Ark Invest Cathie Wood.
The founder, CEO, and CIO of Ark Invest, Cathie Wood.
The queen of innovation.
Peter Diamandis
Your forecast of 7% global GDP growth—it’s a sort of singularity event, doubling the IMF’s forecast.
Cathie Wood
AI is moving faster than we expected. I think 7%-plus is conservative.
Every technology revolution has been accompanied by a step-function increase in GDP growth. And so here we are: robotics, energy storage, AI, blockchain technology, multi-omic sequencing. It’s nothing that anyone living today has seen before.
Peter Diamandis
Your prediction of Bitcoin getting to $1 million.
Cathie Wood
That’s our bull case: $1.5 million in 2030. If you look at what’s happened historically, certainly in the last 2 cycles, gold has led Bitcoin. So we think Bitcoin is getting ready for another big run.
Peter Diamandis
Everybody welcome to Moonshots and this special episode of WTF Just Happened in Tech. Here with Cathie Wood, the founder and CEO of Ark Invest, to talk about Ark Invest 2026 Big Ideas report. Here with my moonshot mates, DB2, AWG, and Mr. EXO. That’s what I’m gonna call you, Salim, Mr. EXO.
Salim Ismail
Fine.
Peter Diamandis
Give you your three-letter initial. This is the podcast that is for us the number one in the world on tech, getting you future-ready, getting you ready for the supersonic tsunami coming our way. Cathie, good morning to you, my friend.
Cathie Wood
Good morning, Peter. I’m honored to be a part of WTF.
Peter Diamandis
For sure. And God Almighty, you put out an amazing 2026 Big Ideas report. We’ve selected about 20 slides out of the 80 or 100 that you have, just to talk about them with the moonshot mates here. It’s so important. Can you imagine how fast things are going? Is it still shocking to you?
Cathie Wood
We have been expecting the world to change at a faster-than-expected pace. But AI is moving faster than we expected, which is really saying something, because we were pushing the envelope on that one.
Dave Blundin
You remember, Cathie, Mary Meeker used to do this deck when the internet was exploding. It became the guidepost for everybody in terms of anticipating what was coming next, and boy, that was epic. This deck has actually taken over that role in this much more accelerated timeframe.
We’re only going to have time to go through 18 slides or so. There’s so much more in there. This is really pretty epic.
Cathie Wood
Mary Meeker was our inspiration. 2017 is when we started. Mary Meeker’s reports were very internet-centric, and they focused on what had happened. They were full of incredible data. We wanted to go a step further and make at least 5-year projections. That’s our investment time horizon.
Peter Diamandis
Yeah.
Cathie Wood
And so it forced us into Wright’s law even more aggressively. Peter, you and I have talked about that. I don’t know if you want to go through it again.
Peter Diamandis
Yes, we have.
Speaker 2
The world owes you a debt of gratitude for doing that. We talked to Ray Kurzweil last week. Being a futurist and predicting the future in the age of AI takes serious guts. You’re right, the Mary Meeker view was always 1 year in the future, 3 years in the past. To try and look 5 years in the future now and make predictions is so valuable for the audience, and very few people are willing to do it. I know you take a lot of darts when you do that, and Peter knows this too.
Cathie Wood
Yes.
Speaker 2
Ray Kurzweil knows it—
Peter Diamandis
Yeah.
Speaker 2
—like more than anybody. But it’s so valuable for the audience.
Cathie Wood
I do want to say, first and foremost, I’m standing on the shoulders of an incredible research team. Brett Winton, who is our chief futurist, and then our directors and analysts. It’s very interesting how AI is changing our research and how much more we can do now because of AI.
Peter Diamandis
For sure. Shall we jump in, gentlemen and lady?
Speaker 2
Yeah. Can’t wait.
Peter Diamandis
Let’s begin with our first slide.
Cathie Wood
Sure.
Dr. Alexander Wissner-Gross
For context, Cathie, that music video is riffing on something we often talk about on the pod, which is that the trillions in CapEx being invested in AI data centers are not going to stay bottled up inside the data centers for much longer. I often joke that the CapEx is literally going to march out the door of the data centers in the form of robots that embed themselves in everyday life. I think that’s what the music video was about, rock and metal notwithstanding.
1. The Great GDP Acceleration
Peter Diamandis
Let’s talk about the great acceleration, Cathie. We’re going to hit a couple of slides on this topic. Here’s the very first one: projected shifts in GDP now through 2030, and the numbers are pretty extraordinary. Your forecast of 7% global GDP growth—it’s a sort of singularity event, doubling the IMF’s forecast. We just had a conversation with Elon, a friend of the pod, talking about going 5× on GDP growth in the next 2 years and triple-digit growth inside of the next decade. Insane numbers. How do you think about it, Cathie?
Cathie Wood
You do a beautiful job with the graphics here. You can see that every technology revolution has been accompanied by a step-function increase in GDP growth. If you look at the 400 years from 1500 to 1900, not much new technology. Toward the end of it, we were into railroads, but according to Brett Winton, who worked with academic research on this number, real GDP growth was roughly 0.6% globally.
Peter Diamandis
Mm.
Cathie Wood
As we went through railroads, the telephone, electricity, and the internal-combustion engine, that was a technology revolution, and we stepped up 5-fold to 3% for the next 125 years. And so here we are. We’re saying these 5 platforms—robotics, energy storage, AI, with AI as the biggest catalyst, blockchain technology, and multi-omic sequencing—and the convergence among them will produce a 2.5-fold increase. I actually do believe that’s conservative. We started putting this number out a couple of years ago, and most people rolled their eyes.
Peter Diamandis
Mm-hmm.
Cathie Wood
Now, to have Elon focused on this idea that real GDP growth globally is going to accelerate to astonishing rates—
Peter Diamandis
Explode, I think, was more like—
Cathie Wood
Explode.
Peter Diamandis
—accelerating.
Cathie Wood
Explode. And I don’t think people understand this. I think 7%-plus is conservative. But it’s nothing that anyone living today has seen before.
Hey everybody, you may not know this, but I’ve got an incredible research team, and every week myself and my research team study the meta trends that are impacting the world, topics like computation, sensors, networks, AI, robotics, 3D printing, synthetic biology. And these meta trend reports I put out once a week enable you to see the future 10 years ahead of anybody else. If you’d like to get access to the meta trends newsletter every week, go to diamandis.com/metatrends. That’s diamandis.com/metatrends.
Peter Diamandis
Dave or Salim, do you want to jump in?
Dr. Alexander Wissner-Gross
Well, I’ll give you the counterargument, even though I don’t believe in the counterargument. I don’t think any of us believe in the counterargument, so I have to do it anyway.
But Alex and I just got back from Davos, and I’d say if you randomly surveyed bankers and politicians, 20% believe and 80% don’t believe. The 80% who don’t believe are saying, “Well, look, when the computer revolution took off, GDP again settled at 3% annual growth. No matter what we do, we can’t get out of this rut of 3% annual growth. There’s nothing that ever changes it. When you see incredible breakthroughs—fusion or computing—it’s all baked into that 3%.”
So we’re always going to settle where we were, and I think that mindset is related to 125 years of history. I love this chart because it shows prior periods of time, so you can zoom out from just your personal experience and start to look at world history. That’s what makes it clear. But pretend I’m a nonbeliever. What’s your answer to that?
Cathie Wood
Yes. What’s interesting is that anyone alive today hasn’t experienced anything different. Part of the reason for that is that productivity growth moved up in the ’80s and ’90s, and that was a golden age for investing. It moved up, and we did sustain 3% GDP growth around the world—not so much because of that. I think it was partly necessary for that, but also because China joined the World Trade Organization.
I think the reason they’re talking like that is, you’re right, we haven’t been in a technology revolution before.
Peter Diamandis
Mm-hmm.
Cathie Wood
This is 5 platforms. They are converging. They involve 15 different technologies. The reason many people, especially in the financial world, do not believe this is because of the way they’ve set up their research. They’ve set up their research by sector, industry, or subindustry. They’ve siloed those sectors and industries when technology is permeating every one of them and blurring the lines.
So you almost have to set up research the way we have set it up, purposefully, and that is by these 15 technologies. Each of our analysts is researching how to understand when and how these technologies are going to scale across sectors. There are no silos here. Our analysts are working together and collaborating in order to understand the massive convergences that are taking place today.
2. Space Data Centers Arrive
Peter Diamandis
And this is the perfect segue to this slide here from your deck, which talked about the convergences that are coming—in this case, the convergence of being able to have reusable, low-cost access to flight and data centers in space.
Cathie Wood
Mm-hmm.
Peter Diamandis
Who would have ever thought? One of the conversations Dave and I had with Elon was that no one was talking about data centers in space 6 months ago.
Cathie Wood
No.
Peter Diamandis
And all of a sudden, everybody’s talking about them.
Cathie Wood
Yes.
Cathie Wood
And we have an open-source SpaceX model out there in collaboration with Mach33. We put it out early, probably in the middle of last year, and we didn’t have anything like orbital data centers in our model. So now we’re going back to the drawing board with Mach33.
Here are some of the early results that you’re seeing: the massive—well, first of all, the cost decline. Again, another use case driving unit growth, and Wright’s law is centered on unit growth. For every cumulative doubling in the number of units produced with a new technology—in this case, reusable rockets—costs decline at a consistent percentage rate.
In the case of rockets, the readers will have to go to the page. I’m blanking on it. It’s a pretty big number in terms of cost declines—
Peter Diamandis
Mm-hmm.
Salim Ismail
—but not as big, believe it or not. In the industrial robot space, for every cumulative doubling in the number of industrial robots produced, costs decline by 50%. It’s not as high as that, but it’s well into the 20s, I believe.
Dave Blundin
I wanted to ask you, actually, on the left chart here, I was surprised the line doesn’t come down even more as launch costs go down. One of my takeaways from that meeting with Elon was that I went in sort of half-believing in data centers in space and came out completely sold.
One of the things that he’s working on very aggressively and very secretly is that when you make the actual GPU chips, there’s about a 50% margin at TSMC and then an 80% margin at NVIDIA. There’s a massive amount of cost increase baked into that value chain. He’s quietly bypassing all that and starting to plan out his own fabs.
Then you look at what the fundamental constraints are. He always does this: What are the fundamental constraints? What’s the real underlying impenetrable barrier? It’s the simple things, like access to sand. Well, that’s dirt-cheap. Access to power. In space—
Cathie Wood
Yes.
Salim Ismail
—the power—the solar panels are 6 times more efficient in space, so there’s a massive reduction. I think what we’re looking at on this chart is purely what happens if we reduce the launch cost today, but there’s no concurrent reduction in the cost per GPU, the cost of power, or the cost of producing the solar panels.
I think all of those will happen concurrently over just a couple of years if Elon is right, and that chart comes down really precipitously. I think on the x-axis here, we’re just looking at cost per launch, but we don’t really factor in time.
Cathie Wood
Right. What’s very interesting about that, of course, is that Moore’s law was all about time, and it is no longer working in the semiconductor industry. Wright’s law is working in the semiconductor industry, so what can get in the way of unit growth is the question.
I don’t think regulations are going to get in the way. I think we’re in a space race here, so I think you’re right. I think we could be conservative. We typically assume, especially with Elon’s companies, vertical integration, as you say.
Dave Blundin
Mm-hmm.
Cathie Wood
We do know how important getting that chip technology right is here. I think we have assumed that, but in terms of some of the other costs you’re talking about, no.
Peter Diamandis
Alex, what are your thoughts here?
Dr. Alexander Wissner-Gross
I’ll pose my thoughts in question form for Cathie. Cathie, if you extrapolate out naively, as I’ve pointed out on the pod in the past, we get to a Dyson-swarm-type scenario where, at some point, we need enough atoms to build our orbital data centers. Just extrapolating naively, we start wanting to disassemble the Moon and other solar system bodies—the planets, the asteroid belt.
Do you foresee—I know you’re very public about 5-year forecasts, but if I were to beseech you to extrapolate a little bit further, maybe call it 50 years out—what is your position on the Dyson swarm? Do we get a Dyson swarm? Do we get 10 different competing Dyson swarms? Do we get no Dyson swarm?
Peter Diamandis
Alex is our resident planetary deconstructor here.
Dr. Alexander Wissner-Gross
The Moon had it coming.
Cathie Wood
Well, I’m probably not expert enough to answer that question, but we have taken the SpaceX model much further than 5 years, and we have incorporated getting Optimus, Tesla, and Boring to Mars. We think that’s very doable.
I think our space analysts—I’d really want them to dwell on this question, and I’d like to dwell on it with them. I will do exactly that.
Peter Diamandis
Well, pretty incredible.
Dave Blundin
Great.
Peter Diamandis
Orbital debris is, for me, the biggest showstopper in the near term if, in fact, we have a deconstruction of a satellite in orbit that leads to a hyper-exponential deconstruction of other satellites. But let’s not go there. Let’s talk about AI infrastructure.
Cathie Wood
Mm-hmm.
3. Inference Costs Collapse
Peter Diamandis
Inference cost is collapsing at an extraordinary rate, and the implications of this are massive. I don’t think people realize it. Salim, do you want to jump in on this one, or do you want to let Dave come in?
Dave Blundin
I have a question that goes back to and connects this, the rockets, and the GDP question. When you have technology being as deflationary as we see, and we can see it in this graph very clearly that token costs are collapsing, the cost of rocket launches—it was $600 million for a NASA space shuttle launch, $60 million for a SpaceX launch, and they’ll get it down another 10×.
Cathie Wood
Mm-hmm.
Dave Blundin
That’s a drop in GDP. How do we project such a huge increase in GDP when technology is dropping the cost of everything so radically? That’s my big concern in terms of how we get to those numbers.
Peter Diamandis
Jevons paradox is playing in here.
Cathie Wood
Yes. The other side of costs coming down is, of course, explosive unit growth. So that 7%+ GDP number is a real number.
Dave Blundin
So, Jevons to the rescue, basically.
Cathie Wood
Exactly.
Dave Blundin
Okay.
Cathie Wood
Many people, especially in our industry, just laugh at us when we say we think prices are going to start falling.
Well, it's been stuck in the 2% to 3% range. We're not getting out of there. If you look at Truflation, which measures 10,000 items in real time, inflation is already down to 1.2%, and yet the Fed is fighting this notion that we're up in the 2.5% to 3% range, and they're going to get it down to 2% by golly. That's how they potentially could overdo it.
I think that within the next year, we'll see inflation below 2% and heading negative. Critical to that forecast is productivity growth and unit labor costs continuing to decelerate. But we've also got gasoline costs coming down. Here in the U.S., housing costs and rents are starting to come down. It's going to become consensus thinking, but it is as far away from that right now as you can get.
Dave Blundin
Well, I'm hoping by the end of this podcast that we've invented Cathie Wood's Law. There seem to be an infinite number of these between Moore's Law, Wright's Law, and Jevons' paradox, but they need names.
You know, the one that came up with Elon—I don't know if you watched the whole Elon podcast—but I couldn't believe he told that story about the 2 economists walking through the woods. They pay each other to eat shit, and it adds $200 to the global economy, but nothing productive is created.
That dovetails with Salim's Law: If AI cures breast cancer and millions and millions of people don't need radiation or chemotherapy, that has the effect of looking like it reduces GDP. In reality, if you wanted to, you could still go and hang out, not get the radiation, and pay if you wanted to, and then not have the cancer. That adds huge net value to the world, obviously, but it shows up as negative GDP.
The GDP metric is fundamentally broken in the age of AI, so maybe Cathie Wood's Law fixes this.
Cathie Wood
It is, but there's another side to this. I'm not going to say it's equal and opposite. If you look at robotics and the time we spend doing things for free, we're not paid to drive our children around, and we're not paid to make dinner and clean up afterward, we're going to unlock a lot of that. That will become paid in the form of buying robots. That will get into GDP, and that never got into GDP before.
It's a little bit like what happened to the farm economy here. The reason people at that time wanted to have lots and lots of children is that they paid them room and board and nothing else. Then we had the Industrial Revolution, and of course their work was not counted in GDP, because GDP equals national income. National income is easier to measure these days because of the tax system and so forth, and they have to equal. They have to equal.
Through robot purchases, we'll see a lot of GDP coming back to us.
Salim Ismail
That's a great point. You take traditional things that aren't measured, and you move them into the measured economy, and that increases revenue.
Cathie Wood
Yes.
Salim Ismail
Right?
Cathie Wood
Yes.
Salim Ismail
This reminds me of a specific data point. I remember talking to VCs, many of whom missed investing in Uber, and I actually interviewed one of them and said, “Why?” He said, “We totally messed up because the taxi market in San Francisco is about $500 million a year, and we figured if Uber takes, like, 20% of that, that's just not a venture investment, because then they only get some chunk of that revenue.”
What we missed was that the ridesharing market quadrupled, and they took 80% market share from the taxis. So you ended up with all these people taking rides that you never would dream would take rides—drunk people, et cetera, et cetera—and that totally changed the game.
Cathie Wood
What's interesting about that is that today Uber accounts for 1% of all urban miles traveled. This is in Big Ideas as well. We've done the analysis, talking about puts and takes here, about GDP and so forth. To accommodate that 1% of urban miles traveled, it would take only 140,000 cars. To accommodate all urban miles traveled in the United States—
Salim Ismail
Mm.
Cathie Wood
It would take 24 million cars. When you put into context that the number of cars owned in the United States today is somewhere around 400 million, and the number of autos sold every year in the United States is now roughly 15 million, that tells you the increase in capacity utilization of robotaxis is going to destroy the auto market as we know it.
Peter Diamandis
Agreed. What we saw on the chart here—put it up there once again—is really the commoditization of cognition, right? This is the most important thing that drives all of human economy and, ultimately, humanity: our intelligence. It's now becoming commoditized at an extraordinary rate—99% per year.
It's a race to the bottom. But still, the question is, are the large language models going to be able, with these reducing prices, to maintain the revenues they're going to need to build the AI infrastructure? Do you have any concerns about that, about closing the economic loop on these frontier models?
Cathie Wood
Well, it's been very interesting to watch OpenAI recently. It is now starting to monetize. It's planning for advertising, commerce, and robots.
But in terms of monetization, we just learned they're going to start charging $60 per thousand—
Salim Ismail
Per thousand views, I think, or engagements.
Cathie Wood
Yeah, something like that.
Salim Ismail
Yeah.
Cathie Wood
The equivalent at Facebook right now is $20. This is Super Bowl kinds of pricing.
Peter Diamandis
Mm.
Cathie Wood
They'll probably get away with it in the beginning because they'll control the supply. But our analysts on the consumer side are beginning to say, “Wait a minute. Gemini's not going to do this.”
Peter Diamandis
Mm-hmm.
Cathie Wood
They're not going to do this. They're going to hang out and take share from OpenAI. They don't have to. They have Google to support them, and Google's massive cash flows to support their spending.
That is something that's evolving here, and I think our consumer analysts are saying, “Huh, that's not good news for OpenAI.” It is true that they have 900 million users. They have a huge head start in that way.
But the fact that our consumer-oriented analysts, the Internet analysts, are saying that is interesting. I think they know they have to start driving revenue much faster in order to scale the infrastructure they need, the way they must. I don't know if it means at some point they're going to have to pull back on certain of their many objectives, because they're going wide and deep all at once.
Peter Diamandis
Mm-hmm.
Cathie Wood
They may have to change their strategy and just focus, focus, focus a little bit more.
Salim Ismail
I don't know if Kevin Weil said this on camera or off camera, but the mandate there is to find $75 billion of ad revenue. I think it was within 2 years. It might have been 18 months, up from 0.
Peter Diamandis
Well, if it's off camera, it's on camera now.
Salim Ismail
I don't think it was a secret. Hopefully not.
Cathie Wood
I think Amazon is up to $50 billion in advertising, but they started their advertising, I'm going to say, about 7 years ago. Anything's possible in the AI age. I think they could do it in 2 years.
4. AI Agents Take Over Tasks
Peter Diamandis
What I found interesting on this slide here is the AI agent performance on long-duration tasks, with an 80% success rate.
Dave Blundin
I think any employee that had an 80% success rate would get fired, so we're not quite there yet.
Dr. Alexander Wissner-Gross
Yeah, but the thing is, if you look at the prior slide and this slide together, the prior slide implies that the cost of inference is going to zero just because it's one pixel away from zero, but it's not even close to zero when it's one pixel away from zero. The desire to use these things in infinitely long thinking loops is astronomical and insatiable.
Cathie Wood
Yes.
Dave Blundin
Mm-hmm.
Dr. Alexander Wissner-Gross
The demand is going to go through the roof, no matter how cheap the inference gets, because of exactly that effect. Peter, when you say it's 80% successful, if you launch 100 agents, your odds of it going from 80% to 90% success are very high, and just 1 of them figures it out. That's a brute-force approach.
Dave Blundin
Right.
Dr. Alexander Wissner-Gross
There are better approaches than that. But the demand for intelligence is essentially infinite, and so that near-zero inference cost is a long way away from zero. People are going to want to spend whatever they can afford to get more of this.
Cathie Wood
Yes. We would agree with that. We would agree with that. It's been fascinating to watch Clawdbot. It's open source—
Dave Blundin
Oh my God.
Cathie Wood
Oh my goodness.
Dave Blundin
Yeah.
Peter Diamandis
Yeah.
Cathie Wood
A weekend.
Peter Diamandis
To all of our subscribers, if you’ve not yet seen ClawdBot on X or gone to clawdbot.ai and looked at what’s available here, this is your personal version of Jarvis. That’s what I call it. It’s on your computer—in this case, on someone’s Mac mini in the example I’ve seen—and it has taken the internet by storm. It’s able to communicate via chat, ask it to do things, and have it actually wake you up in the morning and show you all the things it’s done at night, like an eager employee or intern.
Cathie Wood
Mm-hmm.
Peter Diamandis
It’s amazing.
Cathie Wood
Yeah, and it—
Dr. Alexander Wissner-Gross
It’s not just technology. It’s like Suno or Sora or Arduino boards. It’s a cultural thing, too, where you can show your friends what you built last night and blow their minds. Sorry, Cathie, I cut you off.
Cathie Wood
No. I just wanted to clarify that it’s Clawd, as in C-L-A-W-D. It’s a little bit of a play on the Claude we know and love from Anthropic. And it is open source.
Peter Diamandis
Yes.
Cathie Wood
Our lead AI analyst has used it, and already it’s organized him. I can tell how much better organized he is after just a weekend with ClawdBot.
Peter Diamandis
Yeah.
Dr. Alexander Wissner-Gross
Amazing. Yeah.
Peter Diamandis
What makes it different is that it connects to all your social media accounts, your email account, and anything on your laptop. So it’s incredibly powerful for automating your life and showing your friends whatever in real time without getting in the loop. The reason it didn’t come directly from the big AI labs is that it could also scramble your entire computer in 2 seconds—
Cathie Wood
Mm-hmm.
Dr. Alexander Wissner-Gross
Mm-hmm.
Peter Diamandis
—if something goes wrong. So be careful with it, but that’s also what makes it so powerful.
Alex, what are your thoughts on the agentic slide here?
Dr. Alexander Wissner-Gross
Well, first I’ll point out it’s no longer ClawdBot. It’s now Moltbot due to trademark issues with Anthropic, and its mascot is, of course, a lobster. So we’re very much living chapter 1 of Accelerando at this point.
Peter Diamandis
Oh my God.
Cathie Wood
Oh my gosh.
Dr. Alexander Wissner-Gross
We’ve caught up with the future, and I’ve written in my newsletter, Cathie—
Peter Diamandis
Did you have something to do with the lobster logo?
Dr. Alexander Wissner-Gross
This is convergent evolution. We find ourselves with these intelligent autonomous lobsters, and people are giving the lobsters digital homes now and giving them digital personhood. We have fully caught up with chapter 1 of Accelerando. I wrote about this in my newsletter today.
I think, going back, though, Cathie, you raised a really interesting point that I haven’t heard, to my knowledge, anyone else articulate. So many people, including folks on this pod, are hand-wringing about GDP and asking whether hyperdeflation will somehow reveal the intrinsic misalignment between GDP growth and real wealth growth.
But you’ve, I think, put your finger on a point I’ve never heard anyone else articulate: As humanity delegates more and more services to agents, that delegation looks like commerce from a GDP perspective. Basically, by carving up humanity—individual humans’ roles and productive services—and subdividing them, all of the interactions between those subdivisions, many of which are going to be agents, are additive or accretive to GDP and look like commerce.
So, if anything, you’re painting a story for the exact opposite of how GDP statistics can explode in real terms while real wealth perhaps remains constant as well. I guess my question for you is: If you could wave a magic wand and define Cathie Wood’s perfect definition—not of GDP growth, but of real wealth growth for humanity—how would you define it?
5. Measuring Real Wealth Growth
Cathie Wood
Wealth growth is very much tied to productivity growth. I’m talking about real wealth growth. I’m not talking about real estate and price-driven wealth. I’m talking more about technologically enabled productivity gains.
We got a taste of it—just a taste—from the ’80s and ’90s. It was the pre-internet age, starting with the PC, then the internet age and the mobile age. Back then, which was a magnificent time for the financial markets, wealth creation was stupendous as software, for the first time, unlocked productivity.
We went through a frustrating period in the ’80s—I was there—when technology almost seemed as though it was hurting productivity. There were some people out there saying that. Then, of course, Microsoft came along, and boom. Then we had the internet. Boom.
That was just foreshadowing what we’re going to experience here. If you look at growth, growth accelerated—not a lot, but it accelerated—certainly from the horrible growth rates of the ’70s. Productivity was, I think, zero or negative for a good part of the ’70s into the early ’80s. Then we saw productivity picking up, and the financial markets boomed. Inflation came down.
The reason I’ve thought about it so much is that, very early in my career, we had taken a position that inflation was going to come down. Most people thought that couldn’t happen without a depression. It happened for the opposite reason. It happened because of productivity growth associated with these technologies—and a sensible monetary policy as well, I will say. Productivity growth lifted unit growth.
The history is unlike what you would learn from Keynesian economics, which is associated with Harvard primarily. It says growth is inflationary. Growth is not inflationary. Growth is disinflationary, and in this world we’re going into, it is deflationary. Deflation in the good sense. When the price of something drops, the demand for it explodes.
Salim Ismail
We see that here on this chart, on intelligence, right?
Cathie Wood
Mm-hmm.
Salim Ismail
Please, Alex, go ahead.
Dr. Alexander Wissner-Gross
Maybe just a follow-up, Cathie, on that. This seems like the crux of not just some of these amazing visuals, but also, I think, your broader thesis in investing that GDP may not be the best macro indicator for progress. It sounds like you’re saying something like per capita productivity is the key macro indicator you look to.
But I’m curious: Even per capita productivity, ultimately, you have to resolve that quantitatively down to units of dollars or some other units. Your investments via ETFs—I think the question in my mind is, what is the right benchmark to hold yourself to?
You’re very clearly in the business of investing in the future, and the broader, call it, S&P 500—Mr. Market is a little bit psychotic sometimes—may or may not be properly measuring progress toward the future. If you had to put a single metric to it, what metric is it that we can all sit down and calculate that you’re optimizing for? What do you think progress itself should be indexed against?
Cathie Wood
First of all, in terms of indexation, that is a live wire for me because that is what has happened to the financial markets, unfortunately. Elon Musk feels very strongly about this. We had an X Spaces session with him and spent more time than I ever dreamed we would on this topic.
The S&P, the Nasdaq, and the companies at the top of those lists are there because of past success. If we are right and we’re moving into the most disruptive time from an innovation point of view in history, then the traditional world order is going to be disturbed.
Now, the S&P 500, if you look at the Ibbotson/Sinclair studies, has returned nominal returns in the high single-digit range over time.
Peter Diamandis
Yeah.
Cathie Wood
We think that’s going to change, but it’ll take a while for the S&P to catch up because they need to see the revenue growth and profitability. They are lagging in terms of getting these new stocks in there.
If you look at our Big Ideas, we go into a section where we say, “Disruptive innovation, we believe, is going to compound in terms of returns in the market at a 35% annualized rate for the next 5 years.”
Peter Diamandis
Which of your funds is focused on that?
Cathie Wood
All of our funds are focused on it. Our flagship, which incorporates all of the platforms, is ARKK. And so, yes. That’s a tall order.
We went through a very tough period. Innovation everywhere was crucified, including in venture, as we went through the supply shocks and monetary policy associated with COVID. Very few people believe this because innovation has recently been through such a tough time.
We think it’s coming out the other side, that the rubber band has stretched, and, in fact, COVID has accelerated the digitalization of the world—of every part of our lives.
Peter Diamandis
Just looking here, ARKK has seen about a 31% to 33% annualized rate of return over the last 2 years, which is pretty amazing.
Cathie Wood
Yes.
So our 3-year numbers are starting to ramp toward the number we're saying. But in order to average, we'll have to go past that 35%. And I think we will, but again, most people in our business roll their eyes because they're so wedded to these benchmarks.
Now, if I'm going to try to get at an economic measure of progress, I'm going to look at gross national income while most people focus on GDP. That's the other side of GDP, and it's measured using a lot of information from the IRS and the state and local tax authorities. So that metric is going to be more accurate in terms of the kind of growth rates. They should equal, but they don't. There's always a statistical discrepancy, and that discrepancy is growing because we can't measure from an output side some of the effects that we've been talking about here. That will show on the income side, however.
Dr. Alexander Wissner-Gross
So GDP is the answer, or GNI?
Cathie Wood
GNI.
Dr. Alexander Wissner-Gross
It's not some sort of per-capita productivity.
Cathie Wood
Right. I think it would be GNI. Productivity is also something very hard to measure, and that's why we believe it's being underestimated today. It is about 2% on a year-over-year basis, and we think it's undermeasured.
Now, what does that mean? The way GDP is constructed, if we are underestimating productivity, then we're underestimating real GDP growth, and we are overestimating inflation. So it's a little puzzle that fits together. But there's so much mismeasurement that policymakers, if they're not in the mindset we're in and they're trusting these numbers that are coming out, are going to make mistakes.
Peter Diamandis
Well, policymakers also choose the numbers convenient for making their points.
Cathie Wood
Oh, that very often is the case.
Peter Diamandis
And they have lots of numbers to choose from. I want to move us forward into this next topic. In your Big Ideas report, you had a conversation about the US versus China.
Cathie Wood
Mm-hmm.
Peter Diamandis
I think this is driving much of the Trump policies today.
Cathie Wood
Mm-hmm.
Peter Diamandis
David Sacks speaks about this currently. This has been a large conversation just coming back from Davos. At the same time, we have people speaking about how we need to slow down because we don't understand where we're heading with the emergence of AGI or ASI, whatever you want to call it.
But the bogeyman is that if the US doesn't dominate, it has a chance of failing globally and financially. By the way, we can talk about the US dollar as the global reserve currency, which has been falling in terms of its utilization globally. That's a challenge at the same time that this is going on. Would you take a second and walk us through this chart from your report?
Cathie Wood
Yes. We have been tracking all of the large language models coming out of China. They're all open source. We actually forced China into the open-source movement, and I love open source. I have a high degree of conviction in open source. Linux has been the poster child.
Peter Diamandis
“We” as in the US, you're saying?
Cathie Wood
We—the US—
Peter Diamandis
Yeah, that's right.
Cathie Wood
We forced China because we stopped selling our software into China. The companies did; this was not a government initiative. It was because of IP theft. With the DeepSeek moment, what did we learn? Wow, they have capitalized on open source, and now they're ahead of us.
And with Llama 4 falling flat the way it did—it was Meta's open-source attempt—I think it's now going closed-source as well.
Peter Diamandis
Mm-hmm.
Cathie Wood
Now, Clawdbot—I'm sorry, I forgot. I didn't know it had been renamed. Thank you for telling me. Did you say it—what was the name again?
Dr. Alexander Wissner-Gross
It's now Molt, as in a crustacean molting its shell. M-O-L-T. Moltbot, with its mascot being Mr. Lobster.
Peter Diamandis
Oh my God.
Cathie Wood
Okay. So—
Peter Diamandis
That had to be just yesterday, right?
Dr. Alexander Wissner-Gross
That was the past 24 hours.
Peter Diamandis
Cathie, you're not out of it.
I guess 24 hours in AI time is like a year. But Cathie, Alex's favorite book—and I think Dave and I are right behind him on this—is called Accelerando. It opens in chapter 1 with the neuronal structure of lobsters being beamed down to the universe, and it goes from there.
Cathie Wood
Well, that's okay.
Dr. Alexander Wissner-Gross
Alex tracks the news at minute-to-minute levels, so feeling like you're behind Alex is totally normal for everybody.
Cathie Wood
We just got out of our morning meeting, and usually I'm right on it—we're all right on top of all of this. So thank you for letting me know. I'll let everyone else know.
Peter Diamandis
Well, hi.
Cathie Wood
And the interesting thing about lobsters is that I'm on the board of the Dalí Museum here in St. Pete. There are only 2 Dalí museums, one in Barcelona and one here. He featured lobsters in his art regularly, so I'm going to have to read this book.
Peter Diamandis
Perfect.
Cathie Wood
It must mean something.
Dr. Alexander Wissner-Gross
Yeah, I think lobsters—I've made the point in my newsletter—are the new mascots for the singularity.
Cathie Wood
It's so interesting because Dalí was—
Peter Diamandis
I'll text it to you right now, Cathie.
Cathie Wood
Oh, and fascinating. Dalí was so technology-oriented. I don't know if you know that about him.
Peter Diamandis
Mm-hmm.
Cathie Wood
His art included the double helix—DNA—right after Watson and Crick really identified it. I think they did that in the '50s, and in the early '60s, there it was in his paintings. So I find this fascinating, the lobster element of it. Anyway—
Salim Ismail
A humble crustacean embodying economic growth.
Cathie Wood
Yeah.
Peter Diamandis
All right. I've just texted you that, Cathie, so enjoy your book.
Cathie Wood
Thank you. So the Clawdbot or Moltbot is open source, and I think that started in the US, so maybe that's where this is going. I was just on a call called the Bitcoin Brainstorm with Alex Gladstein, who's now become infatuated with AI as well as Bitcoin and how they can work together. He was all over Clawdbot, and it's just taking the world by storm.
This is individual agency at work here, not the big companies. So it's going to be fascinating to see where this goes. I'm glad we're hopping back into the open-source movement. If you look at investment as a share of GDP, this includes property, and it applies to both China and the US. In the US, our share of GDP is a little north of 20%. In China, it's 40%, and it's been there since they entered the World Trade Organization.
So their “investment”—now, it includes property, but we know that property is deflating big time there—is staying up at that 40% range because Xi Jinping has moved away from “common prosperity” as the slogan toward “new productive forces.” That's all about technology. So they are pouring money into this, and we should be on guard.
I think it's great that we know about their open-source movement, because there's nothing like competition to get the US going. So I actually think the competition is very good. And if you want to see China at work in AI as applied to healthcare, it's unbelievable. Peter, I know you've talked about this.
It's unbelievable what's going on there.
Peter Diamandis
Alex Zharov, who's the CEO of Insilico Medicine, just went public on the Hong Kong Exchange. It was 1,200 times oversubscribed, and I just talked to him. He was in Beijing yesterday. I was Zooming with him, and the market there in biotech is exploding.
Cathie Wood
It is.
Peter Diamandis
It is, and the companies are going public. There is a financial market driving the acceleration, and the government is pouring money in.
Cathie Wood
Yes.
Salim Ismail
And the clinical trials—they're doing far better, I mean—
Peter Diamandis
Yep.
Salim Ismail
In terms of the raw numbers, many more clinical trials are happening in China now than in the West.
Peter Diamandis
Yeah.
Cathie Wood
Yes, and part of that is that our regulation is much more strict than theirs. That is changing.
Peter Diamandis
Yeah, the new FDA commissioner is doing a great job, bringing down barriers. So Salim, can I hear your voice in the US-versus-China conversation here?
Salim Ismail
Yeah. I continue to think that as we push toward abundance, this tension is less relevant.
I also made the point in the last podcast that I think this will be won or lost at the application layer, and I think the US has such a massive lead in the application layer that it'll win there. It's incredible to me how much the US, via Silicon Valley thinking, has blown the world apart and taken over across all application layers, with one exception of TikTok and maybe Spotify. But other than that, all—
Peter Diamandis
But what about the energy layer here? The inner loop—
Salim Ismail
That's huge. As we bring energy closer to the inner loop, it'll be a huge challenge. That was definitely true.
Cathie Wood
Yes, and—
Dr. Alexander Wissner-Gross
I think Cathie's point on open source, though, is far more important than that makes it sound because, when you look at the number of people actually working on these core algorithms inside Anthropic and OpenAI, it's a tiny, tiny, tiny group of people, and they're super arrogant. They think they're the smartest people in the history of algorithms, and so on. As soon as you move all the research out of open source and into just the closed models, the number of ideas that can flow into the US version of it gets throttled tremendously.
Salim Ismail
Yeah.
Dr. Alexander Wissner-Gross
And it does capture all the money, and it does also address the safety issues, but it also slows innovation like crazy. So the Chinese version of it is, “Hey—”
Salim Ismail
But look at Claude versus Moltbot, right? That's the application layer, making it available to anybody to implement their functionality, and there, that's where open source thrives. That's frankly where the US really thrives.
Dr. Alexander Wissner-Gross
Well, it's consistent, too, with past Chinese races to catch up. They poison the air, poison the water, whatever. Just run. Don't worry about the regulatory issues. Don't worry about the toxic fumes coming out. We need to catch up. So the AI equivalent of that is, look, just open-source everything, allow our 1.4-billion-person population to try things, and we'll innovate like crazy. And they're just right. They're fundamentally right. Having that many more people work on it—
Now, the only good news for the US is that that open source flows right back to the US. It's not like it's hidden in China.
Cathie Wood
Yes.
Dr. Alexander Wissner-Gross
But I really do believe the open-source community innovates much, much more quickly, but it's also very, very dangerous in terms of all the negative use cases.
Cathie Wood
It's interesting that our government has had nothing to say about Meta Platforms acquiring Manus. Now, maybe they will. Manus is an open-source Chinese company as well. It is also interesting to have watched Sam Altman and Jensen Huang when they talked about DeepSeek. They said, “Hey, that algorithm was pretty clever.” Kudos to China and the DeepSeek founder. But guess what? That has given us the opportunity to distill into our own models. So it's very interesting: on the software side, our government is not having much to say, but on the hardware side, of course, it has much more to say.
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6. Bitcoin’s Million Dollar Case
Peter Diamandis
You were on stage with me live a few years ago, and then on video 2 years ago because of COVID. But your prediction of Bitcoin getting to $1 million—do you still hold out for that kind of a target? What are you seeing that gives you hope even while we're seeing this recent downturn? Give us your thoughts and projections on Bitcoin, Cathie.
Cathie Wood
Sure. We have not moved off that. That's our bull case: $1.5 million in 2030. There are a few compositional changes. One: stablecoins, especially Tether in the emerging markets, have usurped one of the roles that we thought Bitcoin would serve.
We thought that, before stablecoins, people would buy Bitcoin—and they were—as an insurance policy against confiscation of wealth, either in the form of inflation, hyperinflation, and massive devaluations, which occur regularly in the emerging markets, or outright confiscation of wealth. Stablecoins now serve that purpose. Stablecoins are backed effectively by the US dollar, so therefore are hostage to our fiat monetary system. That would've taken our price target down by $200,000 to $300,000.
On the other side, what has happened to gold recently? Gold has doubled over the last 2 years and has outperformed Bitcoin royally in the last year. So the digital-gold role—and we think, with intergenerational wealth transfers accelerating throughout the world, that the younger generation will diversify into a digital-gold option rather than physical gold. It's more their world. We think that role has increased, or that the price should be supported by what has happened to gold.
Now, if you look at a correlation matrix between 2020 and 2025, the correlation between Bitcoin and gold has been almost nonexistent: 0.14. But if you look at what's happened historically, certainly in the last 2 cycles, gold has led Bitcoin, so we think Bitcoin is getting ready for another big, big run.
What happened on 10/10 was the flash crash caused by a software glitch at Binance, and it left a lot of highly leveraged speculators or investors way offsides. There was an automatic deleveraging that took place, with about $28 billion worth of positions being offsides. We're hearing that that's pretty much cleared out. So we have very high hopes for Bitcoin.
Talking to the team—we had a number of people on the Bitcoin brainstorm yesterday—our thinking is, okay, stablecoins are serving a humanitarian purpose, this insurance policy backed by the dollar. But—and consider this is the Bitcoin crowd—they believe, and I do too, that Bitcoin's cause is freedom, financial freedom—
Peter Diamandis
Mm-hmm.
Cathie Wood
—from all government oversight and so forth, and from censorship and seizure and all sorts of things. As emerging markets' wealth grows, and we think this is a global phenomenon with all these technologies, they will move toward Bitcoin from a savings point of view. Right now, they're hand to mouth for the most part—
Peter Diamandis
Right.
Cathie Wood
—but from a savings point of view, they will move into Bitcoin.
Peter Diamandis
Like El Salvador. I mean, Bitcoin was always viewed as the counter to the inflationary pressures of the dollar—that as the world becomes more unstable with wars, inflation increases, post-COVID, more money is printed, people would flock to Bitcoin to sustain wealth versus having it inflated away, and I don't think we've actually seen that. Do you?
Cathie Wood
Well, I know that if you look at the bottom of the bear markets in equities and crypto in late 2022, Bitcoin has gone up, I think, roughly 360%. So definitely, one of the reasons was the inflation back then and fears that the Fed would not get it under control. So I think it has played the role. The question I get a lot is, “Wait a minute, you're expecting not inflation, but deflation.”
Peter Diamandis
Mm-hmm.
Cathie Wood
“Doesn't that take away an important role that you think Bitcoin's going to play?” Our answer there is yes: Bitcoin is a hedge against inflation. It's mathematically metered to top out at 21 million. It's going up 0.8% per year right now, which will drop to 0.4%. Its supply is now rising more slowly than gold's supply—
Peter Diamandis
Right.
Cathie Wood
Gold miners can just go out and—
Peter Diamandis
Yeah.
Cathie Wood
They can respond to this price signal, so their mining has picked up.
But what about the deflation side? If you think about 2008 and 2009, which was the catastrophic deflation that threatened a global financial bust and introduced all kinds of counterparty risk, Bitcoin is a hedge against that. If you self-custody Bitcoin, you're not subject to any counterparty risk. It's yours, and it's in your wallet. So we think it plays a very important role in both, and especially—
Peter Diamandis
Yeah.
Cathie Wood
—if we're right on how disruptive the world is going to be as it's disrupted by these 5 innovation platforms and 15 different technologies that are converging, then there's going to be a lot of chaos in the traditional world order, and there's probably going to be a lot more bankruptcies out there—
than many people expect.
Dave Blundin
Speaking of chaos, Cathie, we're getting a great case study right now in Iran, where I spent my childhood. We had an intern in our venture fund, Farah, and she said her parents are still in Iran. She's Iranian, and her parents are still in Iran, and all the transactions for years now at the bazaar where we used to buy rice and stuff when I was a kid—they're all done with Bitcoin. Everybody has to have a phone. The only way you can actually buy things is with Bitcoin, and that's been going on for years. I think it's probably illegal. Nobody cares. And now you've got a revolution. Obviously, the currency—
Cathie Wood
Yes.
Dave Blundin
—is completely unusable at this stage. The country is teetering on the brink. I noticed in the blockchain ledger reports—this was a couple of years ago—a hugely disproportionate fraction of transactions came from Iran.
Cathie Wood
Yes.
Dave Blundin
So this will be a good bellwether, because with that kind of disruption in Venezuela and all around the world, a massive fraction of the population of the world lives in unstable places.
Cathie Wood
Absolutely.
Dave Blundin
So if all of Iran moves to Bitcoin because people are going to be fleeing the country imminently, as quickly as they can get out, then that's a bellwether and a case study for what could happen to probably over half the population of the world with all the disruption that's coming.
Cathie Wood
Right.
Peter Diamandis
I have an ARK Invest-worthy tracking system. The market cap of gold is almost 20 times that of Bitcoin, but the daily trading volume of Bitcoin is only a quarter of what gold is. It's already a quarter. So, proportionately, the amount of trading volume of Bitcoin way, way exceeds that of gold. I find that a really fascinating indicator.
Cathie Wood
Okay.
Peter Diamandis
Cathie Wood
Yes.
Dave Blundin
Well, in India and Iran, too, people are huge hoarders of gold. What you do fundamentally with your surplus money is try and buy as much gold as you can, because you can leave the country with it, because it seems to hold its value, and nothing else is stable. But if people start to trust crypto, or Bitcoin in particular, instead of gold, like you said, there's a generational mindset shift.
Cathie Wood
Mm-hmm.
Dave Blundin
So I think in Iran right now, it's a transactional mechanism. You can't use gold easily to buy a bag of rice—
Cathie Wood
Right.
Dave Blundin
—but you can use Bitcoin. But I think if the mindset shifts to store of wealth, like Michael Saylor is saying, then that will percolate across the world very quickly, across one generation.
Cathie Wood
Absolutely. We agree wholeheartedly.
7. Digital Assets Replace IPOs
Peter Diamandis
This next slide here is, “Digital assets could reach $20 trillion in market value,” which implies the entire size of the US stock market back in 2010. I mean, this is—
Cathie Wood
Right, and it's the size of the US economy now, roughly.
Peter Diamandis
Yes, exactly.
Cathie Wood
Yes.
Peter Diamandis
It's insane. And growing—
Cathie Wood
Yes.
Peter Diamandis
—and the laws are falling to enable this, and companies are popping up to accelerate this. This is smart contracts growing massively—
Cathie Wood
Yes. Yes.
Dave Blundin
Cathie, do you have any thoughts? So this is all about store of wealth and replacing currency, but what about replacing the IPO? If AI takes off and Elon is right, we get triple-digit growth rates.
Peter Diamandis
Great question, Dave.
Dave Blundin
Does the ICO replace the IPO, or how's that going to work?
Cathie Wood
Yeah. A lot of people have been thinking, in the early days of Bitcoin and especially Ether, that we'd have much better-distributed opportunities in the private markets. I think we're seeing, for example, Robinhood. Robinhood wants to work with the big companies to decentralize the ownership of these companies. We're doing that too. We're democratizing with something called an interval fund.
Robinhood is very crypto-savvy and, from an infrastructure point of view, is building that up. I wouldn't be surprised to see a version of what we originally thought was going to take place, without an intermediary, happen first with Robinhood.
Dave Blundin
Mm-hmm.
Cathie Wood
So I think it's very possible in the next 3 years.
Dave Blundin
I love that view. We have to study that closely as it evolves. Something is going to happen. There's no doubt.
Peter Diamandis
The secondary markets have become some level of liquidity, right? Dave, as the head of Link Ventures and Link Exponential Ventures, we're buying into companies out of MIT and Harvard at a $10 million or $20 million valuation, with a first check in. They're growing to $100 million. We've had a number of them grow to $1 billion or $2 billion very rapidly, and these are companies started by 20-year-olds, 19-year-olds.
Cathie Wood
Yeah.
Peter Diamandis
It's insane. But getting them to an exit—and fortunately, the IPO market is beginning, but hasn't frothed up to where it's been—and the M&A market has been suppressed, where companies are not buying companies; they are buying rights to companies these days. I guess the question is, Dave, you're seeing selling into the secondary markets as a way to provide interim liquidity. How do we accelerate that? Are we seeing major—
Dave Blundin
Yeah, it's a great question, because I talked to Michael Karman over at Wellington about this. When Uber was private, he was a huge investor, a multibillion-dollar investor from Wellington into Uber, and he was like, “You know, we never need to take this thing public. We can just trade it in the private markets forever, and that's the future.”
Then what happens is people get a little scared and run back to the US public markets. Anytime there's any kind of trouble or turbulence—COVID, whatever—it all falls back to the US public markets because that's the last trustworthy thing to lean on. But it clearly won't keep up with the rate of AI, so something is going to change. There's no doubt about that.
It's just that anytime there's any kind of fear in the world, it all falls back to, “Well, I can trust the SEC. You can trust GAAP accounting.” And at the end of the day, if everything trades privately, that—
Peter Diamandis
IBM, General Motors, General Electric.
Dave Blundin
I mean, look, a16z is $90 billion now. General Catalyst is $60 billion. That's a fair amount of money, but by Cathie Wood's standards, that's a joke, right? In the Cathie world, the numbers start at $1 trillion, and they go to $100 trillion.
Cathie Wood
Yeah.
Dave Blundin
And so if you're not tapping into that capital pool, you're not going to really drive AI. So, yeah, there's another level of scale we need to penetrate somehow.
Cathie Wood
Yeah.
Peter Diamandis
Dave, on that note, a question for you, Cathie. Are we going to see $100 trillion companies by 2030? We're seeing the $5 trillion company now. We're about to see SpaceX go public, maybe merge with Tesla. I'm curious about which way Elon is going to get liquidity for SpaceX or stability. Is it going to be a merger or an IPO? And then can we see tens of trillions or a $100 trillion valuation on companies? What are your thoughts there?
Cathie Wood
Yeah, it's interesting. I'm not sure if he said it on your podcast; I'm not quite sure where I heard this, but he said, “I can see convergences among my companies that I didn't expect.” We'd been saying that for some time, because in the world of AI, what do you have to have to win? You have to have proprietary data.
Think about all the proprietary data he has—different kinds of proprietary data. Tesla, the language of the roads. Neuralink, he's got multi-omics data now to source. SpaceX—nobody else has that data. X, nobody else has that data either. And The Boring Company—no one has that data.
So I could see, yes, $100 trillion. I think it's going to happen because of convergence—the convergence of—
Dave Blundin
So you could see a $100 trillion company come online—
Cathie Wood
Yes.
Dave Blundin
by 2030?
Cathie Wood
I think there could be. The leading candidate is Tesla for the reason I just said, and there could be some combinations taking place as part of that.
It is interesting also—I know there are rumors about SpaceX lining up bankers—and I never thought that SpaceX would go public. I didn't think it needed to go public. I think Elon's experience with Tesla and the public markets hasn't been the most welcoming. But I think if SpaceX were to go public, it is because of this orbital data center opportunity.
Peter Diamandis
That was on this pod, actually, Cathie. This is one of the incredible things about Elon. We threw him a kind of softball and said, “Look at everything that's converging in your empire toward this one centerpiece. If you achieve the Starlink and the global data center in space with satellites or with laser links, I mean, everything you've ever done in your life converges to this one monstrous $100 trillion success.” The foresight must have been incredible.
He said, “No, no, no. It's totally luck.” He said, “Nothing to do with each other.” And I thought that was just incredible, because it was his opportunity to lie like crazy, which he would never do—
Cathie Wood
No.
Peter Diamandis
…and claim genius, which he would never do.
Cathie Wood
Yeah.
Peter Diamandis
And he completely said, “Nope, it's just…” But you know what it is: AI is causing everything to converge.
Cathie Wood
Yes.
Peter Diamandis
And so—
Cathie Wood
No question about it.
Peter Diamandis
Yeah.
Cathie Wood
That's why we set up our firm and our research the way we've set it up. Think about it: with Tesla, why did we get that more right than anybody else on the street? It is because we had our robotics, energy storage, and AI analysts working on it together.
Peter Diamandis
Yeah.
Cathie Wood
In a traditional firm, you had the auto analyst—the expert in the internal-combustion-engine, human-driven car—as the sole analyst. The tech analyst might have been fighting for it, and there's a little bit of turf war there, but the tech analyst lost.
Peter Diamandis
Yes.
Cathie Wood
And so they didn't get it right, and they're still not getting it right.
Peter Diamandis
Yeah, Cathie, I define an expert as someone who can tell you exactly how it can't be done, right?
Cathie Wood
Yes.
Peter Diamandis
And so the… Yeah.
8. Active Investing Makes A Comeback
Dr. Alexander Wissner-Gross
I'd be curious on that point, Cathie, to get your sense, given that you operate a number of actively traded ETFs, on the notion of the efficient-market hypothesis. Surely it must be the case that, in your mind, for you to rationalize running actively managed ETFs, the market must be sufficiently inefficient to motivate those ETFs.
I'm curious: as part of your technical thesis, we're surely moving to a world of superintelligence, to the extent we're not there already, where superintelligence is itself an active trader in the market already on a daily-volume basis. Volume is completely dominated by algo traders. At what point does it make sense, due to an abundance of superintelligence, not even to bother with actively managed ETFs anymore and just let indexing take over?
Cathie Wood
That's a great question. Certainly, there's a pattern-recognition part to algorithms, but if you think about AI, AI should obliterate benchmark-sensitive portfolios. I think the market's never been more inefficient than it is today.
Salim Ismail
Mm-hmm.
Cathie Wood
The reason for that is that, after the tech and telecom bust in the early 2000s, and even more so after the '08–'09 financial crash, risk aversion in the markets reached an extreme. I think even with this administration—and it had a first administration, too—there was a lot of uncertainty, a lot of angst, and a lot of volatility. So it pushed investors even more toward their benchmarks.
I think anyone with that strategy has made a huge strategic blunder, and what I'm excited about is prediction markets.
Dave Blundin
Yes.
Cathie Wood
Prediction markets are going to bring about the return of truly active investment. People who call themselves active investors have, at the heart of active investment, an index: the portfolio manager looks at the index and says, “I'll take a little more of this, and I'll take a little less of that,” based on my always short-term time horizon. It has gotten increasingly short because of all I just said.
So they just take a little bit more of this Mag 6 stock and a little less of that Mag 6 stock, and they all look alike. They all look alike. We look like a different duck altogether. I mean, we don't look anything like them, and the reason is we're doing original research that is very forward-looking, over the next 5 years. That's derided by the traditional financial markets.
I think the ChatGPT moment started to change that. That was a very important moment for the investment world as well. Because everyone's using it and they're saying, “Okay, wait a minute. The ground is shifting underneath me. This AI thing—what does this mean?” So finally, we're getting more forward-thinking institutional investors.
The retail investors have always been futuristic, you know? And so that's why we've appealed to the retail investor more than to the institutional investor, who is also playing it safe. I think it's good that the… I think you're right to ask the question, but I think the first-order effect is to destroy anyone that looks like a benchmark right now. There's no value added there, and it should start rewarding those who are doing the original research to try and figure out the way the world is going to work.
At ARK Invest, we'll harness AI ourselves—we already are—to try and figure that out. And as you say, Peter, we're going to have to work on our charts, beautifying them with AI, and that's exactly what we're going to do. I think this is a very good lesson.
9. Energy Powers The Next Boom
Peter Diamandis
Let's go to the innermost loop. Let's talk about energy a little bit. Again, a couple of charts from the Big Ideas Report 2026. Increasingly efficient energy is powering the global economy. We're seeing kilowatt-hours per dollar of GDP drop.
Cathie Wood
Mm-hmm.
Peter Diamandis
We're seeing global capacity increase. A lot of solar, again, mostly from China, which is running circles around us. At the same time, we're seeing the cost of solar and batteries decline. I mean, incredible progress on batteries in the last year.
These two things—I don't think people realize how critical energy is fundamentally. It ties not only to GDP, but to standards of living, health, and education in every nation on the planet, and especially with data centers right now, it's fundamental to dominance as a nation-state.
Cathie Wood
Mm-hmm.
Peter Diamandis
Thoughts on this, Cathie?
Cathie Wood
Yeah. If you go back to the last chart, one of the things I find fascinating is that we focused a lot on nuclear in this Big Ideas Report, but look at the efficiency of all countries, or major countries. China is half as efficient as those other countries—that's a bit of an exaggeration.
Now, what is it doing to offset that? It is building—they may have more now—28 large nuclear reactors at one time. The U.S. is not building one large reactor. I know we're reengaging with some of the old ones, but I think our regulatory stance is changing there dramatically.
That's one thing I took away from that. What's wonderful about innovation, and what you do, is helping people understand what they're saying. Yes, we need to become more energy efficient. It's a given, and we are becoming more energy efficient. Economic activity is energy transformed. You are helping people understand that.
Others who just blindly say energy is bad are not thinking clearly about what they're saying. They're basically saying they want us to turn back to the dark ages. If we're going to progress, we're going to use more energy.
What's also interesting about the nuclear side of this is that the U.S. and Japan, in particular, started regulating nuclear in the '70s and killed the industry. The construction costs, which had been coming down in tandem with Wright's law—it's a technology—went up. Basically, if we had continued along Wright's law with nuclear, electricity costs in the United States would be 40% lower today.
Peter Diamandis
Mm-hmm.
Cathie Wood
I think our renewed enthusiasm for nuclear is important and will get us back on that Wright's law track. And yes, along with solar and, of course, Elon with orbital data centers, it would turbocharge the sourcing of solar for data centers.
Salim Ismail
I'm curious, Cathie. We talk on the pod sometimes about—perhaps you know the website wtfhappenedin1971.com. Assuming you're familiar with that, is it your view that nuclear, or the overregulation perhaps of nuclear energy, is what happened to the U.S. economy in 1971 that set us on a different course?
Cathie Wood
I think that going off the gold-exchange standard—closing the gold window and not having monetary policy linked to anything except human frailty—was… Then, of course, we had wage-price controls, all kinds of distortions, and just a general increase in regulation. Nuclear epitomized that.
That happened in 1974 or ’75, I think. So yes, it was that moment: going off the gold exchange standard and having no discipline. Oil prices quadrupled almost immediately and set us off on a very bad course.
Dave Blundin
And we stopped sending humans to the moon. A number of things—
Cathie Wood
Yes.
Dave Blundin
...happened around the same time.
Cathie Wood
Yes. And then Reaganomics—the combination of Volcker and Reaganomics policies, which are being repeated today: deregulation and tax cuts. Our corporate tax rate, our effective corporate tax rate, now in the United States is, I think, the lowest in the developed world, down from nearly the highest before Trump, in his first administration, started cutting the tax rates.
The depreciation schedules in the new tax law are astonishing, and they favor innovation in this country. Being able to depreciate a manufacturing structure completely in its first year of service instead of over 30 to 40 years means the companies that build manufacturing facilities here in the United States, as long as they start before the end of ’28, will get huge tax refunds that they can then plow back into R&D and/or cutting prices.
Peter Diamandis
Amazing.
Peter Diamandis
We’re reindustrializing, Cathie.
Cathie Wood
Pardon?
Peter Diamandis
We’re reindustrializing.
Cathie Wood
Yes, we are.
Peter Diamandis
Yeah.
Cathie Wood
I think we are going to see an economic boom in the next few years.
Peter Diamandis
Way beyond. This makes Elon’s 5× increase in GDP growth seem very reasonable. Dave, I’m curious. You and I have been having a chat by text about where to invest next. Again, not investment advice, but energy, energy infrastructure, energy production from SMRs, from fission. Fusion is a little bit far out for me right now, but also data center construction and so forth.
These numbers tend to seem like, yes, this is where we’re going to see the most investment and the most growth in public companies. What do you think?
Dr. Alexander Wissner-Gross
What’s different about us and Cathie in our text thread, Peter, is that we’re not trying to deploy $10 billion at a time, so we can afford to look deep into the data center stack. All these components in the supply chain have suddenly got infinite demand.
We saw this with Boom Supersonic, right? A company that was making supersonic engines suddenly goes up 10× or 100× or whatever in value because they can use the same components to make generators that are backlogged for years. So there’s—
Cathie Wood
Yeah, we own that in our venture fund, too. I presume you do?
Dave Blundin
I wish.
Peter Diamandis
I knew the founder of Boom, and I was like, “Oh my God.” A supersonic airplane dealing with the FAA is crazy. It’s going to be an infinite dollar sink, and then they found a marketplace.
Cathie Wood
They found a market.
Dave Blundin
Yeah.
Cathie Wood
A brilliant pivot.
Dave Blundin
A brilliant pivot.
Peter Diamandis
Yes, brilliant pivot.
Dave Blundin
So it’s a case study in 2 different things. One of them is that anything related to this AI build-out can be a latent 10× or 100× gain if you find it first. The other one is that great teams pivot, and a deal that looks like, “Wow, that’s a quagmire”—oh, wait, it’s an incredible team.
The rate of pivots now is so much quicker than it ever was before, so you always take the great team anyway and stick with the great team anyway. So it’s 2 different case studies in 1 there.
Peter and I, when we were texting about this, were looking for any and all undiscovered opportunities. Alexander has a lot of insights on photonics and the internet interconnect across these huge data centers, and getting the data to move very, very quickly. There’s lots of opportunity there.
But I think it’s all tied to the same theme. If you look just a couple of years into the future at massive orbital data centers, infinite demand for chips, and then the plumbing, the wiring, and everything that it takes to glue all this together, there are latent opportunities all over the place. Any insights there, Cathie, would be—
Cathie Wood
Well—
Dave Blundin
...obviously valuable.
Peter Diamandis
Cathie, walk us through this slide, if you would.
Cathie Wood
Sure. Before I do that, Dave just said something very important, I think, which is great teams. You have to start there.
What’s happening, and the reason we’re seeing these pivots being very successful, is convergences between and among the technologies to create entirely new industries. So there are many more opportunities to pivot.
The risk of passing on a deal because you say, “Well, wait a minute, regulation’s going to be a showstopper here,” may not be there if there’s a pivot in the way that Boom pivoted, which is right into regulatory arms. The regulators want this world to happen. So I think that’s important.
Peter Diamandis
Cumulative investment in global power needs to increase to $10 trillion by 2030.
Cathie Wood
Oh, yeah.
Peter Diamandis
So it’s just making the case that we’re going to see massive investments into power, right?
Cathie Wood
Yes. No question about it. There are going to be trillions of dollars invested into AI everything, and this is all related to AI.
Peter Diamandis
Yeah. All right.
Dr. Alexander Wissner-Gross
I’m curious, Cathie, also just on this energy theme: perhaps you’ve seen the Apple TV show For All Mankind, which posits an alternative history where nuclear energy in particular is fast-forwarded because the space race—humans landing on the moon—was never won by the United States. The Soviets landed first, so the space race continued.
I’m curious, in the vein of an alternative future history, and you speak the language of Wright’s law and, more broadly, experience curves, how far behind do you think we are relative to where we could have been if things had not gone off the rails, as it were, in the early to mid-1970s? Are we a decade behind? 50 years behind? Where should we be by now?
Cathie Wood
I think the energy side of things, meaning nuclear in particular, I can’t say we’re behind. I can say we’re behind on new construction now, but in the United States, nuclear does account for 20% of our electricity generation. We have more nuclear plants than China does. They are building 28, or whatever the number is now.
We need to get going on the large nuclear reactors. We need them all. We need large, medium, and small, and we’re invested in all of them in our venture fund. I think we lost a lot of time on nuclear, no doubt about it.
The whole world ended up in an inflation because we were the reserve currency, and so we brought everybody into this inflationary age in the ’70s, for the most part. I know Switzerland and a few countries were able to buck it, but inflation was a global phenomenon.
I think we’re in the right mindset now. Silicon Valley has always been in the right mindset. We’re trying to create a new Bay Area here. I think that’s something important as well: Silicon Valley—and California tax law is probably helping this—is obviously critically important when it comes to AI.
The talent has congregated there, but we are seeing more distribution throughout the United States now. I think that’s also important, and I think it’ll be important for the Western world as well. As the cost of innovation collapses, which it is doing, individual agency is more and more possible.
Peter Diamandis
You can be an entrepreneur anywhere as a single individual.
Cathie Wood
Yes.
Peter Diamandis
It’s amazing—
Cathie Wood
And, of course, China’s very entrepreneurial. You just have to go to China a few times and—
Peter Diamandis
Yeah.
Cathie Wood
...they’ll blow you away. But when you think about what happened with Jack Ma and all the tycoons, that became a bad thing. It was discouraged, unlike in the United States. So they’ve hurt themselves a little bit in that way, but that doesn’t take away from the entrepreneurial zeal.
Frankly, I think competition makes both of us better.
Peter Diamandis
For sure.
Salim Ismail
I maintain that entrepreneurship in China is so deep and so native they need socialism to put a lid on it. Otherwise, they’d sell their grandmother for profit.
Cathie Wood
Well, and that’s why Xi Jinping recently has been making the case for anti-involution. I think China is very proud of the fact that it’s commoditizing Western markets. But now he’s saying, “Wait a minute. We’re eating our own. We are commoditizing everything so much that we’re killing our own industries. How about thinking about profitability a little bit more?”
Which is shocking, right? Shocking coming out of China, but necessary.
10. Robotaxis Reshape Transportation
Peter Diamandis
We’re going to jump into our final topic with you, Cathie: autonomous vehicles. And there are so many topics that we could talk about.
We haven't even touched on humanoid robotics. Maybe we'll talk—
Cathie Wood
Yeah.
Peter Diamandis
…about it in the midst of Tesla, but let's jump in. So the news, of course, is that robotaxis are finally here. We've seen Waymo, and we've seen, obviously, Cybercabs coming online. We've just heard that Uber, Lucid, and NVIDIA are putting their own fleets on the roads, and of course there are dozens of equivalents in China.
So here are the numbers. Waymo's on the rise, and Lyft and Uber are on the decline. We're going to be seeing robotaxi miles and cumulative miles just spike. When I'm on the road here in Santa Monica, as I'm driving back and forth to the airport or taking my kids to school, we'll do a count of how many Waymos we see.
Cathie Wood
Uh-huh.
Peter Diamandis
On an average day right now, it's probably about 10 or 12 Waymos on the streets here. I'm imagining in about 4 or 5 years it's going to be 80% autonomous vehicles. What do you think?
Cathie Wood
We think so.
Peter Diamandis
Yeah.
Cathie Wood
We agree. And in this book as well, you'll see that we expect Tesla to be the biggest winner from a platform point of view. Waymo will be second, and the reason is Waymo's cost structure. It's dependent on suppliers. Unlike Tesla, which is vertically integrated—that's Elon's preference and modus operandi—Waymo is not.
In fact, for a time there, they had trouble attracting an auto supplier. So now they're working with Zeekr and Hyundai and a few others. They have fewer than 3,000 cars throughout the United States. So for you to see 10 in one run says they're probably concentrated close to where you are already. That's interesting.
But we think that Tesla's solution, from a cost point of view, will be 50% lower than Waymo's, and therefore it will be able to charge less. Now, between now and then, there's a huge amount of room for both of them to compete against Uber and Lyft because, with surge pricing, Uber's average price over the last 4 years has gone up 40%, from $2 to $2.80 per mile.
Salim Ismail
Per mile.
Cathie Wood
Right.
Salim Ismail
Yeah.
Cathie Wood
So that's a beautiful umbrella because we do agree, and our research corroborates what Elon is saying, which is that Tesla will be able to price at 20 cents per mile when at scale. Between now and then, this huge price umbrella is going to cause cash flow to explode at Tesla.
Dave Blundin
Yeah, that's something you're totally right about, Cathie, and I completely didn't get it until we went to the Gigafactory. I thought Elon didn't like suppliers just because he was a control freak, and it's just not true.
Cathie Wood
Right.
Dave Blundin
He doesn't like suppliers because he sees the exponential opportunity to manufacture. The demand is going to go through the roof overnight, and the only way to fulfill that demand is to turn raw aluminum into a car on the other side, or raw chips. You have to build all this stuff internally and plan ahead, but if you have even a single component in your supply chain, like Waymo does, that's constrained, then the entire supply chain has to wait for that one component.
Cathie Wood
Absolutely.
Dave Blundin
And so there'll be infinite demand for both Waymo and Tesla, but Tesla will make far, far more cars more quickly because Elon is thinking about doing everything inside that fully exponential, automated internal supply chain. Sorry, Salim, I cut you off there.
Cathie Wood
Right.
Salim Ismail
I would think one huge advantage Tesla also has, if they allow people to own their own cars and turn those into taxis, is that it would be massive. It's much more Exponential Organizations-friendly, where you don't want to own your own assets, right? This is why Uber scaled so fast, and I think that is a massive area of opportunity.
Cathie, on the convergence conversation, are you tracking the idea that millions of autonomous Cybercabs are inference engines and energy storage devices—
Cathie Wood
Oh, yeah.
Salim Ismail
…moving around cities?
Cathie Wood
Oh, yes. Oh, yes. And also tuning in to what Elon says regularly about how inefficient our grid is right now. It's not used very much at night and overly used sometimes during the day, depending on the weather. So, yes, distributed energy ecosystems, absolutely.
Dave Blundin
No, it's just amazing to me how much people underappreciate that when you look at a Tesla Gigafactory, right across the street you've got the Optimus factory going up, and you've got the data center. All of the components in this are general-purpose.
When you—
Cathie Wood
Yes.
Dave Blundin
…look at Ford or GM and you say, "What do you guys do?" "Well, we order the seats from China. We order the chassis from whoever. We order the drivetrain from whoever." If they want to become a robot company tomorrow, they can't because it's just a bunch of assembly of third-party components. It's a car company; it can only be a car company.
The way Elon has set up his empire, every part of that manufacturing supply chain can literally pivot to being a satellite manufacturing thing on short notice. It's all reconfigurable robots in a long chain. And so, yeah, I think that's maybe unique to him. Maybe Google's working on something similar and I don't know about it, but that's the future, right? Every one of these things—
Cathie Wood
Yeah.
Dave Blundin
…can be reconfigured using AI and robots.
Cathie Wood
That's it.
Dave Blundin
The other thing that's happening here in terms of our auto sector here in the United States is they're pulling back on electric.
Salim Ismail
Yeah.
Cathie Wood
Right? They're pulling back, but they're thinking robotaxis, trying to figure out how to insinuate my way into it.
Salim Ismail
They're coaching—
Cathie Wood
…my way—insinuate my way into it. This is all going to be one thing, and Tesla—Tesla figured this out. Elon figured it out in his first Master Plan. Maybe it was the second one, but whatever. He figured it out so long ago. It was there for them to see if they had decided to take him seriously.
Salim Ismail
Cathie, I can't see the automotive industry surviving this. It's going to be integrated with AI so that your AI knows your schedule. You're walking toward the front door. It sees you opening the handle. It knows where you're going to go, and an autonomous car is waiting for you there without you even asking for it. It's seamless, automagical futures that are coming.
Cathie Wood
I—
Salim Ismail
And—
Cathie Wood
I think the key—
Salim Ismail
Yeah.
Cathie Wood
…the key point here is that we only need a few tens of millions of cars to cover all of the U.S. vehicular—
Salim Ismail
Yes.
Cathie Wood
…needs, right? And right now we sell 90 million new cars globally a year. This is insane oversupply.
Salim Ismail
Yeah.
Cathie Wood
Mm-hmm. Yeah.
Dave Blundin
But I think there's, by comparison, effectively infinite demand for robots in different shapes and sizes. So I'll take the position: I think here I do see the automotive industry surviving. It'll just evolve into robots in the same way that bicycles, arguably, plus carriages evolved, in some sense—
Salim Ismail
Yes.
Dave Blundin
…into—
Salim Ismail
Airplanes.
Dave Blundin
…airplanes and automobiles.
Salim Ismail
So, totally right, but the sector survives and gets bigger than ever. But then, within the sector, if you look under the covers at some of these companies, they're not positioned at all to pivot and make robots, and others—
Dave Blundin
Zero.
Salim Ismail
…you know, others are. And America loves reinventing. Just kill the old thing. Let's create a new startup. We just love it. Sorry, Cathie, go ahead.
Cathie Wood
Yeah.
Salim Ismail
There's a really key point I wanted to point out here. The difference between human-driven ride-hailing and a fully autonomous system is literally more than 10X. It's an incredible drop.
Cathie Wood
Yes. Yes. See, this is the thing. They grew up on the internal combustion engine and human driving, so their DNA is not right.
Salim Ismail
Mm-hmm.
Cathie Wood
They'll reconfigure, consolidate, restructure, all of that, sure. But this happens all the time when it comes to disruptive innovation: They will not win in this space. They just won't—
Salim Ismail
Uh—
Cathie Wood
…because this space is the convergence of 3 technologies they have not been working on. Robotics, in the way that Elon has evolved his robots and his cars; AI was always a part of the equation. Always.
Dave Blundin
Yeah.
Cathie Wood
And energy storage was as well. So electric vehicle costs continue to fall. Internal combustion engine costs—it's a completely mature industry. According to Wright's law, a cumulative doubling from this level would take them, I don't know, 100 years. So they are not riding down any cost curve the way they would be if they stuck to electric vehicles, which are riding down a cost curve—the learning curve.
Dr. Alexander Wissner-Gross
I think we may also be leaving out a very important component, which is, as Elon would call it, "the machine that makes the machine."
Cathie Wood
Mm-hmm.
Dr. Alexander Wissner-Gross
We're talking about ICE versus electric, but the very important component I think we're leaving out is how they're made.
And right now, legacy auto companies lean heavily on unionized human labor.
Dave Blundin
Totally right.
Cathie Wood
Mm-hmm.
Dr. Alexander Wissner-Gross
And much of that is going to be automated with robots. So I guess—
Cathie Wood
Yes.
Dr. Alexander Wissner-Gross
In question form for Cathie, do you think maybe a barrier to competition that Tesla has is that, at least among American car companies, it’s leaning more heavily into roboticized automation for manufacturing in a way that the legacy manufacturers aren’t or can’t?
Cathie Wood
Without a doubt. Maybe it was three or four years ago, Elon said, “I’ve discovered that I’m a manufacturer of factories.” That was an important aha moment for us as well, because he was designing the manufacturing—the factories—of the future, and he had the right technologies involved. So, yes.
Dr. Alexander Wissner-Gross
Mm-hmm.
Dave Blundin
Well, also, to Alex’s point, when the original Gigafactory in California shut down during COVID, Elon just said, “Screw it. I’m leaving California. I’m never coming back. This is insane.”
Cathie Wood
Mm-hmm.
Dave Blundin
So now he’s in Texas and building in a much better regulatory environment. But if you look at the legacy car companies, the unions, how tied those unions are to the voter pool in those regions, and the pension plans, it’s just impossible to escape. Starting a new, clean sheet of paper in a new jurisdiction is actually cheaper than retooling a legacy car company.
Cathie Wood
Yes.
Dr. Alexander Wissner-Gross
And they can’t—
Salim Ismail
And it’s worse in Europe, where they have, in Germany, for example, worker councils that determine what BMW or Mercedes are allowed to do as a corporation, which is nuts.
Dave Blundin
Totally right. This was a big deal in Davos. Europe doesn’t have a place to go. If you want to hide your money, you can go to Liechtenstein or Monaco, but if you want to build a cheap car company in an unregulated environment—or, not unregulated at all, just a rational environment—where do you go? There’s regulatory—
Salim Ismail
They’ll go to Ukraine. No, they’ll go to Ukraine eventually.
Dr. Alexander Wissner-Gross
Yeah.
Salim Ismail
Ukraine will—
Dr. Alexander Wissner-Gross
Go to special economic zones like Texas.
Dave Blundin
Yeah.
Cathie Wood
I know that most people think Europe is completely lost. From a technology and regulatory point of view, I think the collapse of innovation and individual agency will help. But from a macro level, I agree with that. Peter, in the age of abundance, I’m looking for scarcity. Obviously, Bitcoin comes to mind. But the other thing is, what does Europe have that other countries don’t have? Why do we all go there for vacation?
Salim Ismail
Beautiful buildings.
Cathie Wood
The lifestyle.
Salim Ismail
Lifestyle, yeah.
Cathie Wood
The lifestyle. It’s easygoing, the food, the—
Salim Ismail
Lifestyle as a service.
Cathie Wood
So I wouldn’t write off Europe as though it’s just going to serve the rest of the world in the way it always has. It just will be—
Dr. Alexander Wissner-Gross
Cute piazzas and espresso.
Dave Blundin
I’ll make my prediction. The talent, the latent talent pool in Europe is like you would not believe. Brilliant people.
Cathie Wood
Oh, absolutely.
Dave Blundin
Historically, people from India flood the US, make a ton of money, and then retire wherever they want to retire. Europeans don’t do it because it’s so hard to leave Europe. It’s so wonderful.
Cathie Wood
Mm-hmm.
Dave Blundin
But I think the disparity is getting so wide now that the entrepreneurial community is going to start flocking to the US, work 10 years or whatever, keep their place in Europe, and bounce back and forth.
Cathie Wood
Mm-hmm.
Dave Blundin
I suspect that’ll unlock, but Europe is just very, very hard to leave. It really is.
Salim Ismail
Can I give the counterpoint here?
Dave Blundin
Yeah, of course.
Cathie Wood
Oh, sure.
Salim Ismail
I think if you’re a European entrepreneur, coming to the US in the past was a real option. It’s not really an option right now. I think what’s—
What’s going to happen is—
Dave Blundin
Why?
Salim Ismail
It’s going to force a change in the regulatory structure in Europe because it can’t sustain. They have to break through via special economic zones or whatever. They will have to make a structural change very, very soon, and I think they’ll do it.
Dave Blundin
And we saw that at Davos this year, right? Basically trying to create a commonality across corporations. When you incorporate in one country, you’re incorporated in all of them and the rules are the same, trying to unify its innovation system in some fashion.
Dr. Alexander Wissner-Gross
It’s called EU Inc.
Dave Blundin
Yes.
When your voter base starts tipping in one direction, then it gets into a death spiral, and I don’t see how you get out of that death spiral. No matter what is rational, you look at these tax proposals in California and Massachusetts, and the governor is like, “No way. This is insane.”
Cathie Wood
Mm-hmm.
Dave Blundin
“Don’t do this.”
Cathie Wood
Mm-hmm.
Dave Blundin
And yet it still goes through.
Salim Ismail
Here’s our last slide. Fully autonomous delivery is here. We’ve been focusing on robotaxis for a long time, but we’re seeing 4 million deliveries per year. Keller Clifton with Zipline is crushing it.
Cathie Wood
Yes. We own it.
Salim Ismail
What an incredible story that is.
Cathie Wood
Yeah.
Salim Ismail
Yeah, I love it.
Cathie Wood
Yes.
Salim Ismail
—
Cathie Wood
Yes, and he started—what’s so beautiful about that story is he started in Rwanda, sending medical supplies, and I think he cut the mortality rate of maternal—
Salim Ismail
Maternal pregnancy—
Cathie Wood
At—
Salim Ismail
Yeah, maternal bleed-outs from pregnancy by a huge amount.
Cathie Wood
Yeah, more than 50%.
Dave Blundin
Yes. Wow.
Cathie Wood
Yes.
Peter Diamandis
So we’re seeing autonomous delivery in the air, from Zipline and Wing. Matternet, which was a spinout from Singularity University—shout-out to them.
Cathie Wood
Mm-hmm.
Peter Diamandis
On the ground, we’ve got Starlink, Meituan, and Coco robots. Again, there are dozens—probably 50 Coco robots—that I see in the streets of Santa Monica here. And then, of course, we’re seeing the beginning of trucking. It’s interesting: the ground is crowded, the airways are open, but they’ll eventually get crowded. If we start seeing delivery rates that high from Zipline and Wing, I’m curious whether people are going to start complaining about noise. It’s high in the sky, and it lowers the delivery on a cable.
Cathie Wood
Mm-hmm.
Peter Diamandis
Dave or Alex, do you want to jump in on this one?
Dave Blundin
Well, the airways are three-dimensional. They won’t get physically crowded, but you’re right: the noise is going to be a major issue. If someone invents a silent drone, that’ll be a total game changer, or at least a quieter one.
Peter Diamandis
Antigravity, baby.
Dave Blundin
Yeah, well, that’s hard, but—
Peter Diamandis
Gravity shielding, Alex. When do we get gravity shielding, Alex?
Dr. Alexander Wissner-Gross
Working on it, Peter. Ask me in a few years.
Peter Diamandis
Okay.
Dr. Alexander Wissner-Gross
Seriously, ask me in a few years. Maybe just a closing question, if I may, for Cathie. A lot of this is premised on labor being substituted for by intelligence and automation.
In my mind, there’s another possibility. Once we’ve fully swapped out human labor for AI, automation, robotics, and drones, there’s still capital left, and historically, the debate from all the isms at the beginning of the 20th century was largely premised on labor versus capital. But do you think it’s possible that automation could also substitute for capital at some point in the next few years? Could capital be replaced by automation, or is capital, in some sense, immortal?
Cathie Wood
I think blockchain technology is going to transform everything in financial services, but that’s more about the infrastructure and bringing more efficiencies into it. I think capital is—should I say immortal? That’s quite absolute. Can I think of a reason it wouldn’t be?
Dr. Alexander Wissner-Gross
Well, blockchain, for example. Fundamentally, blockchain’s proof of work—in particular, and yes, to everyone in the audience who’s about to lecture me on the increasing difficulty of Bitcoin, I know how that works, preemptively—is based on the difficulty of inverting a hash function. So, in some sense—
Cathie Wood
It’s a feature.
Dr. Alexander Wissner-Gross
It’s a bet against automation getting smart enough to be able to efficiently invert hash functions. It’s sort of an anti-technology bet, in some sense. So I would say, even with blockchain, blockchain is just as immortal, in some sense, as the ability for AI not to solve math is, which is, I think, a pretty bold bet if one’s going to make one.
Salim Ismail
We've been using money as a main mode of discourse in the world for the last several hundred years through our capitalism, profits, and business. It's the main conversation.
Cathie Wood
Mm-hmm.
Salim Ismail
I think we're shifting from money to information, right?
Peter Diamandis
Mm-hmm.
Salim Ismail
Any startup is much more interested in collecting data and wants to monetize it later. We're seeing that over and over again. Over time, information becomes the higher-order bit, and I think over time intelligence becomes the higher-order bit.
Peter Diamandis
Are we shifting purpose?
Salim Ismail
Over time, if we can quantize—
Peter Diamandis
And we're going from money to data, I think, to directed intelligence or purpose as the highest—
Cathie Wood
Yes.
Peter Diamandis
—order bit.
Cathie Wood
But it has to be measured in some way—
Salim Ismail
How to measure is the tricky part.
Cathie Wood
And monetized, right?
Peter Diamandis
Yeah.
Well, monetization is really the ability for you to trade something or to use it—
Dr. Alexander Wissner-Gross
Yes.
Peter Diamandis
—to take an action or get an end result.
Cathie Wood
Right. Right.
Peter Diamandis
Yeah.
Dave Blundin
I think what you're asking about is really right on target too because, again, the vast majority of the world has latent talent that can't participate in the world economy in a corrupt environment, and the taxation and the friction are ridiculous.
Cathie Wood
Mm-hmm.
Dave Blundin
But there hasn't been an option before to trade in intelligence, trade in crypto, or trade in whatever.
Salim Ismail
Agreed.
Dave Blundin
I think that's a dam that's going to break very quickly in the age of AI. Just to unleash the talent in latent areas of the world, it's going to happen. But it's not going to be measured in dollars or stablecoins.
Peter Diamandis
I want to say thank you. This was a fantastic conversation. If you don't mind, at least once a year, we'd love to have you back on the show here to review your Big Ideas 2027 report, like we're doing with Elon at the end of the year—a recap of what he did.
Cathie Wood
Yeah.
Peter Diamandis
I'm grateful for all the work, your vision, and your education.
Cathie Wood
Yeah. Thank you, and of course I have to give all credit. You have no idea how intense the research effort is here. I think many people, when they hear ARK, think top-down, and in terms of stock-picking, they're throwing darts into these innovations. That's not what's going on.
We're probably—I think we're the most intensely focused, certainly in the traditional asset-management world, on research and investing in disruptive innovation. And it would be an honor for me to join you. I mean, this is a brain trust here that has been delightful. The interaction's been quite delightful, so thank you.
Peter Diamandis
Yeah. Thank you, Cathie.
Dave Blundin
Yeah, super fun.
Peter Diamandis
Love you guys. Dave, I'll see you in about 90 minutes. I'm heading to Santa Monica Airport.
Dave Blundin
And Cathie, we'll see you at Event 360, right, in March?
Peter Diamandis
You are more than welcome, and I would love you there. It's not on the books for this year, but if you have time—
Cathie Wood
Is it the next year? I think—
Peter Diamandis
Probably it's next year—
Cathie Wood
—we're skipping years.
Peter Diamandis
We've been doing every other year. Yeah.
Dave Blundin
Oh, okay.
Cathie Wood
That's it.
Dave Blundin
Okay.
Cathie Wood
Yes.
Dave Blundin
All right.
Cathie Wood
Yes.
Salim Ismail
I can't even calendar out three months, gosh. Okay.
Peter Diamandis
All right, guys.
Salim Ismail
Have a great flight, Peter. When you guys see Brett, ask him if he has plans for multi-armed robots for me.
Peter Diamandis
Of course I would, absolutely.
Salim Ismail
Okay, thank you.
Peter Diamandis
Without question whatsoever. And, Alex, please text me all of your questions for Brett as well.
Dr. Alexander Wissner-Gross
Will do, and we've got to save the lobsters in the meantime.
Peter Diamandis
Yes. Moltbot, love it.
Cathie Wood
Check out the Dali Museum in St. Petersburg.
Dave Blundin
All right.
Salim Ismail
I have been there—
Peter Diamandis
Talk about a trip.
Salim Ismail
—and it's absolutely worth a visit. It's a stunning place.
Peter Diamandis
Have a great day.
Cathie Wood
There's a lobster phone—
Dave Blundin
All right, Peter.
Cathie Wood
—to ask Dalí.
Dave Blundin
Fly safe, brother.
Peter Diamandis
All right.
Dave Blundin
Have a good day.
Peter Diamandis
See you guys.
Cathie Wood
Okay.
Salim Ismail
Take care, folks.
Cathie Wood
Take care.
Salim Ismail
Good to see you, Cathie.
Cathie Wood
Bye-bye.
Peter Diamandis
If you made it to the end of this episode, which you obviously did, I consider you a moonshot mate. Every week my moonshot mates and I spend a lot of energy and time to really deliver you the news that matters. If you’re a subscriber, thank you. If you’re not a subscriber yet, please consider subscribing so you get the news as it comes out. I also want to invite you to join me on my weekly newsletter called Metatrends. I have a research team, you may not know this, but we spend the entire week looking at the metatrends that are impacting your family, your company, your industry, your nation, and I put this into a two-minute read every week. If you’d like to get access to the Metatrends newsletter every week, go to diamandis.com/metatrends. That’s diamandis.com/metatrends. Thank you again for joining us today. It’s a blast for us to put this together every week.