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Frans Stander 🏝 PayVolution
@StanderFrans
Africa - Payments Evolution.
Modernisation of National Payments Systems and Payments Processing. Regulation and Governance. CEMEA.
Views expressed are my own.
South Africa and EMEA Regions
Joined January 2012
981 Following
307 Followers
1.3K Posts
Elon just created 4,400 millionaires in a single day.
400 of them are now worth over $100 million.
These aren't VCs. They're SpaceX employees, and the list includes welders, technicians, and cafeteria staff, because for two decades the company paid every level of the workforce in stock instead of higher salaries.
Juan Hernandez immigrated from Mexico and took a $28 an hour contractor welding job in 2015. He says he didn't even know what SpaceX was. The company gave him a $10,000 equity grant and let him buy more shares through payroll deductions. That stake is now worth $880,000.
Trevor Hise's parents wanted him to take a stable job at General Electric. He picked SpaceX instead, stayed 12 years, and accumulated over 100,000 shares. At the $135 listing price that's $13.5 million. He's 37 and semiretired. His words: "The magnitude of this has been ridiculous."
The most telling detail came before the listing. Over 100 employees quietly banded together and negotiated a group wealth management deal covering up to $5 billion, because none of them had ever needed a wealth manager before.
Software IPOs have minted millionaires for 30 years. This is the first one where the money went to the factory floor.
🚀🚀🚀🚀🚀🚀🚀🚀🚀🚀🚀🚀🚀🚀
Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez: "Elon Musk is not a scientist, he’s not an engineer, he’s a billionaire conman with a lot of money"
Elon Musk: "Point of correction... Its Trillionaire now, starts with a T not a B"
F*cking legend 😎
Elon Musk just exposed the one lie every modern nation tells itself.
Musk: “In 1969, we were able to send somebody to the moon.”
Rotary phones. Computers the size of rooms. Slide rules.
We put a human on the moon with less processing power than your watch.
Musk: “Then the space shuttle retired, and the United States could take no one to orbit.”
The most advanced nation in human history went from footprints on the moon to zero capability of leaving the atmosphere.
That is not a funding problem.
That is civilizational decay dressed up as a policy decision.
Musk: “People are mistaken when they think that technology just automatically improves… it will, by itself, degrade.”
That sentence should keep you up tonight.
We treat progress like gravity. Like it pulls us forward whether we try or not.
It is the opposite.
Progress is a boulder on a hill. The second you stop pushing, it rolls back over you. And it never announces itself.
Musk: “You look at great civilizations like ancient Egypt, and they were able to make the pyramids, and they forgot how to do that.”
They did not run out of stone.
They were not conquered.
They got comfortable. And the knowledge bled out so quietly that nobody noticed until it was already gone.
That is the real threat to everything we have built.
Not a nuclear flash. Not an asteroid. Not some dramatic Hollywood collapse.
A quiet forgetting.
Every chip we fabricate. Every rocket we launch. Every data center we power. All of it held together by a thin fraction of the population working at a pace that would break most people.
The moment that fraction gets tired or outnumbered by people who believe the machine runs itself, everything dissolves.
And here is the part nobody wants to say out loud.
We are not special. We are running the same operating system as every civilization that came before us.
Comfort is the sedative. Complacency is the flatline.
One generation that stops fighting is all it has ever taken.
You do not lose the future in a war.
You lose it in your sleep.
Who to follow
Payments. Innovation. Technology.
@PaymInnovTech
Discover the dynamic world of Currency Research, where innovation thrives, and global connections are forged since 1992. https://t.co/c5f0T1tZMK
Abdulaziz
@a_abdulaziz_a
تنتهي حرية الشخص عندما تبدأ حريات الاخرين !
Mo
@Moaliyusuf
CEO @ Fuze | Building Digital Asset and Fintech Infrastructure across Middle East | ex-@Checkout @visa @strategyand | Board @TheMENAFintech
As real time rails become standard across parts of MEA, competitive advantage is shifting to integration.
The banks that connect payments will define the next chapter of transaction banking.
Euromoney's report explores where transaction banking in MEA is heading next.
Read more:
A hybrid model is taking shape in MEA transaction banking.
It blends traditional correspondent strengths with new rails, smarter data and corridor specific strategies.
Euromoney's report explores where transaction banking in MEA is heading next.
Read the full report now:
The future is going to be AMAZING with AI and robots enabling sustainable ABUNDANCE for all!
AI with real next level " leap-frog" vision and results. We just skipped a century... expect to see and experience so much more in our lifetime..
TESLA'S $2 TRILLION SECRET: THE CARS WERE JUST THE TROJAN HORSE
Tesla's stock just hit $450 after years of skeptics calling it overvalued for a "car company."
The skeptics were right about one thing: Tesla isn't a car company.
It never was.
The vehicles were just the data collection devices, the training ground, the Trojan horse for what's actually being built: the world's most advanced real-world AI that's about to make human labor optional.
Full Self-Driving V14 just achieved something nobody thought possible: intervention-free drives from Los Angeles to New York.
Not on highways with perfect lane markings, but through construction zones, unexpected detours, unmarked rural roads, and Manhattan traffic.
Tesla's fleet of 6 million vehicles has been training this AI with billions of miles of real-world data.
Every car is a teacher, every drive a lesson, every edge case captured and learned.
No other company has this data advantage, and they never will.
But here's what Wall Street is finally understanding: the same AI that navigates a two-ton vehicle through chaos can navigate a humanoid robot through a factory, kitchen, or hospital.
Optimus, Tesla's humanoid robot, uses identical neural networks, same vision system, same decision architecture.
The only difference is legs instead of wheels.
When you've solved vision and real-world navigation for cars, you've solved it for everything.
The economics are staggering.
Tesla's targeting $20,000 per Optimus unit at scale.
The global labor force is 3.5 billion people.
If Optimus replaces just 10% of human labor, that's 350 million units at $20,000 each: $7 trillion in revenue.
Not market cap. Revenue.
For context, Apple's total revenue last year was $380 billion.
Optimus could generate 18 times that from just partial market penetration.
Elon's prediction that Optimus will be bigger than everything else Tesla does combined isn't hyperbole; it's conservative.
Cars are a $3 trillion global market.
Labor is a $75 trillion market.
Every restaurant, warehouse, factory, hospital, and home becomes a potential customer.
Unlike cars that sit idle 95% of the time, robots work 24/7.
One Optimus could replace three human shifts.
The timeline is what nobody expected.
Optimus went from stumbling prototype to gracefully running in two years.
Tesla's manufacturing expertise means they can scale production faster than anyone.
They're already building the factories.
By 2027, Elon projects thousands of units. By 2030, millions.
This isn't theoretical anymore; it's industrial planning.
What investors are really betting on isn't Tesla's ability to make cars or even robots.
They're betting that Tesla has solved real-world AI while everyone else is still playing with chatbots.
Google's Waymo needs pre-mapped cities and perfect conditions.
Tesla's FSD works anywhere, instantly.
That's the difference between narrow AI and general intelligence applied to physical tasks.
The automotive business was never the destination; it was the funding mechanism and data pipeline for the actual product: artificial general intelligence for the physical world.
Every Tesla sold wasn't just a car purchase but an investment in training the AI that will fundamentally restructure human civilization.
The owners paid Tesla to build its true product.
We're watching the last pivot before everything changes.
Tesla's cars proved they could build quality hardware at scale.
FSD proved they could solve real-world AI.
Optimus will prove they can replace human physical labor.
The stock price isn't irrational exuberance; it's the market finally understanding that @Tesla owns the future of work itself.
“If there are historians in the future, they’ll look back at Starship and say this is one of the most profound things that has ever happened (to humanity).”
- Elon Musk
SPACEX IS ENTERING ITS NEXT ERA AND ELON JUST SHIFTED INTO OVERDRIVE WITH AN UPCOMING IPO
The future of SpaceX just snapped into focus. Former SpaceX veteran Abhi Tripathi says the company’s long-rumored IPO started taking shape the moment Elon realized Starlink satellites could double as orbiting data centers.
“That was the moment the writing was on the wall,” he said.
“Once Elon commits, he goes all in.
The IPO isn’t about cash, it’s about firepower.
In the AI race, whoever builds and deploys fastest wins.”
Inside the factory, the transformation is even wilder. Starship’s upper stage is getting a total rebuild.
New Raptor engines.
More thrust. Smarter avionics.
Reinforced energy systems for deep-space missions.
Sleek new docking ports will let two Starships link up mid-orbit and swap fuel, a crucial step before heading to the Moon or Mars.
Super Heavy is turning into a different beast altogether.
A wider fuel spine.
Three giant grid fins built to lift, guide, and literally catch the rocket on return.
The new Raptor 3 engine looks meaner, simpler, and more powerful, like the inside of a V12 built for space.
Elon isn’t just scaling production.
He’s scaling ambition.
Source: @SawyerMerritt @elonmusk
Some major highlights during the event.. it was indeed a great experience to see what the GCC Region is capable of..
Day 3 of #ADFW2025 spotlighted Abu Dhabi as a hub for financial innovation, bringing together over 24 MoUs signed with major local and international partners.
Fintech Abu Dhabi, the MENA region’s largest fintech gathering, hosted global leaders to explore topics from digital credit and tokenisation to AI adoption and next-gen banking.
RESOLVE focused on Courage, featuring keynotes from H.E. Abdullah bin Sultan Al Nuaimi and ADGM Courts’ CEO Linda Fitz-Alan, emphasising Abu Dhabi’s leadership in legal innovation and dispute resolution.
Major events like AI Abu Dhabi, Blockchain Abu Dhabi, and Risk 4.0 provided insights into emerging technologies and risk management.
SPACEX IS ABOUT TO REWRITE THE RULES OF CAPITAL FOREVER
One company. One number. One moment the world will never forget.
$1,500,000,000,000.
Bloomberg just confirmed SpaceX is targeting the largest IPO in human history. Not by a little. By redefining what “large” means.
The mathematics are staggering:
65x revenue. That is not a typo. Boeing trades at 0.7x. Lockheed at 1.5x. SpaceX is demanding a multiple that has never existed in aerospace. Ever.
At $1.5 trillion, Elon Musk’s stake becomes worth $630 billion. One man. More than the GDP of Sweden, Poland, and Belgium combined.
But here is what no one is telling you:
This is not a rocket company going public. This is the privatization of orbital infrastructure. The IPO proceeds will fund space based data centers. Artificial intelligence running above the atmosphere. Beyond the jurisdiction of any nation on Earth.
8.5 million humans already depend on Starlink for internet. By IPO, that number crosses 10 million. A constellation of 7,600 satellites. 65 percent of everything orbiting this planet belongs to one company.
The raise must exceed $29.4 billion to claim the record. At 2 percent float, they hit $30 billion. At 5 percent, they raise $75 billion and shatter every record by a factor of two.
Saudi Aramco took a century to reach $1.7 trillion. SpaceX will attempt it in 24 years.
This is not an investment opportunity. This is the moment capital markets acknowledge that whoever controls orbit controls the 21st century.
The space economy just became the only economy that matters.
Watch the S1 filing. Watch the Fed. Watch the sky.
Everything changes in 2026.
Data Centres in Space... the sooner... the better.
Yeah
Anthony Soohoo, Chairman and CEO of @MoneyGram , explained what happens when three major forces—AI, stablecoins and embedded finance—begin moving toward one another rather than in parallel.
For Soohoo, we are witnessing a structural convergence that will redefine how value moves across borders. The winners, he said, will not be the platforms but the people who use them.
Transformative shifts may arrive every decade or so, but this one could fundamentally reset convenience, pricing and access. And this time, the system is bending in favour of the consumer.
ADFW This Dec 8–11: 60+ events, 300+ speakers. The finance week that sets what’s next. Use FW75 for 75% off.
Get Your Ticket Today.
@ADFinanceWeek 2025 is next level. I am here in Abu Dhabi. Let's have a coffee and talk about the Fintech trends and #payment testing platforms.
DM me..
ADFW This Dec 8–11: 60+ events, 300+ speakers. The finance week that sets what’s next. Use FW75 for 75% off.
Get Your Ticket Today.
MWC25 Doha brings together experts shaping the future of connectivity.
Experience cutting-edge tech, expert insights & networking opportunities that drive digital excellence.
يفصلنا يوم واحد عن لقائكم في سيملس السعودية 2025
زورونا غدًا في جناح
N40-H3
We are just one day away from welcoming you at Seamless Saudi 2025
Visit us tomorrow at Booth
N40-H3
He predicted:
• AI vision breakthrough (1989)
• Neural network comeback (2006)
• Self-supervised learning revolution (2016)
Now Yann LeCun's 5 new predictions just convinced Zuckerberg to redirect Meta's entire $20B AI budget.
Here's what you should know (& how to prepare):
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