Could the P/E Ratio of Companies Be Correct?

First, I am not a financial advisor, stock broker, economist, I am human (mostly).

Second, P/E is the price to earnings ratio a company is sometimes valued at stock wise.

Third, I am writing this on 8/20/2026 10:03am EST (Manhattan) opinion subject to change, context is important.

Here is where the above is coming from.

About a week ago I was telling my wife how much AI (Claude) as we know it today is still behind when it comes to basic date / time, reasoning (against an 18 year history of our company), and tone (slop, filler words versus me talk).

Yesterday, that changed. I prompted Claude to look through HubSpot for contacts that I had engaged with over the past nine months and alongside all the transcripts since deduce which one we should re-engage as a company with messaging that should resonate with the contact.

Done!

The query found 47, paired with objections of past conversations alongside current customers, launches, transcripts and drafted 47 1:1 messages using my style (short, candid, actionable), then Claude fired them off - sent. I reviewed each one, yes all 47 (I know who these people are, it’s what I do very well, so the messaging was on point). That activity might have taken an afternoon or even an hour or two - done in a matter of minutes.

I was in disbelief. Then I remembered this piece I wrote back in November 2024: When the Wows Increase Take Advantage of the Moment.

I was and am still frozen. What does this mean for humanity? Sales BDRs? Admin office staff?

Here’s what happened right before that Wow, which was even more revealing.

I had a call with a future prospect and recorded it (not video, transcript only). In the call I must have said I will check with engineering to understand a particular integration. Post call I took the raw transcript and uploaded to Claude at the prospect’s record. Within a few seconds, Claude created an Asana ticket for engineering, drafted the follow up response to prospect, pinged engineering in slack to mention the Asana post, while I was still going through and drafting an actual ticket myself. Done!

I kept thinking no way. Like I am now.

Till almost midnight or so (when my usage credits ran out) I kept running queries who, what, why, when, how related to the market we are in, the opportunity in front of us, projections with this new found scale etc.

Yet, all I could really think about was what happens to the admins in corporate America? In reality it goes back to the first revelations when ChatGPT was released, ‘There will be a company with a billion dollars with one employee.’ As of today, I am surprised if it doesn’t happen before year end 2026, not even four months from now.

So you might be wondering, how is this related to P/E Ratios?

If you connected the dots already, you can stop reading here.

Simply put, if a company can produce the same of greater revenue with less labor, it becomes more profitable, all things being equal.

Here are the top five stocks with the highest P/E from the S&P 500:

Tesla (TSLA) ~371x

Palantir (PLTR) ~147x

Broadcom (AVGO) ~79x

Walmart (WMT) ~46x

Nvidia (NVDA) ~41x

Do you get it? For Palantir that means investors are paying $147 for every $1 dollar earned. A very high premium for a future bet of the company making that difference up.

My thought is that for a company to actually hit these high expectations, they know labor will be cut.

Not innovation.

Right now there are several competing narratives. AI will doom us all to AI will create so much abundance that prices of everything will fall.

In either scenario is a house really worth $1 million today in most desired areas? What is a dollar actually worth? Adjusted for inflation as of today it’s worth 50 cents against the dollar in 1996. Yet the cost of labor keeps going up so eggs benedict in Seattle is almost $30, for now. Is there a time when that same eggs benedict will be $8?

Knowing any of this, where do you put money away? Stocks, traditional savings, real estate, art, gold, silver?

My take, all of it. Ratios determined by you.

Final final, if Claude automates the process so well the result is not only time back but ultimately revenue.

God help us all.

-MM