More bubbly than a warm bottle of lambrusco on Friday evening:

Nvidia has taken on an outsized importance in US stock markets, after a blistering rally pushed its shares up about 160 per cent in the year to date, giving it a market capitalisation of $3tn. Its growth has driven more than a quarter of the year-to-date gains on the S&P 500.

Asked whether he felt the weight of those expectations, Nvidia chief executive Jensen Huang told the Financial Times: “Not until you brought it up just a second ago. We can only do our job. We can only do what we can do.”

He added: “Everybody’s racing to the future . . . It is our responsibility to help the world get there.”

This banality from the man who, just a few months back, was signing titties like he was the bassist from some indie-sleaze also-ran band of the mid-Noughties.

I watched Cosmopolis last night—hence the rather zeitgeisty screengrab—and while I guess it’s been possible to accuse it of being a very “now” film since the day of its release, nonetheless it feels very contemporary, very of the moment.

I mean, just look at Huang, running the same combination of Visionary Seer cos-play and through-the-motions decadence as Pattinson’s protagonist, but this time as farce rather than as tragedy.

On some level, I think they all know the game’s up, and have reached the stage of escalating self-sabotage— of seeing exactly what sort of poke it will take to burst their own bubble.

---

Well, whatever it was that hit me at the weekend seems mostly to be gone now. In one respect, the timing is almost unimaginably cruel, having basically blocked me from attending and enjoying what was basically going to be the business-socialising event of the year—by which I mean that, for me, it was going to be the one in-person business-socialising event that I went at full blast, so as to maximise the value (ugh) and thereby minimise the need to do more of the same at other times of the year. Well, selah; I guess the universe has other plans for me in that regard.

The silver lining, though, is that in its brevity, it hasn’t actually cost me any more work bandwidth than attending The Conference would have cost me. Or, more simply: I’m no more behind on my schedule than I was on Sunday afternoon.

I’ll take that win.