During Monday’s stock market swoon, Nvidia, the artificial intelligence giant, lost nearly $600 billion in value, the biggest single-day loss for a public company on record. How could the fortunes of one of our leading companies fall so far so suddenly? While some will seek answers in the promising A.I. start-up coming out of China or the vicissitudes of trade policy, these movements speak to deeper changes in our financial markets that can best be explained, oddly enough, by revisiting ancient mythology.

The image of the ouroboros, a serpent eating its own tail, is a remarkably durable and pervasive motif. Ancient Chinese, Egyptian, European and Latin American civilizations seemed captivated by the image or ones like it, variously symbolizing the cyclic nature of life,66jogo the totality of the universe or fertility. Today, the more resonant lesson comes from the self-cannibalism of the ouroboros, which helps us understand the most significant financial puzzle of our day.

Like the ouroboros, I believe Big Tech is eating itself alive with its component companies throwing more and more cash at investments in one another that are most likely to generate less and less of a return. Monday’s correction shows that our financial markets — and possibly your retirement portfolio — may be starting to reflect an understanding of this dynamic.

Even after Monday’s dip, the disjunction in valuations between Big Tech — sometimes referred to as the Magnificent 7 of Microsoft, Apple, Amazon, Nvidia, Tesla, Meta and Alphabet — and the rest of the stock market remains staggering. The Magnificent 7 still constitute more than 30 percent of the market capitalization of the S&P 500 (up from just under 10 percent a decade ago). When you compare their stock prices with their earnings or sales, the traditional way to measure the valuation of a share, our tech Goliaths trade at ratios that are two to three times those of the Unmagnificent 493.

Disciplinary proceedings against Dr. Wax tested the tenure protections of professors and whether such protections allow them to voice opinions that many might find inappropriate or downright insulting. Many students said that they could not trust Dr. Wax to grade students without bias. But many professors — even those who found her comments profoundly racist — objected to disciplining her on the grounds of academic freedom.

Market watchers have debated whether Big Tech stocks will continue to outperform everyone else or if shares in other companies will catch up as they use artificial intelligence to become more productive. But the myth of the ouroboros suggests yet another possible outcome.

The first step in understanding this analogy is to return to some finance basics. Stock prices don’t always rise because the prospects of companies improve. They also rise when investors judge certain companies to be a safer bet than others and don’t penalize them for taking longer to generate returns for their money.

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