It's not what they "only" care about, when it comes to investment; it's what they can make money on. Or, rather, what their investment advisers or fund managers think money can be made on, and all the more so if younger investors are shut out.

In software, anyone younger than their mid-30s is late (too young to invest in Apple when it was at lows, Facebook IPO, etc.). AI is just the latest rolling of the software hype trade, with cloud and mobile and crypto and SaaS and more before it. And investors don't have to understand marijuana to know that being at the ground floor of an industry that's high-demand, low-supply-by-regulatory-capture would be incresibly lucrative; they piled into ownership (not stock, which was a pump-and-dump for suckers) while indie growers were shut out.

But the crux of the issue isn't simply that they like these investments. It's that they'll cannibalize everything else to prop up their chosen champions. Ironically, the mass tech layoffs of the past couple years are an example, with hundreds of thousands of workers sacrificed to keep companies not just solvent, but "growing" on paper. The post-COVID "boom" that funded their positions was misallocated capital that could have gone towards jobs that were actually sustainable; those people would still be gainfully employed, rather than unemployed or underemployed as they are now.