The richest Americans have never controlled this much wealth:
The wealth of the top 0.00001% of Americans is up to a record ~12% of US national income.
National income measures the total income earned across the economy, including wages, business profits, and investment income.
This percentage has more than quadrupled since the 2008 Financial Crisis.
By comparison, this metric never exceeded 1% between the 1950s and the 1990s.
The surge has been fueled by record gains in the equity market and rising real estate prices.
Asset owners are the only winners.
The faster technology moves, the more I think about Bezos' question
What won't change in the next 10 years?
Things I've been writing down over time:
- Humans will always need shelter, food, energy, and healthcare.
- The desire for ownership and the accumulation of wealth.
- The physical world will move more slowly than the digital one.
- Every increase in technological capability, especially AI, will require more energy.
- People and businesses will continue to need access to capital.
- Capital will continue to seek returns that exceed inflation.
- Underwriting methods evolve, but demand for credit (loans) is persistent.
- Trust remains scarce and becomes increasingly valuable as content, code, and fraud become cheaper.
- Verified identities and reputation becomes more important as information becomes abundant and synthetic.
- Long-term wealth creation and dynastic (multi-generational) thinking predate modern technology, and will persist.
- Coordination and transaction costs never fully disappear; market friction will continue to justify the existence of firms and intermediaries.
- People will continue to compete for status.
- Consumers will pay a premium for products and services that confer status.
- Time remains fixed at 24 hours per day.
- But attention is a finite resource and an enduring constraint.
- Products that credibly save time (or enable delegation) have a perpetual market.
- Inaccessible, proprietary data will be a persistent moat. The more inaccessible and difficult to aggregate, the deeper the moat.
- People want accountability, recourse, and clearly identifiable responsibility when things go wrong.
- Regulation consistently lags technological innovation.
- Compliance requirements, licensing, and regulatory moats persist even when machines can perform the underlying task.
- Local knowledge remains valuable and difficult to replicate.
- Heterogeneous markets (like real estate) continue to reward people with deep contextual understanding.
- Incumbent organizations tend to underinvest in disrupting their own businesses, which always creates opportunities for challengers.
Bezos' insight on what wouldn't change in 10 years was "Customers will always want lower prices and faster delivery."
It's boring/ true, but I think that's the point.
Everything we build today can and will be rebuilt more cheaply, faster by someone else.
Build on the invariants, not the trends.
What have I missed?
@LynAldenContact Feels like his strategy is to reduce communications, change how inflation is measured so can serve the people who put them in their role.
There's a game being played and its us.
Real pleasure comes from overcoming challenges, feeling confidence in your abilities, gaining fluency in skills, and experiencing the power this brings.
AI, Robotics, Medicine, Defense (ai drones etc), Energy
What a crazy 10 years ahead of opportunity. The Golden Dragon Bull Run (with many shakeouts and peaks and valleys)
2 years ago people would laugh at AI bc the image generation wasn't great, or robots bc they were slow and clumsy. But really, every time we see a new release you have to realize that it's the worst version we will see of them. Especially with how quick things are progressing. Humans mostly think in linear terms but what is happening is at a logarithmic scale and pace.
One of the largest issues is we can't actually scale all of this. YET. I think the biggest mistake is looking at things on too low of a time frame when you have to think about what all this is going to unlock over the next decade.
An underrated cheat code in life: being incredibly reliable. Show up on time. Do what you say you will. Own your mistakes. It goes so much further than you think.