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“There is a belief that global GDP is somehow limited to $100 trillion. AI will turn $100 trillion into $500 trillion.”
—Jensen Huang
In 1901, US Steel became the first company to be valued at $1 billion – an “almost unimaginable sum”, a date The company marveled only 20 years later.
She added: “Hundreds of millions gained respect.” “But a billion, a thousand million – that seemed like just a row of numbers, something that was difficult to calculate.”
Today, the number investors should try to calculate is a trillion: that number now exists 11 Publicly traded companies worth more than $1 trillion.
To get a sense of scale, consider that if you earned $1 every second of the day, every day (and never spent any), you wouldn’t become a trillionaire until a year 33,168.
Investors – who are unlikely to survive that long – will have to hope their trillion-dollar companies make dollars much faster.
Scientifically speaking, Aswath Damodaran does a sort of thing Reverse discounted cash flows To calculate how much annual revenue major companies would have to generate to justify current valuations.
To invest in Tesla now, he calculates, you have to believe the company will generate at least annual revenue $2.2 trillion By 2030 — an assumption that “pushes the limits of possibility,” he says.
Nvidia shareholders are not as ambitious: they only need the company to generate about $590 billion in annual revenue by 2030. “While this is a longshot, it is possible and reasonable,” Damodaran advises.
However, $590 billion is still a huge number.
For perspective, US Steel in 1901 was only worth about $46 billion after adjusting for inflation.
Now, OpenAI is It is said to lift More than double that amount — $100 billion — in a single cash call to investors.
SpaceX was too I mentioned $800 billion will be raised this week, with plans for a $1.5 trillion IPO.
Anthropic, a public benefit corporation that does not aim to maximize profits, may go public at a valuation of $300 billion.
amazing.
It was only 12 years ago that the term “unicorn” came into being. He coined To refer to the new phenomenon of billion-dollar startups.
Now we have “centicorns” – privately owned startups worth 100 times more than a unicorn.
Perhaps most surprising is the artificial intelligence startup Thinking Machines, which has raised $2 billion from investors in… Seed round Earlier this year.
The seed equivalent of the size of a US steel company (unadjusted for inflation) is a measure of how dramatically financial markets have expanded over the past century.
Will these companies collectively generate the trillions of dollars in revenue required to justify these valuations?
It’s hard to imagine that in dollars per second.
But perhaps we, as the head of ChatGPT, need to think bigger than that Recently encouraged We have to: “I think there is an almost infinite demand for intelligence.”
If so, I think there should be near-infinite demand for the stock as well.
Let’s check the charts.
Land of the Unicorn:
The United States has 712 unicorns, with a combined value of $2.9 trillion, compared to only 157 for China, which ranks second. 80 of them were Founded in 2025 Lonely.
It’s good for large companies to have:
that Unofficial tally It found that in 2024, the EU made more from fining US tech companies than it collected from all public European internet companies. Related statistics (attributed To Goldman Sachs): In the past 50 years, only 14 companies with a market capitalization of more than $10 billion have been founded in Europe compared to 241 in the United States.
AI Credit Concerns:
Bloomberg Reports Oracle debt is now trading at junk bond levels.
Jobs are the new prices:
Greg I.B He writes With US unemployment rates rising and wage growth declining, jobs will soon replace prices as the focus of our economic concern.
Where jobs are lost:
Bloomberg Reports The tariffs hit small businesses hard, leading to job losses.
The good and bad news about tariffs:
A New study Good News Reports: Actual US tariff rates so far are about half the headline number due to time lags, exceptions and implementation gaps. But the bad news is that “nearly 100%” of the tariffs are passed on to consumers through higher prices.
Just getting started?
Joe Brusuelas Reports “The gap between U.S. productivity and the hourly wages paid to non-supervisory employees continues to widen. If anything, the gap is accelerating as the U.S. economy continues to be transformed by global supply chain and technological advances.”
Read on:
The Financial Times reported earlier this year Reading decline: The proportion of Americans who read for personal interest has declined by 10 percentage points since 2005, although the proportion of children reading remains steady. Do you consider newsletters as personal interests? If so, please consider reading this to a child.
Fewer children reading:
Torsten Slok points out that the percentage of American families with children is declining.
YouTube generation:
Nearly 50% of US teens say they “seldom read” in their free time, compared to 20% in 1990. It sounds alarming, but you can really learn a lot on YouTube.
Increasing Yield Land:
The yield on 10-year Japanese government bonds is about 2% for the first time since 1999. High yields usually mean that Japanese savers will sell American investments to reinvest them at home, but The opposite seems to be happeninglikely due to the attractiveness of US AI stocks.
Prices by weight:
Measure everything by price per pound, Andrew McCaleb He finds that a Tesla Model 3 costs less than a Camembert. “We extract sand, oil and ores from the ground and turn them into machines that are cheaper than old milk.”
Maybe this is the kind of thinking we need to understand trillion-dollar valuations.
Have a great weekend, trillionaire readers.
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