On March 10, 2000, the NASDAQ Composite touched 5,048.62 in intraday trading — the highest point the index had ever seen, and the summit of a delirium that had convinced the world the future could be bought on credit and never have to pay.
The story in images
The crash in images
The delirium
The 1990s had taught investors a seductive lesson: the internet changed everything, and whoever arrived early would own the century. Money poured into companies with no revenue, no profit, and sometimes no product — only a “.com” suffix and a story. New listings doubled on their first day of trading as a matter of routine; startups hired thousands before selling anything; Pets.com put a sock puppet on television while it lost money on every bag of dog food it shipped, and Webvan burned a fortune building grocery-delivery warehouses for demand that never arrived.
The Federal Reserve saw the fever and tried to cool it, raising interest rates through 1999 and 2000. But manias do not read minutes. By early 2000 the NASDAQ had become less a stock market than a collective hallucination — and March 10, 2000 was the day the hallucination priced itself: 5,048.62, intraday, the top of the world.
The reckoning
The crash ran from 2000 to 2002, and it was merciless in slow motion. The NASDAQ bled month after month; the telecom boom that had laid oceans of fiber-optic cable collapsed under its own debt, taking the carriers down with it. In December 2001, Enron — the energy giant that had been the era’s golden child — fell in the age’s great accounting scandal, its books revealed as fiction. Then, in July 2002, the telecom titan WorldCom filed for bankruptcy.
When the bleeding finally stopped in October 2002, the NASDAQ stood at around 1,114 — a fall of nearly four-fifths from the peak of March 10, 2000. Pets.com and Webvan were already punchlines. The future had been repriced, brutally.
The legacy
The crash did not kill the internet; it killed the innocence. The mania’s graveyard cleared the field for the companies that had real businesses underneath the hype, and the bust wrote the rules the technology world still lives by: revenue matters, unit economics matter, and no story, however beautiful, survives contact with the cash-flow statement. The dot-com crash was the internet’s tuition fee for adulthood — paid in full between March 10, 2000 and October 2002.