Humanity has advanced not just by discovering knowledge, but by finding better ways to record and preserve it. A stone carver might manage to carve twenty letters in an hour. Writing by hand increased that speed roughly 200-fold. Printing machines pushed it far beyond what any human hand could accomplish. The fastest solid-state drives can record up to 112 billion bits per second—nearly 13 billion times faster than handwriting. We have also learned to store vastly more information in vastly less matter. A modern solid-state drive can store roughly 5.3 trillion times more information per gram than the Rosetta Stone. humanprogress.org/from-stone…

Next year, I will give one of my SpaceX shares to every kid in America. This will be the first of many.

"Capitalism is the force that drove down the price of almost everything it touched. The state is the force that blew up the price of almost everything it captured. And young people blame the first for the crimes of the second."

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.

There is nothing inaccurate about that chart, but it is important to also note that wages are up 38% in the past 7 years, which is more than prices as measured by the CPI-U

I think about this clip a lot...

Yep

"Capitalism is the only economic system (if freedom to own and sell property can truly be called a system) where the virtue of charity blossoms." - Axel Weber

Walmart is selling real diamond earrings for $12. Not a typo. Half-carat lab-grown diamonds, same carbon, graded by the same labs that grade the stone in your engagement ring. A jeweler can't tell them apart without a machine. And that $12 price tag is why the company that invented the engagement ring is about to get sold for scrap. De Beers ran the diamond trade for over a century. At its peak it controlled up to 90% of the world's rough supply, and when demand dipped it just locked diamonds in London vaults until prices came back. The slogan "A Diamond Is Forever" came from their ad agency in 1947. So did the rule that a ring should cost two months of your salary. Before that campaign, most American brides never got a diamond at all. The whole thing held for 80 years because there were only so many mines. Then China started growing diamonds in reactors, and there's no vault on earth big enough to hide a factory's output. Lab-grown wholesale prices have crashed roughly 96% from their peak, down to around $100 a carat. The Knot says 61% of engagement rings sold in 2025 had lab-grown center stones, up 239% since 2020. Even De Beers' own average selling price fell 32% in a year, to $105 a carat. So Anglo American, which owns De Beers, has written it down by $6.8 billion in two years and is now in talks to sell the whole thing for about $1 billion. This is a company that was valued over $18 billion in 2001 and $13 billion as recently as 2011. The stones coming out of the ground are the same as ever. The only scarce thing De Beers ever owned was the marketing, and marketing doesn't survive a $12 price tag at Walmart.

As families get richer and the population grows, housing prices are rising quickly in desirable locales. The natural market response would be to increase supply, but unfortunately, artificial policy barriers are preventing that from happening. humanprogress.org/the-end-of…

In the United States, part of the supposed rise in mental illness is likely driven by the healthcare financing system. When diagnosis is subjective and payment depends on diagnosis, the system rewards expanding the definition of illness. From @AdamOmaryPhD: humanprogress.org/psychiatri…

A loaf of bread can only be eaten once. A better way of growing can be used again and again, copied by other farmers, and further improved by future generations. That is what makes resistance to innovation so costly: suppressing one useful idea can deny its benefits to people far beyond those who first discovered it.