He Hit Enter and Wiped Out $440 Million in 30 Minutes
August 1, 2012. Wall Street. The company is Knight Capital, one of the biggest here in the United States in automated trading. That day they launched a new system, but it wasn’t properly tested. One line of bad code was enough to break everything.
As soon as it went live, the software started buying and selling uncontrollably, executing millions of trades in minutes. Prices jumped, the market bent, and traders stared at their screens, frozen. The system was faster than anyone, and by the time they stopped it, it was over.
$440 million gone in half an hour. Knight Capital collapsed and was absorbed soon after. No hacker, no cyberattack, just a bad line of code in a machine left running alone, with no brakes, no control, no backup.
That’s modern finance: automated, opaque, oversized. Machines decide who wins and who loses in milliseconds, and when something fails, no one is fast enough to stop it.
Now the same logic runs everywhere: lending, marketing, HR, healthcare. And it’s merging with artificial intelligence. When an AI makes a wrong decision, who notices? Who stops it?
Knight Capital isn’t just about finance. It’s about the blind power of technology without control. The system did exactly what it was built to do. The real problem was that no one truly understood what they had built.
Today, AI can click for us. Buy, sell, accept, post, confirm. And we don’t even notice.
#ArtificialDecisions #MCC #AI
✅ This video is brought to you by: https://www.ethicsprofile.ai
👉 Important note: We’re planning the upcoming months.
If you’d like to request my presence as a speaker at your event, please contact my team at: [email protected]