years (record −238 Moz in 2022) driven by solar and EVs, why byproduct mining means supply can't chase demand — and why a deficit is still not a shortage.

Bitcoin, Priced in Gold (Not Dollars) — To Scale

How many ounces of gold one Bitcoin buys, 2010-2026, on a log axis spanning six orders of magnitude: from a sliver of a gram to a 40-ounce peak in December 2024 — and a ~64% fall in gold terms that the dollar chart hid.

All the Gold Ever Mined Fits in One Cube

Every ounce of gold humanity has mined in 5,000 years (~220,000 tonnes) fits in a single cube about 22 metres on a side — roughly 3-4 Olympic pools — and that ~60-year stock-to-flow is the scarcity property Bitcoin was built to copy.

Chips Got Cheaper. The Factories Got Insane.

Moore's Law vs Rock's Law, to scale: the cost of a transistor fell ~10,000,000x while the leading-edge chip fab climbed from ~$14M (1966) past $20B — the chips fall BECAUSE the factory rose.

A 1985 Supercomputer Fits in Your Pocket

Dollars per billion calculations a second, 1961 to today, to scale: from ~$18B of hardware to roughly one cent — computing got more than a trillion times cheaper, and the GPU step is what made the AI boom economically possible.

The Internet Used to Cost $1,200 a Megabit

Wholesale IP-transit price in dollars per megabit per second, 1998-2025, on a log axis: from ~$1,200 a month to about a nickel — a ~24,000x collapse that made "just stream it" possible.

NVIDIA vs Walmart: Profit Per Employee Isn't Close

NVIDIA's ~36,000 employees each generated about $2M in profit last year. Profit per employee vs Meta, Apple, Microsoft, Amazon, and Walmart on one honest linear scale — plus the fabless catch: the ~84,000 TSMC workers who actually build the chips aren't on the payroll.

1TB Used to Fill a Building

The physical size of one terabyte, 1956 to 2019, drawn to scale: from ~267,000 IBM RAMAC cabinets (a building) to one 3.5-inch drive in your palm (2007) to a fingernail-sized microSD (2019) — a roughly three-trillion-fold physical collapse, and the wall it's now hitting.

The Toyota Everyone Thinks Beat Stocks

A $39,900 1994 Supra Turbo vs the same money in the S&P 500 with dividends reinvested: real, condition-labelled public-sale receipts (2019–2026) against a total-return line that reaches nearly $600,000 by the 2022 annual-average endpoint — about 15x. No invented car-price curve.

The $800 Xbox Isn't Even the Record

U.S. console launch prices converted to 2026 dollars: the $800 Xbox Series X isn't the record — Panasonic's 1993 3DO FZ-1 works out to about $1,600, with the PS3, Neo Geo Gold, the cheap-console cluster, and 2026's three post-launch price hikes on the same honest scale.

The College Price Everyone Gets Wrong

The Camera That Killed Itself

Digital camera shipments, drawn to scale: up to the 2008 summit of 110 million point-and-shoots in one year, then a ~98% collapse — driven by the same cheap CMOS sensors that made cameras a mass market and then put one in every phone.

Short — A Pocket Calculator Went From $395 to $8 in Three Years

In 1972 the HP-35 pocket calculator cost $395; by 1975 four-function calculators ran about $8. The chip crash that bankrupted Bowmar and retired the slide rule, in one vertical short. Standalone short, no parent episode.

Short — The First Quartz Watch Cost as Much as a New Toyota

Christmas Day 1969: the Seiko Astron goes on sale at ¥450,000 — about the price of a new Toyota Corolla. Within a decade a $10 watch beats it, Switzerland loses two-thirds of its watch industry, and the rescue is a 51-part plastic Swatch. Standalone vertical short.