Elon says money will become obsolete and energy will be the true currency. Half my timeline understood: "there won't be any currency anymore." It's the exact opposite. There will always be a currency. What's going to die is fiat money. And with it, the power of the people who print it. Quick masterclass on why. First, what is money? Money isn't wealth. It's a tool. It has three functions: unit of account (measuring value), medium of exchange (avoiding barter), and store of value (carrying today's work into tomorrow). At its core, money is a database. It records who produced what, and who has the right to consume what. It's a system for allocating human labor. And good money has one non-negotiable property: you can't create it out of thin air. Otherwise, it lies. For centuries, money was backed by something real: gold. Every banknote was a claim on a weight of metal. You couldn't print more than what you had in the vault. Then we dismantled it, piece by piece. In 1914, World War I. Countries suspend gold convertibility to finance the war on credit. In 1933, Roosevelt bans Americans from owning gold and devalues the dollar right after. In 1944, Bretton Woods. The dollar becomes convertible to gold at $35 an ounce, and every other currency gets pegged to the dollar. On August 15, 1971, Nixon "temporarily" suspends the dollar's convertibility to gold. That "temporary" measure has now lasted 55 years. In 1973, exchange rates float. Not a single major currency in the world is backed by anything physical anymore. Since 1971, the dollar has lost nearly 90% of its purchasing power. US federal debt has grown almost 100x. Housing prices have decoupled from wages. That's not a coincidence. It's the direct consequence of money with no physical limit. Now, central banks. A central bank does two things: it sets the price of money (interest rates) and it creates money. Two massive levers, in the hands of a handful of people nobody elected. When they keep rates too low for too long, they create bubbles, keep zombie companies alive, and push everyone into debt. When they print, they dilute your savings. The Fed's balance sheet went from roughly $900 billion in 2007 to nearly $9 trillion in 2022. The US money supply grew about 40% between 2020 and 2022. Result: 9.1% inflation in the US in June 2022, 10.6% in the eurozone in October 2022. Inflation is a tax nobody voted for. And it doesn't hit everyone equally: those closest to money creation (the state, banks, asset holders) get the new money first. Workers and savers get it last, after prices have already gone up. Now let's reason from first principles. If AI and robotics produce most goods and services, human labor is no longer the limiting factor of the economy. So a currency whose job is to allocate human labor no longer has a purpose. What stays scarce? Energy. Every physical good is matter transformed with energy. Every AI is computation, meaning electricity. With enough energy, you extract, you recycle, you manufacture, you reason. The natural unit of account of a robotic economy isn't the dollar. It's the kilowatt-hour. And this is where it gets beautiful: energy-backed money is tied to a real, measurable asset governed by thermodynamics. As Elon puts it, governments can print money, but they can't print energy. No more inflation manufactured by bureaucrats playing with the printing press. We go back to a standard. But this time, not a metal sitting in a vault: the very input of all production. My prediction: within the next ten years, the fiat monetary system will break. And with it, the grip that politicians and legacy bankers have on money. Elon is designing the new global economic order. Not a communist system: private property stays central. But capital will flow to those who best allocate energy to create more goods and services. A meritocracy of physics. That's what will bring us abundance. Money isn't disappearing. It's becoming honest again.

Bernie Sanders says the top 1% owns more than the bottom 93%, that fewer than a thousand billionaires got $2.2 trillion richer last year, and that it's "obscene." It's the most seductive and most wrong economic argument of our time. Let me explain why. First, wealth distribution follows a power law. Always. Everywhere. Books, music, startups, followers on X, goals in soccer. A small minority captures most of the value. That's not a bug of capitalism. It's the mathematical signature of every system where value gets created. So the only question that matters isn't "how big is the rich's slice?" It's "is the cake growing, and is the slice of the poorest growing with it?" And the answer is yes. In 1990, more than one human in three lived in extreme poverty. Today it's about one in ten. During exactly the period when billionaires multiplied. Bernie shows you the slice. He never shows you the cake. Second thing he won't tell you: past a certain level, wealth stops being consumption. It becomes capital allocation. Elon Musk isn't sleeping on a pile of cash. He owns stakes in Tesla, SpaceX, xAI. Jeff Bezos owns Amazon stock. That "$2.2 trillion" isn't sitting in a checking account. It's factories, rockets, data centers, millions of jobs. Nobody can eat $100 billion. You can only decide where to invest it. Once you understand that, the whole debate changes. The real question becomes: who allocates capital better? The people who built Amazon, SpaceX and Nvidia? Or politicians? A 5% wealth tax isn't "taking money from the rich." It's taking investment decisions away from people who proved they can create value and handing them to people who proved the opposite. Because the fundamental difference between an entrepreneur and a politician is consequences. The entrepreneur invests his own money. If he allocates badly, he loses everything. The market corrects him brutally, no appeal. That's why most startups die: the system kills bad decisions. The politician invests other people's money. If he allocates badly, nothing happens. Worse, he gets a bigger budget to "fix the problem." Milton Friedman put it better than anyone. There are four ways to spend money. Your money on yourself: you care about price and quality. Your money on others: you care about price. Others' money on yourself: you care about quality. Others' money on others: you care about nothing. Government is the fourth box. By design. Perfect example: California high-speed rail. Approved in 2008 for about $33 billion. Current estimated cost: over $100 billion. Passengers carried: zero. No entrepreneur would have survived that. The politicians who pushed it built careers on it. And when allocation has no consequences, it eventually finds a buyer. A politician who controls billions without accountability becomes the most profitable target in the world for anyone who wants to steer that money. The irony is that the left that rails against billionaires is itself funded by billionaires. George Soros is one of the biggest Democratic donors in history. The Gates Foundation shapes public health policy across the planet. Politicians don't fight billionaires. They pick their own. The ones who fund the state over the ones who compete with it. So if we actually want fewer poor people, we have to stop judging ideas by their intentions and start judging them by their results. And the results are brutally clear. China, 1978: Deng Xiaoping opens the economy to markets. More than 800 million people escape extreme poverty. The largest retreat of misery in human history. Not through redistribution. Through the freedom to build. India, 1991: liberalization. Same movie. South Korea and North Korea: same people, same language, same starting point in 1953. One became one of the most advanced economies on earth. The other has famines. Poland and Ukraine: comparable living standards in 1990. Today the average Pole is more than three times richer than the average Ukrainian. Argentina: a year and a half of liberalization, and the poverty rate falls from over 50% to around 30%. No country in history escaped poverty by punishing the people who build. Every single one did it by letting them build. And if you want to see what Bernie's program looks like in real life, you don't have to imagine it. It exists. It's called France. We've been running it for 45 years. Mass nationalizations in 1981. Two years later, Socialist president Mitterrand has to reverse course into austerity. Retirement at 60. The 35-hour workweek. A wealth tax for 35 years. Hundreds of wealthy households left every year for Belgium, Switzerland, London, taking their capital, their companies and their future taxes with them. Macron finally scrapped it in 2018. Hollande's 75% tax: raised a few hundred million, drove talent out, abandoned after two years. One of the highest tax burdens in the OECD. Public spending around 57% of GDP, a record in the developed world. Last balanced budget: 1974. Public debt: over €3.4 trillion. Mass unemployment for four decades. If taxing the rich and growing the state made people prosperous, France would be the richest country on the planet. It isn't. GDP per capita in France is barely more than half of America's. It's lower than Mississippi, the poorest state in the US. Not a single global tech giant. Our best engineers build Silicon Valley instead. I've been going back and forth between Paris and San Francisco for years. I see it every week. And California is about to replay the movie. Prop 40, on the ballot November 3rd, would take 5% of billionaires' net worth. Even Gavin Newsom, a Democratic governor, opposes it. The state's own nonpartisan budget analyst warns that income tax revenue could drop every year if the wealthy leave. Larry Page, Sergey Brin and Peter Thiel have reportedly already started moving their assets out. You don't fight poverty by shrinking the top. You fight it by growing the cake. Bernie wants a society where nobody has too much. I want a society where nobody has too little. The first has been tried everywhere and produces equality in stagnation. The second lifted a billion people out of misery. Choose.