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So, you want to talk about quantum computing stocks. Specifically, Rigetti Computing, the stock that just strapped itself to a rocket and blasted up 5,900% in a year. Everyone on X is a genius, every analyst is a visionary, and every retail investor with a Robinhood account is about to buy a yacht.
Give me a break.
I’ve seen this movie before. We all have. The dot-com bubble, the crypto boom, the AI gold rush—it’s always the same story. A legitimately cool, futuristic technology emerges, and Wall Street immediately turns it into a casino where the house always wins. Right now, Rigetti is the hottest table in town, with shares hitting an all-time high and analysts slapping absurd $50 price targets on it. And honestly, I can't even blame people for getting excited... for a second.
The Story They're Selling You
Let’s be fair and look at the PR sheet. Rigetti isn’t just some vaporware company. They’re building real superconducting quantum chips. They have a cloud platform. They’re landing multi-million dollar contracts with the U.S. Air Force and the UK’s National Quantum Computing Centre. They’ve even partnered with Nvidia, because offcourse you have to partner with Nvidia in 2025 if you want anyone to take you seriously.
The narrative is perfect. They’re in a race with giants like IBM and Google, but they’re the nimble underdog with a better chiplet architecture. They have a roadmap to a 1,000+ qubit system. JPMorgan is throwing $10 billion at "frontier technologies," which includes quantum. The hype machine is humming along beautifully, churning out buzzwords and bullish headlines.
Next to them, the other players almost look boring. You’ve got IonQ, with its trapped-ion approach that actually works at room temperature and boasts a higher gate fidelity score. They’re growing revenue like a weed and seem to have a more commercially viable model right now. Then there’s D-Wave, the weird cousin using "quantum annealing" to solve optimization problems. Both IONQ and QBTS have also seen insane stock surges this year, but nothing like the sheer vertical climb of Rigetti. IONQ, RGTI, QBTS: Which Is the Better Quantum Computing Stock?
So, if you just read the headlines, you’d think you’d be an idiot not to mortgage your house and go all-in on RGTI. The future is here, right?
The Story Nobody Wants to Hear
Now for the part that makes my stomach turn. While the Reddit crowd is busy drawing rockets next to the RGTI ticker, the people who actually run the company are doing something very, very different. They’re selling. They’re selling as fast as their brokers will let them.
In the last six months, Rigetti insiders have sold their stock 25 times. The number of times they’ve bought? Zero. A big, fat goose egg.
The President and CEO, Subodh Kulkarni, dumped a cool $12 million worth of shares. The CFO, the CTO, and half the board have cashed out millions. This is a bad sign. No, "bad" doesn't cover it—this is a five-alarm fire drill where the fire marshals are sprinting for the exits while telling you everything is fine.
What are we supposed to make of this? If you’re sitting on a technology that’s about to change the world and make you all richer than God, why would you be cashing out your lottery tickets before the numbers are even drawn? It just ain't logical. Are they just taking a little profit off the table, or do they see the storm clouds that the retail investors, blinded by the 5,900% gain, can’t?
This whole situation reminds me of my first car, a beat-up 1992 Honda Accord. The engine sounded like a bag of angry cats and the gas gauge was permanently stuck on full. The guy who sold it to me swore it was the most reliable car he’d ever owned. I found out later he was a mechanic. He knew exactly which wire was about to snap. The insiders at a company are the mechanics. They know which wires are loose.
And then there are the Wall Street analysts. The same geniuses who put a "Strong Buy" rating on the stock are, in the same breath, issuing price targets that imply a nearly 50% downside from its current price. Read that again. "You should definitely buy this, but we also think it’s going to be worth half of what you paid for it." How can both of those things be true? It feels less like financial analysis and more like a poorly written riddle. They’re just covering their asses, playing both sides so they can claim they were right no matter what happens. And the retail investor is the one left holding the bag...
Follow the Money, Not the Hype
Let's cut the crap. The quantum future might be inevitable, but that doesn’t mean every company with "quantum" in its name is a guaranteed winner. Most of them will burn out, fade away, or get swallowed by a tech giant. What we’re seeing with Rigetti feels less like the dawn of a new technological era and more like a classic, high-octane speculative bubble. The stock price has become completely detached from the company's actual, current-day performance.
The hype is deafening. But the actions—the insider sales—are screaming even louder. When the people who know the most about a company are quietly heading for the door, you have to ask yourself why you’re so eager to rush inside. Maybe Rigetti will build a 1,000-qubit computer and solve humanity's greatest problems. Or maybe, just maybe, this is the top. And a lot of people are about to learn a very expensive lesson in gravity.