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“The impact seems to be a combination of the 2008 financial meltdown combined with the dot-com bubble busting,” he said.

The S&P 500 has recovered from previous downturns, including after the Great Depression, the dot-com bust and COVID, The Associated Press reported.

The founders of these micronations — in the 2000s quite a few dot-com tycoons — were usually men of means, steeped in Ayn Rand and Thomas Hobbes.

But many pensions are seriously underfunded, a problem that emerged in the 2000s when, following years of expanded benefits, the dot-com bust and then the Great Recession hammered the value of pension assets.

Still, as he told the graduates at UMass Dartmouth, he has never forgotten the experience of losing everything, when the first company he built went bankrupt in the dot-com crash more than 20 years ago.