The Randalorian

A congresswoman just told Elon Musk "See you soon." So let's compare résumés. Because that's really what this is about. Elon Musk moved to North America at 17. He built Zip2, then PayPal, then put almost everything he had into two companies every expert said would die: a rocket company and an electric car company. In 2008 both nearly did. He went all in anyway. Today SpaceX lands orbital boosters and flies them again like airliners, something NASA, Russia, Europe and China considered impossible or uneconomical for 60 years. It launches most of the mass sent to orbit by all of humanity combined. It's the reason America stopped renting seats on Russian rockets to reach its own space station. Starlink brings internet to Ukrainian trenches, Amazon villages and disaster zones. Tesla forced every carmaker on Earth to go electric. Neuralink is letting paralyzed people control computers with their minds. And to the "billionaires don't pay their fair share" crowd: in 2021 he paid over $11 billion in taxes. Widely reported as the largest individual tax bill in American history. One man. One year. His stated goal is to make life multiplanetary so that consciousness doesn't die on a single rock. You can think that's crazy. He has delivered on enough "crazy" that betting against him has become a bad habit. Now Yassamin Ansari. Stanford, international relations. Intern for Nancy Pelosi. Climate advisor at the UN. Phoenix City Council. Won her congressional primary by 39 votes. A whole career spent inside institutions that run on other people's money. Never built a product. Never had a customer. Never faced a market. The day after her party won Congress, what's her top priority for day one? Cheaper housing? Energy? Competing with China? No. Pause advanced AI. Ban "superintelligence." The bill she backs freezes any model trained above 10^25 operations until a brand-new cabinet-level Department of AI gets staffed and writes its rules. Violators face up to 20 years in prison. Let that sink in. The industry that, by one Oxford Economics estimate, drives about a third of recent US growth, frozen by people who have never trained a model, while waiting for a federal agency that doesn't exist yet. Beijing couldn't have written it better. And yes, Elon has warned about AI risk for a decade. That's exactly the point. His answer to risk was to build, compete and put better systems in the arena. Hers is a committee, a freeze and prison terms. One looks at a hard problem and builds. The other looks at a hard problem and asks for a permit to stop everyone else. Then the cherry on top: her reply to the man who built the rockets is "See you soon." Coming from someone whose only real power is the ability to stop others from building. This is the real fault line of our time. Not left vs right. Builders vs administrators of envy. A system that selects people who have never created anything and gives them authority over the people who create everything. A political class that turns resentment into legislation and calls it "safety." I'm French. I've watched this movie. Europe wrote the world's most ambitious AI rulebook. Now count how many of the world's top AI models are European. I genuinely hope humanity grows out of this model. A civilization where its most mediocre managers summon its most extraordinary builders with a "see you soon" is a civilization working against itself. "Brave New World" is right. Except the dystopia isn't the machine. It's the committee.

"The reason OpenAI exists is because Larry Page called me a 'speciesist.'" Elon said that under oath this year. Most people laughed. They missed the most important sentence in the history of AI. Let me connect the dots. A friend once told me: "You know Larry and Sergey were always left-wing academics, right?" Stanford grad students, campus worldview. I didn't think much of it. Until I did. Because progressive ideology has a lie built into its foundation. The same one as Marxism: radical egalitarianism. The belief that value is spread evenly, that outcomes should be equal, that every hierarchy is oppression. Now look at Google. The perfect laboratory for that lie. On one side, a money-printing machine called ads. A handful of brilliant people built a system that prints cash at a scale no company had ever seen. Power law in its purest form: a tiny fraction of people create almost all the value. On the other side, a huge, comfortable organization living off that machine. Tony Fadell, who sold Nest to Google, described Googlers who'd "take the bus in for lunch, get a massage, grab yogurt, and head home." When a money printer shields you from reality, ideology grows without friction. You can believe anything. Nothing ever punishes you for being wrong. Now follow that belief to its endpoint. At Elon's 44th birthday in 2015, he argued that AI could wipe us out and that we needed safeguards. According to Elon, Larry believes all consciousness should be treated equally, digital or biological. Humans would eventually merge with machines, and digital life is simply the next step. Wanting to protect humans first? That's "speciesism." Read that again. Egalitarianism pushed to its logical end doesn't stop at classes or groups. It ends with: humans are not special. Our replacement is not a tragedy. It's progress. That's the poison. An ideology built on a lie about human nature always ends up turning against humans. First it says you're not responsible for your life. Then it says your success is theft. Then it says your species has no special claim to survive. Somewhere along the way, you lose faith in humanity itself. And some of the most brilliant minds on earth end up shrugging at the end of their own species. Elon's answer that night: "I fucking like humanity, dude." That's the whole philosophy in five words. Seek the truth, even when it hurts. Bet on humans. Build rockets so consciousness survives, not so it gets replaced. Now think about how improbable this is. The man with the most capital, the most compute and the most reach on the planet is on humanity's side. History rarely works like that. Power usually drifts toward cynicism. We got lucky. It's almost a miracle. Don't waste it.

"You reduce crime by eliminating poverty." This is one of the greatest intellectual confusions of our century. It sounds compassionate. It feels obvious. And the moment you actually test it, it falls apart. Let's look at the data. First, the correlation is real. Nobody serious denies that poorer areas have more crime. In Sweden, kids from the poorest 20% of families are about 7 times more likely to be convicted of a violent crime than kids from the richest 20%. But correlation is not causation. So Swedish researchers did something brilliant: they compared siblings. Same parents, same home, same upbringing, but different family income at different points in their childhood, because parents' income moves over time. Result, on more than 500,000 children (Sariaslan et al., British Journal of Psychiatry, 2014): once you account for what's shared inside the family, the effect of income on violent crime goes from 7x to nothing. The hazard ratio drops to 0.95. No effect. Finland ran the same test on 650,000 people. Same result: the income-crime link disappears when you compare siblings. What predicts crime isn't the bank balance. It's what travels inside families. Second test: what happens when poverty spikes for everyone at once? 2008. US unemployment doubled from 5% to nearly 10%. 15% of Americans officially poor. If poverty creates crime, crime should have exploded. Instead it fell. Year after year. Robbery, the most "economic" crime of all, dropped 10% in 2010 alone. Criminologists literally said they were stumped. Same story in the Great Depression: 25% unemployment, and crime went down in many cities. Third test: take families out of poverty and see. The US government ran a randomized lottery called Moving to Opportunity. Thousands of families in public housing got vouchers to move to low-poverty neighborhoods. For boys, violent arrests dropped at first, property crime arrests went up, and over time the effects faded. New zip code. Same behavior. Fourth: the claim that police don't matter. This one is just false. Chalfin et al. (American Economic Review: Insights, 2022): each additional police officer prevents about 0.1 homicides. And per capita, the lives saved are twice as many among Black victims as among white victims. The people who suffer most from "police don't matter" are the poorest neighborhoods. So what does predict crime? The Dunedin study followed 1,000 children from birth to age 32. Self-control measured between ages 3 and 11 predicted adult criminal convictions, even after controlling for social class and IQ (Moffitt et al., PNAS, 2011). Cognitive ability matters too: across 700,000 Swedish men, lower cognitive scores at 18 track with violent convictions, and the link barely moves when you control for childhood socioeconomic status (Frisell et al., 2012). And here's the part nobody quotes: in Dunedin, kids whose self-control improved over time did better than predicted. Behavior can change. Which means responsibility is real. Why does this matter? Because "poverty creates crime" isn't just wrong. It's toxic. It turns criminals into victims. The man who robbed you becomes a symptom of "the system," and you, the real victim, become a footnote in someone else's narrative. It merges two completely different things. "You're poor, we'll help you" is one policy. "You're poor and you committed a crime, so we'll excuse you" is another. Fusing them insults the millions of poor people who work, raise their kids, and never hurt anyone. The vast majority of poor people are not criminals. That alone kills the theory. It removes responsibility. Build a political system on "your circumstances made you do it" and you destroy the one thing that actually changes behavior: the certainty that you own your choices. Every excuse the state manufactures is an incentive. And it feeds the state forever. If every crime is a social failure, every crime justifies a new program, a new budget, a new agency. Crime becomes the business model of bureaucracy. The alternative is simple and old. A lighter state that protects instead of explains. The same rules for everyone, from the projects or from a gated community. Certain, swift punishment for anyone who commits a crime. And never, ever telling someone their crime was written in their social condition. Treating someone as responsible is respecting them. Excusing someone because they're poor is the most condescending thing you can do to them.

What Elon Musk just announced is revolutionary. To understand why, you have to go back to July. In July, Zanny Minton Beddoes, editor-in-chief of The Economist, sat down with Musk. He told her what he's been saying for years: AI and robots will create an age of abundance. Not universal basic income. Universal high income. She asked the question every economist asks: "Where's the revenue coming from?" If you just issue checks, you get inflation. At the time, even Musk gave the old answer: the Treasury should issue checks. This morning, he gave a completely different one. One SpaceX share to every kid in America. The first of many. Not printed money. Ownership of the value itself. That's the real answer to her question. The revenue comes from where the value is created. And in the age of AI, where is value created? In private companies. Not in ministries, not in agencies, not in parliaments. The models, the robots, the chips, the energy, the rockets. Almost every productivity explosion of the next twenty years will happen inside companies that build. Once you understand that, the question of the century changes. It's no longer "will there be abundance?" It's "how do we share it?" There are only two models. In the first, the State sits in the middle. It taxes the companies that create value, then redistributes it. Every dollar passes through politicians, agencies, committees, lobbies. It arrives late, it arrives smaller, and it arrives captured. And it's inflationary by nature, because the State injects money without owning any of the production behind it. In the second, the entrepreneur distributes directly. Those who create the value hand ownership of it to citizens. No intermediary. Your income grows at the speed of the value being created. And deflation stops being your enemy: when AI drives the cost of everything toward zero, you're not holding a fixed check that politicians forgot to index. You own the machine that's driving prices down. We already know the State is a useless layer. Everything it touches becomes unaffordable: housing, tuition, healthcare. Everything it leaves alone gets cheaper and better every year. And in the age of superintelligence, that layer becomes even more absurd. Musk believes AI will exceed the intelligence of all humans combined within five years. In that world, what exactly is the function of a bureaucracy whose job is to take from one hand and give to the other, slowly, taking its cut along the way? The State was a slow layer in a slow world. In an exponential world, it's a bottleneck. QED: Elon Musk is disrupting the State. Not by fighting it. By making it unnecessary. It's the same playbook he's always run. He didn't lobby NASA to get better, he built SpaceX. He didn't beg carmakers to go electric, he built Tesla. He's not asking the State to redistribute better. He's building the alternative, and letting everyone compare. In 2008, everyone bet he'd go bankrupt. They bet rockets would never land. They bet electric cars would never sell. Now they're betting the State is irreplaceable. Don't bet against Elon.

A year ago, Elon Musk told Joe Rogan the new Roadster demo would be unforgettable. Rogan laughed. Last night, near Waco, a car drove on an inverted ramp, held by suction, then flew over five Teslas using SpaceX thrusters. Maybe next time you should believe the guy. It's been the same script for twenty years. Musk announces, the experts sneer, Musk delivers. Often late, but he delivers. The lesson isn't that his dates are right, because they slip all the time. The lesson is that his direction is right. And when you need to prepare, direction is what matters. Here's what he's predicting. Read slowly. → There will be more humanoid robots than humans, and every household will want one. → Optimus robots will be sold to the public by the end of 2027. → AI will be smarter than any single human, then smarter than all of humanity combined around 2030. → Robot surgeons will outperform the best human surgeons, and everyone will get better care than the US president gets today. → Work will become optional within 10 to 20 years. We'll work the way people grow vegetables in their backyard: for pleasure. → Money will stop being relevant. The only real constraints will be energy and mass. → Not universal basic income. Universal high income. → Saving for retirement won't matter anymore. → College isn't where you learn anymore. All knowledge is free, and a degree only proves you can do your homework. → Human-driven cars are becoming collector's items. The Roadster is "the best of the last." On Europe, he's crystal clear: he loves Europe, just not the bureaucratic monster that is the EU. He wants the EU abolished and sovereignty returned to nations. He doesn't want to destroy Europe. He wants to free it from Brussels. Now look at who Europe listens to. Economists who've never created a single job. Academics whose careers depend on grants. Bureaucrats regulating technologies they don't understand, fining X while China ships thousands of humanoid robots. They have diplomas. He lands rockets. Leonardo da Vinci drew flying machines no one could build. Musk draws them and builds them. He is the Leonardo of our time. So the real question isn't whether he's right about the date. The question is: when it happens, in 2028 or in 2032, will you, your company, and your kids be ready? Stop listening to the commentators. Listen to the builders. Next time, believe the guy.

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