“Irrational exuberance” was a phrase coined by Alan Greenspan, former chairman of the Federal Reserve, to describe a market driven by enthusiasm rather than fundamental analysis. The term can describe any asset, whether a stock or a piece of property, whose true value is obscured by wishful thinking and bullish sentiment, which prices the asset much higher than it might actually be worth.
If you noticed the headline stock of this piece, you can probably guess where this is going. Oklo (NYSE: OKLO), a nuclear start-up whose backing by Sam Altman and extremely stylish reactor design fueled a feverish market rally in 2025, has now tanked over 40% in 2026.
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In numbers: If you had invested $10,000 at Oklo’s peak price in mid-October 2025, your investment would be worth about $2,840 right now.
But let’s leave that in the past, and turn our attention to the future. In the midst of this brutal sell-off, is the company’s future still worth investing in? Or has Oklo stock already seen its best days?
Oklo was always a risky idea. Not only because its industry is heavily regulated — no one wants to repeat Chernobyl — but because its principal idea has never been implemented at the commercial scale to which Oklo aspires.
That “principal idea” is, of course, a micro nuclear reactor. Oklo’s version — the Aurora powerhouse — is designed to be built in a factory and deployed wherever on-site power generation is needed. It sounds good on paper, especially with demands growing for more and more power, but the reality of it hasn’t been tested.
In simple terms, investors don’t know how profitable this idea is. We don’t know if revenue generated from it will meaningfully surpass operating costs. We don’t even know how many customers Oklo will manage to sign, or if it has what it takes to command a large portion of the utility market. These unknowns are on top of the regulatory risks — most importantly, getting a commercial license — which have prevented it from generating revenue today.
Despite these unknowns, Oklo carries an $8 billion market cap. That’s over double the valuation of Oklo’s competitor, NuScale Power (NYSE: SMR), which actually has a small reactor design approved by the Nuclear Regulatory Committee (NRC). The fact that NuScale carries a $3 billion market cap despite leading Oklo in the regulatory race speaks volumes about the kind of hype that’s been billowing Oklo’s sails since going public in 2024.
