Cathie Wood on Tesla-SpaceX Merger, $1M Bitcoin, More AIs Than Humans | EP #296 | Moonshots Live
In a Nutshell
Cathie Wood predicts Tesla and SpaceX will merge this year, combining AI, robotics, energy, and satellite networks under one company to accelerate Mars colonization and dominate AI infrastructure. AI agents will outnumber humans online next year, requiring blockchain identity systems, legal personality, and stablecoin infrastructure to enable agent-to-agent economic transactions at scale. Bitcoin will reach $1M as stablecoins complement rather than replace it, while tokenization of assets and USDC adoption will unlock trillions in previously idle global capital.
These notes were generated by AI and may contain inaccuracies.
The era of technological exclusivity has begun. We feel things are speeding up. Daily monitoring of X platform channels and WhatsApp group conversations with Moonshots buddies reveals mind-boggling developments happening constantly.
Tesla and SpaceX merger might be announced this year. Rockets and satellites, artificial intelligence, electric cars, robotaxi, humanoid robots, and energy would all come under one roof.
Long-term Objectives
Elon's ultimate goal is Mars. The path includes establishing stations along the way in the form of a global business for connectivity and broadband through satellite swarms. This work is unreasonably profitable and large from a revenue-generating perspective.
New Cloud and XAI
New Cloud represents a radical shift for XAI. The leader in artificial intelligence with regard to advanced models will be the company with the greatest computing power and the lowest cost. With orbital data centers, SpaceX believes it will be that company, determined to compete with companies like OpenAI and Anthropic.
Investment Priority
SpaceX is the biggest investment. Tesla and SpaceX are believed to merge.
Chinese Business Challenges
Chinese business dealings with Tesla involve working with the Ministry of Defense. This represents one of the existing obstacles. Elon is seen sitting at the table with President Trump and Xi Jinping. May Mask is very popular in China. There has been talk about developing an automated taxi system in China.
Optimistic Outlook on US-China Relations
The principle of keep your enemies close applies. Productivity gains from artificial intelligence and the technological revolution will be enormous, potentially achieving a win-win situation for China and the United States. China needs to develop a consumer economy and can convert production gains into wage increases. More aggressive competition against China could lower prices, leading to lower inflation.
The Federal Reserve announced GDP growth of about 4.7% in the last quarter, double what it was in the previous quarter. Triple-digit GDP growth was envisioned over this decade. Real GDP growth of 7 to 8% is expected, accelerating in the next five years.
Grok robot now has hundreds of thousands of installations. Muse reached 3.8 million downloads. The question emerges about when there will be more artificial intelligence than humans performing tasks on the internet. This drives tremendous real GDP growth.
AI Agents Outnumbering Humans
More artificial intelligence than humans is expected next year. Between five and six and a half billion people are online at any given time. Each person having thousands of agents working for them is not hard to imagine.
Consumer Platforms and Computing Limitations
Consumer platforms like Muse and Instinct are reaching mass audiences, mainly limited by computing at this stage, not by people's desire to acquire those things. Just as there was a computer on every desk and a phone in every pocket, an agent for every person would not be surprising.
Sub-agents and Economic Actors
Every agent has sub-agents that appear to perform tasks and then disappear. Main organized agents stay with users and have context and memory. These agents will become fully-fledged economic actors by the final years of this decade.
Identity and Verification Systems
Economic endpoints will talk to each other on behalf of users. When agents conduct transactions, verification becomes necessary regarding identity, birth date, ownership, responsibility for mistakes, source of identity, source of computing allocation, motivations, and proof of claimed actions.
ARK's new blockchain gives agents money when they start working. Agents need money for computing and trading. A credit program gives agents 25 cents, and if they return and pay back, more money is given. Blockchains create continuous records over many years with distributed groups of validators preventing lies.
Hugging Face Hack Example
Records were rewritten in the Hugging Face hack because their agents didn't have records. Public records would allow verification regarding agent identity, actions, source, and incentives.
Economic Efficiency Through Agents
All inefficiencies in the economy should disappear because agents operate at additional cost. A very effective system for allocating capital emerges. Capital formation will be almost instantaneous, with serious ideas being funded immediately.
USDC has settled over 100 trillion across 30 public blockchains. Nearly one trillion dollars of USDC has been created and redeemed. Stablecoins provide 24/7 availability year-round at low cost, settling instantly compared to credit cards requiring three to five days.
Genius Act Implementation
The Genius Act legalized stablecoins and created a framework for them in the United States. Implementation takes 18 months, effective in January. Companies can hold stablecoin funds and consider them as cash or its equivalent.
Blockchain speeds of 20 to 100 transactions per second are needed. Visa handles up to 20,000 transactions per second. ARC chain achieves tens of thousands of transactions per second. The goal is reaching 100,000 transactions per second, then one million transactions per second.
Economic Activity Requirement
Agents without conducting transactions represent noise and spam, not real economic activity. Economic activity requires transactions.
Proving humanity is extremely important. Working with Aiko, Open AI, and Mr. Beast to understand this. Human experience will be valued much more highly than machine experience. Active choices in educating children include choosing human teachers over computer-based learning.
Building for Agents
Developer platforms are being built with priority remaining with developers, but agents will become the developers next year. Programming agents have moved from suggesting three things to suggesting one thing. Agents will start appearing on developer platforms.
Programmatic advertising represents 25-30% of online advertising and happened very quickly, showing the direction toward agent-mediated interactions.
The institutional world of public equities has turned to passive investing, merely mimicking indices. Future companies making up the new world are not large parts of those indices, except for a few like Meta.
Multiomics Revolution Evidence
The multiomics revolution in life sciences was considered dead in markets despite artificial intelligence's most profound application being in healthcare. Anthropic and OpenAI have started talking about healthcare sectors.
Data Factory Concept
Humans are data factories with between 35 and 40 trillion cells and 3 billion base pairs of DNA. Private data factories walking on the ground represent the most undervalued and least appreciated area in healthcare.
Healthcare and technology do not go well together. Healthcare analysts are cautious about technology because move fast and break things doesn't work in healthcare. Technology analysts dislike healthcare because it is too bureaucratic, too regulated, too politicized, and beholden to insurance companies and repayment cycles.
Longevity Market
Longevity has become achievable. When asked how much wealth people would pay for an extra 20 or 30 years of good health or to turn back the clock 20 or 30 years, the honest answer is almost everything.
President Milei announced changing laws to attract all AI companies and give agents legal personality. Regulatory arbitrage among countries will attract companies and efforts.
AI Agent Legal Personality
AI agents working on behalf of people represents a compromise similar to institutions. If a company is simply an AI-founded entity managed by AI but with a human board of directors, the next evolution would be boards made up of other AI agents. Questions remain about how companies should be established, what kind of economic output they create, who is responsible for mistakes, and how profits will be distributed.
Artificial intelligence could use crypto platforms to generate capital and find shareholders willing to give it the capital to operate in the world. This could occur during this decade, though predicting which problems agents will focus on is difficult. Possibilities include medical problems or other areas. This will also merge with the concept of independent decentralized organizations, which aligns perfectly with crypto. Decentralized Organizations (DAOs) developed the idea of governance among a group of people who did not know each other and were global. Agents are similar in that they are also global and do not know each other.
Independent organizations were built four or five years ago, before the concept became outdated. There are plenty of precedents that agents can learn from about what worked and what didn't. There is a whole concept of quadratic finance that has been tried. Cryptocurrencies have many of these basics available for untrusted parties to coordinate with each other. Agents are essentially new and innovative entities that already exist. Once they obtain legal personality, it becomes even more valuable because you can find out their origin, who granted it to them, and why they obtained this legal personality.
There will be new financing models that will not resemble traditional financing models such as going to the bank and collecting money. These are likely to be original online financing models. One of these agents could create its own currency, have its own version of proof of work, have a very complex economy built into it, and use tokens to coordinate that.
Independent organizations were somewhat lacking in intelligence because they relied on human intelligence. The emergence of artificial intelligence now to create decentralized smart organizations is a great development.
The metaverse is not simply a place to play games, but rather a complete digital economy of people and entities. This is finally happening now, and can be made to look great with Meta glasses and other technologies.
Personal work on augmented reality glasses at Meta included the Ray-Ban glasses as a good first step, and the Orion glasses as a good point of proof. Metaverse has always been about something other than the three-dimensional aspect. Three-dimensional technology is exciting, but what's even more exciting is that there are layers of intelligence in this world waiting to be discovered.
Pokémon Go was a great example of metaverse because you don't know how many Pokémon are at any given station, and people interact with these layers of intelligence, wandering around the world trying to catch Pokémon. This represents how people find meaning and how that meaning settles into the physical world around us. The metaverse does not have to be three-dimensional.
AI entities will provide meaning because AI already passed the Turing test three years ago. AI will provide meaning and human connections, creating strange new societies that are hybrids between humans and artificial intelligence, where meaning will be created.
There is another digital world happening now that is accelerating at a much faster pace than space. Unalterable intellectual property rights now exist in the digital world. The best way to lift peoples, countries, and ecosystems out of poverty or stagnation is through property rights.
A research team has been organized to consist of a team for analyzing business intelligence and a team for analyzing consumer artificial intelligence. There is ongoing discussion about whether a new device with Muse or Muse charm will achieve any tangible results, and whether the mobile phone might eventually become solely a hub for entertainment while another device seeps into working lives.
The financial infrastructure being built is for an economy that exists but is not yet widespread, only in its early stages. The two main reasons for building a private blockchain are related. The concept of final payment is critical because when two banks interact, this interaction method must include a final payment feature. No other blockchain on the market today possesses this feature. To bring existing banks, institutions, and companies into this infrastructure, guarantees that the current infrastructure does not provide are necessary.
Many public blockchains operate with anonymous validators. Approving a transaction means looking at the block and making sure that it is not defective, and then everyone agrees that it is a valid block. For many organizations around the world, not knowing who is authenticating is a major problem due to concerns about security and the flow of funds.
A well-known group of validators has been established on the blockchain. Privacy was addressed because when two parties do business, it is not acceptable for the world to know how much money is in their bank accounts or even what the value of that transaction is. Privacy solutions must work on a sufficient scale to achieve the number of transactions per second required, while maintaining compatibility with existing regulatory frameworks.
The settlement cost on Ark is approximately 0.005 cents, while it is 89 cents on Ethereum. This is based on P50 category transactions. If markets are going to be super efficient, efficiency comes through trading where value is transferred back and forth, with price discovery occurring. Inefficiencies are eliminated by transferring value. The settlement cost should be very low, much lower than it is today, because these are huge public databases competing with databases that are managed internally, such as MySQL, but now must be globally scalable and auditable by the entire world.
The agent package requires a world where agents have legal personality, are accountable for their mistakes, and have a work history that can be relied upon before hiring them. Programming agents today involves paying upfront and then waiting for the programming result to come back, which creates problematic situations.
Banks will not disappear, though every new technological change presents new challenges and opportunities. Some will move with new technology and others will not. Banks are working through the transition.
Unitree sold 11,000 humanoid robots last year. Tesla's Optimus and other humanoid robots are coming. Approximately 70 million cars and 70 million motorcycles are manufactured annually. A humanoid robot is 200,000 times more complex than a self-driving car, with the hands being the most complex part.
Elon Musk says the expansion could happen in late 2028 or 2029, but expectations are two years later. Tesla is ahead in this area because the same three technology platforms converge in humanoid robots as they do in self-driving taxis: electric, battery-powered, and AI-driven.
Full Self-Driving with the latest software update is being used, with statistics showing it is ten times better than human drivers. Waymo and Tesla are safer than human drivers. If all cars were as safe as Waymo cars, there would be 40,000 fewer deaths a year and about $400 billion less in medical costs in the United States. There are 1.25 to 1.5 million deaths from car crashes a year worldwide.
80% of Americans are afraid of artificial intelligence. 73% are against having a data center in their area, which is more than they're against having a nuclear reactor in their area. In China, the opposite is true where 80% support it.
Building a data center in a state or city will, over time, actually lower electricity costs. Nuclear power was completely phased out in the 1970s because of regulations. If nuclear power had not been abandoned and regulations had not been placed on it, electricity prices in the United States would be 50% of what they are now. Regulation is a risk.
Political backlash has been encountered in Florida despite it being a business-friendly state. When policymakers are confronted with the facts, propaganda has diluted much of that dynamic. A podcast with Michael Kratsios at the White House, head of the Office of Science and Technology Policy, revealed that no one within the government is responsible for dealing with misinformation and helping Americans gain more confidence.
If the narrative continues that AI is going to kill jobs, the expected reaction will occur. AI should make housing cheaper, education better, and healthcare more accessible, not just make people live longer. The numbers do not support the job loss hypothesis, except possibly at the entry level. There will actually be a labor shortage.
Technology is ultimately a job creator. In the early 1990s, jobs like influencers, Airbnb, and Uber did not exist and could not be imagined. New jobs associated with the five major platforms include asteroid miner.
90% of all corporate bonds funding data centers are US bonds. USDC is trading faster and seeing expansion. There is no asset securitization in Europe and not enough capacity.
US securities laws are more complicated and need to evolve to allow for more experimentation. The SEC is putting new rules in place. USDC is essentially exporting dollars to the world. People take their local currency, sell it, and then buy dollars, essentially lending their labor and effort.
Stablecoins are strategically important for any country because if debt needs to be increased and growth needs to occur with high interest rates that need to be lowered, money must be raised from people to invest in growth and then paid back later. For the first two years at Circle, there was puzzlement about why America did not want stablecoins because a trillion dollars could be raised from the world, with people willing to give money because they believe in the dollar.
Treasury bonds will be tokenized. When assets are tokenized, 24/7 market access is enabled, which is valuable because it means capital is used more efficiently. Treasury bonds cannot be traded after 4:00 AM or 5:00 PM Eastern Time, leaving money idle until Monday morning.
There is about $3 trillion in motion in the international banking system that is not being used in the economy because technology and settlement protocols are outdated. If the global economy is $100 trillion, an extra $3 trillion in liquidity would be significant.
Tokenization unlocks securitization and makes it accessible to people. People in the rest of the world want to own Tesla shares and Circle shares. Circle shares were trademarked by third parties, and one of the most traded tokenized stocks in the world is all through XUS. People trade XUS because they want to participate in Circle but do not have a good way to do that except by owning a tokenized version.
Tokenization is good for America because people in other countries are investing in America, saying they believe American companies are the best and want to invest their money in those companies. If other countries can tokenize their securities and modernize their financial systems, more money will flow in because investors will not be solely dependent on what the local regulator tells them, and money will not disappear because it will be in a smart contract with the ability to audit how the financial system works.
Tokenization is inevitable and will accelerate just as agents accelerate doing more cognitive tasks, including taking businesses, securitizing them, lending against them, and borrowing against them. The dollar has started to rise, which also happened in the 1980s when business-friendly policies were implemented and the dollar doubled in the early 1980s. The dollar is actually going to rise because of everything discussed.
The investment fund was just securitized.
Cathie Wood remains optimistic about Bitcoin reaching $1 million. Three factors have affected Bitcoin recently: the sudden crash, quantum computing fears that are considered overblown, and AI consuming resources and attracting miners away from Bitcoin.
One significant change has been the emergence of stablecoins, which are usurping a role that was thought to be reserved exclusively for Bitcoin. Stablecoins make sense for people living day to day, though this hasn't diminished Bitcoin's three main roles: introducing a technology and native currency for the internet that didn't exist before, serving as a global, private, rules-based monetary system, and representing the first of its kind in a new asset class.
Bitcoin has very low correlation with gold, maintaining a correlation around 0.1 since 2019, indicating practically no correlation at all. Bitcoin is now rising relative to gold. The war will be beneficial for Bitcoin as the price of gold will fall, and investors will look for the other safe haven, store of value option.
Expectations for Bitcoin have not changed despite these revolutions. Stablecoins are making things easier and prompting more people to wonder where to put their profits once they're making money from stablecoins. Bitcoin will be in demand from emerging markets as always expected.
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