There’s a lot of talk right now about programmers losing their jobs because AI can code. But that’s the wrong framing, this is much bigger than that, coding is just the most visible part. If I look back at my last corporate job, at Mercedes-Benz regional headquarters in Beijing (2000–2002), I realize almost all of it can now be done by AI. And this was not an intern role or so, I was Senior Manager, Controlling, for Daimler’s operations in Northeast Asia (Daimler was the mother company of Mercedes-Benz). In hindsight, that title was partly job inflation, it was more of a solid middle management job. But I was good at it, I had real responsibility, and Mercedes-Benz paid a lot of money for me to do it.

What I actually did all day

The job was simple, in the way many corporate jobs are simple once you strip away the endless meetings and politics.

I communicated with joint ventures, factories, and sales organizations in the region. They sent me spreadsheets with their financial results. I analyzed them, consolidated them, and turned them into reports and presentations. I made budgets: monthly budgets for the next year, and  annual budgets for the next three to five years. Then every month I compared budget vs actuals, explained variances, wrote it up, and presented it.

There were other tasks, of course. There are always other tasks, especially for a young, ambitous guy who was still eager to quickly climb the corporate ladder. But most of the job was variations of collect numbers, make them consistent, explain them, and tell a story.

The expat package was wild

When I moved to Beijing I had just turned 28. I don’t remember my exact salary anymore, but including expat ‘hardship’ allowances it must have been somewhere around USD 100k to USD 150k per year at the time. This was a real salary in those days, and in Beijing it went very far. For some reason headquarters in Stuttgart thought life in Beijing was hardship, but for me it was actually much easier and relaxed than life in Germany. You could live like a king, and I did!

On top of that I got a housing allowance, which was USD 6000 per month (that number was so astronomical to me at the time that I still remember it). I had a very nice company car, and I was flying business class. Even the vacation flights to Europe for me and my girlfriend were business class and paid for by the company.

Mercedes spent a lot of money on this role. And the crazy thing is: the role was basically a workflow, a workflow that is now completely automatable.

AI can do my entire workflow

AI can:

• write and format reports
• build and improve presentations
• analyze numbers, spot anomalies, find drivers
• reconcile messy spreadsheets and inconsistent formats
• translate and communicate in multiple languages
• ask follow-up questions when inputs are missing
• chase people politely when they are late
• run the same process every month without getting bored

I didn’t speak Chinese well back then. I spoke English and German fluently (and Dutch, which was useless for this job). AI can communicate directly with factories in Chinese, Korean, Japanese, English, German, whatever is needed, and it can keep the tone consistent.

Even the spreadsheets I received can now largely be produced by AI agents inside those factories and sales orgs. A lot of financial reporting is simply formatting, mapping, validating, and explaining. In other words, both the inputs and the consolidation layer are automatable.

This is not about AI getting smarter anymore

For a long time we could say: “Yes, AI helps, but you still need people.” But that argument is getting weaker by the week. Over the past weeks AI has improved so much that you don’t need the people anymore. AI agents can now schedule tasks (for example, make a weekly report every Monday morning, create a powerpoint presentation for headquarters every Friday afternoon), and make decisions about what to  independently from their human.

From now on it’s not about whether AI can do the job, but it’s about whether companies are willing to let it do the job. Are they willing to adopt AI? It requires organizational courage, a lot of risk tolerance and of course the eternal internal politics. The fact is that cutting staff is painful and messy, and nobody wants to be the first manager to say: “I can replace my entire team with software.” But they can, and eventually they will.

One person could do twenty of these jobs

My old job is a perfect example of leverage. If you give a capable person the right AI tooling, they can run the reporting and budgeting process for far more entities than one human ever could in 2001. If a company like Mercedes-Benz wanted to, they could centralize a lot of controlling work. One small team at headquarters could cover what used to be dozens of regional controllers. They won’t do it overnight, but they will do it over time. Quietly, with “reorganizations” and “efficiency initiatives”.

If you are in that job today, you should pay attention

Somebody is doing a job similar to mine right now. Somewhere in Stuttgart, Singapore, Beijing, Dubai, wherever Mercedes-Benz has regional structures. That person is at serious risk. They might be excellent at their job, but their job is a process, and processes are what software eats.

The emotional part, for me

I was proud of that role at the time. I didn’t love corporate life, but I was good at it. It felt like a serious job. A “real” career path, a big salary and huge condo, all while in my late 20s. I felt like I had made it. (As a side note: I still eventually decided to leave that cushy job, to study Chinese and become an entrepreneur, something none of my colleagues at the time understood).

Realizing that the whole thing can now be done by AI is a revelation. It makes the changes feel very concrete. It’s not a thought experiment anymore, or a theoretical idea. It’s my own life, my own résumé, one of my own chapters, and I can see how it gets automated.

What happens next?

If you are a 20-something today in a white-collar job, you probably feel this already. You see what the tools can do, because you use them, and you know the direction. If you are in your 40s or 50s, you might still be underestimating it. Not because you’re not smart, but because your mental model of “what a job is” was formed in a world where the work required humans by default.

The scary part is the speed, and the fact that many people will not have an obvious “next job” to transition into. If you lose your job and you know you can find another one in a few months, you can survive. If you suspect your whole category of work is being automated across the economy, that’s a different psychological reality.

If I’d be in that job right now, I would spend all my waking hours learning about AI and vibecoding and I would automate my own job. I would show top management in both the regional headquarters and in Stuttgart how they could save tens or hundreds of millions of dollars right away. My colleagues would likely hate me for it, but they would simply be shooting the messenger, because if you don’t adapt you die. Maybe I would be fired for doing it (Mercedes-Benz was a very conservative organization in those days, they resisted change, especially if initiatives came from middle management, which was one reason why I left the corporatate world), but my job would have been gone eventually anyway.

We will need a new social contract

I don’t see a way around some form of universal basic income, or what Elon calls “universal high income”. I believe it’s a stability requirement, without it the world as we know it will fall apart. If people lose their jobs and don’t have a way to provide for their families, plus no expectation of finding another job anymore, they will revolt.

We are heading toward abundance in production and scarcity in employment. That mismatch creates political pressure, resentment, and instability. We can either design for it or crash into it. I’m not optimistic that governments will handle this gracefully. But I also don’t think we can stop the technology anymore. And honestly, I don’t want to stop it, because the upside is enormous. The question is whether we build a world where people can still live with dignity while the machine does more and more of the work.

Final thought

If my Mercedes-Benz “senior manager” job from 2000 can be done by AI now, then a huge portion of white-collar work can be done by AI. Many people believe it may happen in 5-10 years, but reality is that we are there already.  

AI doesn’t need to get more capable anymore, in its current form it’s good enough already. What we are seeing now is the slow realization inside companies that the old org chart is outdated. Once that realization spreads, things will move faster than most people expect.

Last weekend I was in Stuttgart (Germany) for the first time in more than twenty years, after having lived there from 1996-2000. It was just a very short trip that was cut even shorter because of the snowy winter weather in most of Northern Europe. I left Daimler in 2002 to study Chinese and to become an entrepreneur in China, so the last time I really spent time in Stuttgart was probably around that time. 

The reason for this trip was a 30-year reunion of the Mercedes-Benz Nachwuchsgruppe, the management trainee program that was my first job out of university. A program that changed my life, not only because I was by far the youngest person in the program (I was just 22 when I managed to get accepted into the program, most were at least 5 years older) and I learned so much from my fellow trainees who I felt were much more mature than me at the time, but also because after 3 months I was sent to Asia already (I helped to implement SAP at Mercedes-Benz Indonesia). After a few months in Asia I knew my future would eventually be there, and that turned out to be the case. Most of the Nachwuchsgruppe colleagues I had not seen in over 25 years, but because we spent quite some (intense) times together during the program, it felt like meeting with good friends very quickly again. We spent two days talking about the past and the future, walking through the wine hills above Stuttgart, having long dinners with nice wines, and of course visiting the Mercedes-Benz Museum.

It was genuinely nice seeing familiar faces with a shared history, lots of laughter of course (especially looking at some pictures from our group retreats and activities during that time) but also some deep discussions. In many ways it felt like stepping into a parallel universe where time had slowed down, and that is exactly what struck me.

A city where time moves slowly

Stuttgart has not changed much. Compared to places where I’ve spent significant time over the past decades like Beijing, Shanghai, Bangkok, Jakarta and Singapore, and even parts of Canada and the US, the contrast is stark. Those places reinvent themselves every few years, but Stuttgart feels almost frozen in time. There were some major projects going on, but some of these already started when I still lived there (“Stuttgart 21” for example, the project was announced in 1994 and is still not finished…). 

That has a certain charm. It is calm, orderly, and comfortable, but it also feels static. Strangely, I even had the feeling that Stuttgart looked wealthier twenty-five years ago than it does now. That may partly be perception, because I was younger, poorer, and more easily impressed back then. Still, it didn’t feel like it was a dynamic place, or a place I would ever try to start a company. And that same feeling came back in my conversations.

Talking about Tesla in the heart of Mercedes land

Most of my former colleagues still work in the automotive industry. Several of them have worked for Mercedes-Benz or Daimler for close to thirty years. If anyone should have a sharp view on what is happening in the global car industry, it should be them. So naturally, the conversation drifted to Tesla and to Full Self-Driving (FSD). Tesla is a company I strongly believe in, in which I invested heavily and so I thought this trip could give me some new insights.

What surprised me most was not disagreement with what I said, but a lack of awareness. Yes, they know Tesla exists and yes, they know Tesla talks about self-driving. But almost nobody really knew how far Tesla FSD has come. One openly doubted that it works at all. None of them had tried Tesla FSD. Even more striking: a few genuinely believed that Chinese car manufacturers and even Mercedes’ own self-driving capabilities are at least as good, if not better.

This is not a criticism of them personally. These are smart people, serious professionals who are probably better at running a large company or a large business unit than me. But it made me realise something uncomfortable: if people working in automotive full-time do not understand what Tesla has built, how can we expect the general public to understand it? 

The unthinkable future: not owning a car

I tried to explain my broader view to them: That Tesla is much more than just a car company, that FSD is a platform and not just a feature, and that Robotaxi will change the economics of transport completely. Most of them simply could not imagine a future where people would stop buying cars. Cars, especially in places like Stuttgart or Munich, are not just transportation. They are your identity, they determine your status and show off your personality. You are what you drive and that mindset is deeply ingrained.

I actually understand that resistance because I lived it myself when I worked in Stuttgart. Even though I was only in my mid-20s I bought a new Mercedes-Benz every year (I didn’t have a company car yet), and despite living on my own I also owned a second car (a bright yellow Italian convertible, I still miss it). It’s just what you do in Stuttgart if you have the money (Mercedes-Benz obviously paid good salaries). But despite understanding it well, I still believe it will break.

When AI starts taking jobs, which is something that has already started, owning a car will be one of the first big expenses people will try to eliminate. Why own a depreciating asset when you can summon transport on demand at a fraction of the cost? If Robotaxis are available everywhere for a quarter, or even an eighth of the true cost of ownership, behaviour will change. Maybe not overnight, but in my opinion it’s inevitable.

In cities like Stuttgart it will take longer. I very much understand that culture and identity matter, but economics always wins in the end, and Robotaxi will be about economics. I even explained that owning a Robotaxi could actually make you money: if you let the car taxi other people around while you work or sleep, you could easily make up to EUR 50,000 per year per car. And this does not even take into account the time you save while driving, because FSD will give you a virtual driver. I guess you have to see it to believe it.

Trucks, buses, and another blind spot

What worried me at least as much were conversations about Daimler Trucks, the separately listed truck and bus company. The risk from Tesla Semi, and more broadly from autonomous electric trucking, hardly seems to register. That’s likely partly because the Tesla Semi has not started mass production yet, but that will happen this year. They know about Tesla Semi of course, but don’t seem to take it serious. They are confident that Daimler’s solutions will be at least as good, but I am not so sure.

From my time at Daimler I remember that for commercial vehicles the cost per mile is much more important than for passenger cars. And that is where Tesla shines: the Semi truck will likely sell for about $150,000 in the US, while Daimler’s class 8 EV trucks will likely be in the $400,000 or more range. To make matters worse, the Tesla Semi has a 500 mile range, with just 310 miles for the best Daimler truck. And Tesla can charge up to 70% in 30 minutes, while it takes Daimler trucks 90 minutes to charge 80%. That is a huge difference if every minutes costs money. 

This doesn’t even take fully self driving into account. The Tesla semi doesn’t have FSD yet (only advanced driver assist systems), but you can be pretty sure that if Tesla has FSD solved for passenger cars the FSD for trucks is coming very soon as well. Imagine truck fleets without drivers that can drive without having to stop every couple of hours because human drivers are getting fatigued or need sleep. 

To me this is clear, for companies like Daimler Truck this is an existential threat, especially as production scales and cost curves bend down. Yet the sense of urgency just was not there. Again, not denial, but more like absence. 

A warm company, but a changing one

Walking around, visiting old places, talking to people, I was reminded why Mercedes was such a nice company to work for. I remember the company really did feel like a warm bath, almost like a family. You felt you were part of something bigger. 

That culture still exists to some extent, but it is clearly under pressure. The company is not doing as well as it used to. People are being asked to leave, and there are voluntary redundancy and early retirement packages. Good money, yes, but still a signal that the golden days are over.

Mercedes-Benz is changing, and not necessarily in a controlled way. My honest opinion after this weekend is that Mercedes may not survive in its current form in the long run. Possibly not even the medium run. They are still betting on internal combustion engines lasting longer and lobbying the EU for that, mostly because they are not able to get the costs of EVs down. They believe they can catch up in self-driving and seem to assume that the brand alone will save them. I think that is a dangerous combination.

The museum and the power of the past

One of the highlights of the weekend was the Mercedes-Benz Museum. It is genuinely spectacular: architecturally impressive, thoughtfully curated and in a way quite emotional, especially while looking at the cars that were in production when I worked there.

What makes it special is how it places the evolution of Mercedes-Benz vehicles alongside world history. You see photos of wars and of social change. You basically walk through time. Anyone visiting Stuttgart with even a mild interest in cars should go, it is world-class.

But there is something ironic about it too: it celebrates the past incredibly well. Almost too well…

Media, narrative, and selective reality

When I was in Stuttgart I bought a Auto Motor und Sport, a magazine I used to read religiously when I worked at Mercedes. I had not touched one in years, so I was quite curious about the articles. What do they say about Tesla or about EVs in general? The answer was quite revealing.

On the cover I saw a comparison between an “e-Tesla” and a Skoda diesel.The wording alone is interesting: “e-Tesla”, as if there are other kinds of Teslas. Subtle framing matters… Not sure why anyone who would consider buying a Tesla would consider a Skoda as well, let alone a diesel Skoda. The test itself was about towing caravans and other equipment. I didn’t read most of it but skipped to the end. And yes, unsurprisingly, Tesla “lost” that test. 

Inside the magazine, there was an EV SUV comparison test. Five EV SUVs: An Opel, a Hyundai, a Kia, a Renault and a Volkwagen. I had to read that twice: no Tesla? Tesla’s Model Y is a SUV and it’s the best selling car in the whole world, including in China where it beat all domestic players (not many people at Mercedes knew that). In almost any country in the world, an EV test without Tesla would be unthinkable. In Germany, apparently, it is normal. However you want to frame it, this is not neutral reporting.

When I worked at Mercedes, everyone read this magazine, so I assume many still do. If this is the lens through which the industry sees the world, it explains a lot. The word brainwashing came to mind. German readers are not just uninformed, they are willingly misinformed. 

Leaving Stuttgart with mixed feelings

I loved seeing my old friends, I loved walking through familiar streets, I loved the food and wines, I loved the museum. It was a truly great weekend and I will be back soon again, hopefully with a bit more time to see other friends and colleagues as well. But I also left with a sense of unease. There is a world moving very fast and another moving very slowly. Stuttgart and Mercedes-Benz still live largely in the second one. Tesla is not just a competitor, I see it as almost a different species. And the fact that so many smart, experienced people still do not see that may be the biggest risk of all. 

I never really believed in New Year’s Resolutions. However, last year I did make some and kept reminding myself about them every month, and it actually worked pretty well. Because of that I read over 50 books this year and I spent 6-7 weeks sailing on my boat (mostly offshore). So I decided to make some new resolutions for the coming year and will send them to myself as a reminder every month. Most are personal (related to health, sports and friends/family) and I won’t write about them publicly. But some are business related so I share them here, so friends know what I will change and focus on this year.

Focus on AI
My main ‘public’ resolution is that I plan to focus almost completely on AI in 2026. Over the past year I already spent a lot of time on AI, but I feel I keep falling behind. Everything goes so fast that you need to do it almost full-time. New LLMs come out every day, there are new vibe coding packages all the time and I can’t count the number opf agentic AI tools that I come across every week. I want to try all the latest software and tools and understand what is possible, and how they could impact our lives and my investments.

Vibe coding and AI video
My initial focus will be on vibe coding and on creating videos. I have only dipped my toe into the vibe coding waters so far, but I want to become an expert in 2026, for example to create my own personalised software and to automate more things in my life. I also want to understand better how I can create videos, not just funny personal ones like you see them all over YouTube and TikTok, but also videos based on stories that I write. I believe in a few years most long-form video will be created in AI, after starting off with online video 20 years ago I would like to see if I can be part of that.

I will likely start with vibe coding videos on DeepLearning.AI and then I will do some of the online Stanford AI courses that are available on YouTube. But for Stanford I will likely have to start with refreshing my math skills (calculus and linear algebra), so that I can really understand what’s going on under the neural networks hood. I look forward to this deep dive, but also to keeping up to date with the latest trends in AI. I think it will help me to become a better investor in the space as well.

My equity portfolio
With regards to public equity investing, I now have my portfolio in place for the next couple of years. My main public investments consist of GOOG, GLXY, IBIT, BSOL, BMNR, and of course TSLA. My resolution is not to make many changes to it, unless something big happens that requires an adjustment. Or unless my AI knowledge will give me new insights into what the world will look like in 2-3 years. For now I think this portfolio is pretty much future-proof, so I will have more time to spend on AI.

Stepping down from my businesses
The last big resolution is that I will step down from most of the companies that I am involved in, although I will keep advisory roles. This process I already started in 2025, and this wil free up more time for AI and for personal endeavours. It doesn’t mean I won’t start new businesses anymore in the future, but if I would start a new business it will likely be a business run on AI.

I look forward to the new year ahead, I wish you all a happy 2026!

I have been an investor in Bitcoin for almost 13 years. It changed my life, my views on money and society, and on how I invest. But in the past year I sold almost all my BTC and I do not plan to hold any self-custodied crypto in the future anymore. This is not a rage-quit like some OGs have done in the past, but a practical move. I know I will likely get some criticism because of writing this, but it’s something I have thought long and hard about, and something I have finalised already.

With regards to this being a practical move, a large part of the proceeds actually went straight back into Bitcoin exposure through spot ETFs such as IBIT. The logic is simple: I can borrow against ETF shares easily and at better terms with my current, mostly non-EU, brokers. For me moving into IBIT has been cheaper and more straightforward than borrowing against self-custodied BTC. Yes, more banks now offer crypto-backed loans, I have talked to some of them and also used it with a Swiss bank. But in practice the rates, LTVs, operational friction and reporting still favor something like IBIT in my setup. I hate paperwork and I like clean statements, ETFs make that part easy.

The other reason is diversification. For more than a decade I was almost all-in on Bitcoin or Bitcoin related products. That worked really well, but it also boxed me in. The world is changing fast and I want a broader portfolio that can benefit from what I call ‘AI eating everything’.

So I shifted more into public equity. I wrote a bit about this in the summer of 2024 already, when I took a position in Tesla (the Tesla share price has roughly doubled since I wrote the post). I am still a huge believer in Tesla and it is now my biggest public equity position. But just having Tesla and IBIT is not enough diversification for me anymore, so I also started buying Google this year. Not just for their AI strategy (in my opinion they became the new leader of AI this year), but also because I want some exposure to Quantum Computing. Google is much further with QC than the general public realises. I am also invested in 2 nuclear fusion companies (both held privately), because I believe that fusion may change the future of energy and may help to mitigate climate change. Next to that I am invested in some Bitcoin and Ethereum Treasury Companies, leading ones that I believe will outperform their underlying assets (both private and public entities). This is not a complicated strategy, it is simply concentrated exposure to the platforms I think will matter most in the 2030s.

A third change is what I do with some of the gains. I started giving back more through charity. I prefer to do this quietly, either anonymously or through a company, so I will not go into detail here. I want to do more of this over the next couple of years, especially in education projects and in places where I spend a lot of my time. I will likely not talk about it much publicly, and please do not approach me with projects. 

As I have said here before, I believe we are heading for a very difficult time, with most people losing their jobs because of AI over the next decade. AI is great for investors, but horrible for people making money from their labour. It’s not something we can stop, we are past the point of no return. 

As much as I love AI, I also believe that we created a monster. A monster that we can’t control anymore. Governments won’t be able to help you if you lose your job or income, because their tax base will start to evaporate labour income goes down. Maybe the time of big governments ruling the world is over soon, but that’s a topic for another time. Whether that will happen or not, I think we may have to go back to a situation where the wealthy will have to give back to society in order to save it. 

Am I still a Bitcoin believer? Absolutely. It will likely outperform almost any investment over the next 10-15 years. But the world around Bitcoin has changed: BTC is no longer just an outsider asset, it is now part of the financial system. You may not like that, but just like with AI you can’t stop it, so I adapt to it. To me that means keeping exposure to Bitcoin, using the rails and tooling that exist, and redeploying capital into areas with asymmetric upside outside of Bitcoin. It also means thinking more about impact than about pure maximalism.

As always, this is not investment advice, it is simply how I am positioning after 13 years in Bitcoin. I know I am not the only one. I know several of my ‘early-BTC’ friends have done similar things over the past 2 years since the BTC ETFs came out, switching to IBIT but also diversifying to other asset classes. 

If AI shrinks the job market and tax revenues fall, survival may depend less on the state and more on the people right next to you.

I had a call today with a friend in Latin America, and we were talking about a man he knows who receives a pension of 20 dollars a month. That’s not a typo. There aren’t many formal jobs, and the government doesn’t really take care of people. Yet life goes on. People lean on friends and family. They share food, pass around small jobs, sit in the shade, listen to music, nap, gossip, love. It’s not the Western script for a “good life,” but it is a life. And many seem, if not wealthy, at least unburdened by the constant grind.

That conversation got me thinking about our near future. What happens in 10-15 years if automation and AI eliminate a large percentage of jobs? What happens when tax revenues fall because fewer people work, or because mobile capital and talent keep outrunning higher rates? What happens when governments can only offer a subsistence income, or even that becomes hard?

The Western social contract may not work anymore

The Western social contract quietly assumes three things: most adults have paid work, governments can tax those wages and profits, and in exchange the state provides a safety net. But if employment shrinks and the tax base erodes, the math stops working. You can raise taxes on “the rich” and many will cheer, but the wealthy are also the most mobile. They move jurisdictions, restructure assets, or simply stop realizing taxable income. You can try to catch them, and some governments will try hard, but chasing the base tends to shrink the base.

Even if higher taxes “worked,” the numbers likely wouldn’t cover a generous universal basic income. I’m in favor of UBI in theory, but I’m against pretending that we can make it work based on tax once AI starts taking over most jobs. If the pie isn’t growing and the slice-takers get better at leaving the table, there’s less to redistribute. Meanwhile trust in government falls, especially as fiat purchasing power keeps leaking away and services decline.

A preview from the Global South

Parts of Latin America already live in a low-state, high-community equilibrium. There’s less formal employment, less reliable public service, and more dependence on your immediate network. It isn’t all sunshine (crime and instability are real) but there’s also an unexpected abundance: of time, of relationships, and of improvisation. People trade favors, share meals, raise kids together, and find meaning outside career ladders.

We might be headed for a version of that. Not identical, but rhyming. As the state’s role shrinks, the tribe’s role expands. “Tribe” here isn’t an online fan club. It’s your family, your close friends, your neighbours, your church or club. It’s the people who will pick you up from the hospital, lend you tools, watch your kids, and tell you when you’re being stupid. In a world where institutions become slower and thinner, the local and the personal get faster and thicker.

Less government power, more personal responsibility

I don’t think we’re headed for apocalypse. I think we’re headed for uneven abundance. AI will make goods and services much cheaper and better, but the distribution of income will be very different, and the old funding model for the welfare state will wobble. Governments will try to do more with less, but they’ll also try to tax more from fewer. Some will overreach, some will reform, but on average their relative power will decline.

That means we need to re-learn habits our grandparents took for granted: build community, share resources, fix things, grow things, teach each other, keep an eye out for one another. In affluent countries we’ve let the state do that for us. If the state can’t, we either rebuild those muscles or we will become very lonely.

Practical steps I’m thinking about

• Invest in people, not just assets. Treat relationships like compounding capital. Show up before you need help.
• Build a local mesh. Know your neighbours. Join (or start) a small group — a church circle, sports club, parents group, makerspace.
• Diversify jurisdictions and money. Don’t rely on a single tax system or currency. Keep some optionality (and privacy) where lawful.
• Learn useful, tradable skills. From basic repairs and cooking to AI-assisted craftsmanship. Skills are always useful.
• Reduce dependency. Lower your fixed costs, grow a bit of food if you can, keep some emergency supplies, and document your critical knowledge.
• Give first. The best insurance in a low-trust world is to make yourself high-trust. Be the person others want in their tribe.

If I’m wrong, nothing breaks

If governments pull off a miracle (strong growth, smart taxation, well-funded UBI, renewed trust) great. You still win: strong community, diversified risk, and real skills are assets in any scenario. But if I’m right (or even half right), then relying purely on large, distant institutions will feel riskier each year, and relying on the people you can actually call at 2 a.m. will feel like common sense.

The conversation with my friend was a reminder: many people already live in a world where the state is thin and the tribe is thick. They survive, and many find joy, not because they have more money, but because they have each other. As we move into an era of technological abundance and institutional scarcity, that may be the most important lesson for the West to learn.

PS: I’m not romanticizing poverty or chaos. I’m arguing for resilience and for rebuilding the human networks that let abundance actually feel abundant.

Note: I dictated this post to ChatGPT and it cleaned it up for me (it took out the repeats and things like ‘eh’, and it actually rephrased some sentences). Then I edited it myself, which took more time than I had expected. Not sure if I like the result better than writing a normal post: I feel when writing it on a laptop I tend to go deeper and add more detail. My sentences also tend to be much shorter when dictating. Maybe I need to just practice it a bit more?

On New Year’s Eve I was invited to a dinner party with some AI entrepreneurs and investors in Singapore. Of course the main topic was how fast AI had developed in 2024 and what would happen in 2025. We all agreed that 2025 would be a very interesting year – not just for AI, but also for crypto and for the direction the world is going.

In 2025 jobs will start to disappear

Although we certainly didn’t agree on everything, we all believe that in about ten years we could live in a world of abundance. However, the period until then will be a transition period that will be very hard for most people. During 2025, we will start to see that people are not able to find jobs anymore. Either people right out of university that can’t find work or people that get laid off and cannot find new jobs anymore. For example, I believe that anybody who is in law school right now will find it very hard to find a job at a law firm after graduation, because most entry-level jobs at law firms can now be done by AI agents. The same is true for consulting jobs. I believe 2025 will be the year where the first large firms will start implementing AI agents at scale. Anybody good at building AI agents and prompting them could make a killing this year.

When talking to a friend working at a large consulting firm last week, he told me that most clients are not interested to work with junior consultants anymore. They just want to work with the partners. They’re not willing to pay for juniors, simply because they can now do those tasks themselves with large language models and very soon with AI agents. If you’re a junior consultant, it will soon be very difficult to find a job right out of university. Clients, and therefore these firms, just want to work with experienced people. This is happening right now and in 2025 this is going to get worse. It starts with juniors, then it gets to middle-level consultants. In the end, I think most consulting firms might downsize by 80%, 90%. And maybe eventually, companies don’t even want to use human consulting companies anymore. A company like McKinsey could be run by AI agents with justs a few humans for social connections. Maybe that’s the next big thing, who knows?

Anyway, the problem is that these people that are laid off (or not hired in the first place) won’t have money. There is social security in many countries, at least in the Western world, but not in every country. And people that are laid off will certainly not be able to live their lives at the level that they were used to. That’s going to be a huge transition for many. I recently read a story on X about a Google Senior Director who had been laid off (something that happens regularly at these large firms). These can be $1M+ salary positions, and in the past it would be fairly easy to get a similar job with similar pay at another tech firm. But this person has been without a job for 9 months and wasn’t even able to get a job with a 70% pay cut. Of course there could be other reasons for this, but I start hearing more stories like this. I believe there is a trend here and that AI is behind it.

Preparing for social unrest

Because of these lay-offs, quite soon many of these people actually may not even be able to survive anymore.  What we are going to see is a lot of social unrest, potentially riots or even a civil war ‘against the rich and AI’. That is going to be a dangerous thing. At the NY Eve dinner party we mostly agreed that we have to be prepared for this. One of us said he is considering a move to Argentina over the next years to avoid the problems that will happen in the world. Another one was looking at living in a rural area in the north of the US, which I think is a good idea because I now think the US will do really well during this period (but you probably don’t want to be in the big cities there). There are a number of places where you could live more safely during the next 10 years to avoid the real problems in society.

Maybe we’re overcautious? Could be, but keep in mind that we are entrepreneurs and investors who spot future trends to make money, and we think you cannot be too prepared for this. I’ve never really been a prepper (except in the months before Covid hit, when nobody saw yet what was going to happen), but I’m getting to the point that I feel like we may have to somehow become a prepper to survive in the future.

A future of abundance

AI is going to hit us very soon. It has of course already been hitting us, but so far it was less visible. This year many people might for the first time realise that their life will be changing in a negative way because of AI. Eventually life will get better, but as mentioned it will take at least 10 years until we get to a society of abundance, a society where AI helps us to do most of the work and where humans can have a more relaxed life. Where we don’t have to work hard anymore, where we can have a lot more free time, and where most things will be (almost) free. So you won’t need a lot of money anymore to live a good life. Entertainment is already almost free. Things like Netflix or Prime Video don’t cost that much per month for basically all movies and TV shows in the world. YouTube has even more content and can be accessed for free with ads. I think transportation will be almost free because energy costs are going to be much lower than they currently are thanks to renewable energy and nuclear fusion. Because robots can build everything for us, including other robots, the production costs will go down tremendously. Humans will be able to live a very different and potentially very much better life than they currently can for hardly any money. So that’s a major difference. But the next decade could be very difficult.

Climate change will add to the problems

At the same time, what we’re seeing is that climate change is hitting us as well. And many people still don’t want to see what the effects of climate change are. The inability to look the problem in the face points towards a blind spot in human psychology that allowed this problem to form in the first place. They sort of feel like ‘it’s not that bad’ or ‘technology will solve it’. Well, technology certainly will solve a lot of it eventually. However, I think it might be too late. We are already at the point of no return or even past the point of no return. I often give the example that once you start to boil an egg, you cannot unboil it anymore. And that’s what we’re seeing with climate change as well. Lots of changes that have taken place over the past couple of years simply can’t be reversed and will lead to a planet that could be uninhabitable for much of humanity.

The combination of AI and climate change will lead to major changes. And I think many humans actually might not be able to survive the coming 10 years. Not just a few million, but potentially hundreds of millions or maybe even billions of people could not survive the changes. And this is going to be a very difficult period because of it. It’s hard to say how it will play out, there are simply too many variables that are difficult to predict. But I think if you do not prepare for this, you could be in serious trouble.

2025

For me, I look forward to 2025. It’s going to be a very interesting year for crypto and for AI. But it’s also going to be a difficult year for many people. So what I would tell everybody in the first week of this new year is to be positive, but be prepared. Make the right investments right now, both financially and with your time. Learn how to work with AI to help it improve your job so it will be safe for a bit longer. But also be prepared to lose your job and start creating side income streams. Things can change fast. I know that for many people  it’s difficult to move to another location. But it’s something you should keep in mind, because the world around you will be changing. If you are prepared, you will have a better chance of getting through this next decade and end up in a world of abundance. Hopefully I’m wrong. But if I’m not, it’s better that you know what might hit you than that it will all of a sudden happen without being prepared.

This weekend both Donald Trump and Robert F Kennedy spoke at the Bitcoin conference in Nashville. It was a huge moment for Bitcoin, it was the first time that US Presidential candidates talked about Bitcoin in public, and announcing ideas for a US strategic Bitcoin reserve.

This could have a huge impact on the Bitcoin price. It’s all about game theory: once one large nation states announces it will start buying Bitcoin, other nations states will immediately start doing this as well. Nobody wants to be first, but certainly nobody wants to be last. And when the US is first everyone wants to be at least second.

Because Bitcoin has a limited supply (only 450 new BTC are created per day, about $30M at current prices), the only way for these countries to get these coins is for others to sell them to them. This is different from Gold, where higher prices means that it’s now possible to mine at more expensive locations, so the Gold supply eventually will go up when the price goes up (and the market expects that, thereby capping the growth of the Gold price). Most people will not sell their Bitcoin if they see nation states are starting to buy (why sell today if you can sell for a higher price tomorrow?), leading to much higher prices.

How high? If the US would follow RFK’s plans it would mean that the US would buy more coins per day than are being mined. This would be ongoing for years to come. That would be the moment Bitcoin could go up hundreds of percent within a few months, simply because people won’t sell anymore. My expectation is that very soon other countries would follow (the longer they wait the more expensive it would be to build a Bitcoin reserve), meaning that Bitcoin could break $1 million within a year.

Neither Trump nor RFK are in office (yet), and even if they would be elected it’s the question whether they will follow through on their promises. But these speeches will have woken up other countries. Because of their announcements, talking about Bitcoin is suddenly something that won’t get you fired for anymore if you bring it up. On Sunday a Hong Kong politician announced that he will start looking at a strategic Bitcoin reserve for Hong Kong. A Dutch friend of mine (and a Bitcoin whale) has been working on a Dutch Bitcoin party idea for a while and he just posted about it. I am quite sure there are several other countries looking at a Bitcoin reserve idea right now, they have just not announced it yet.

Once the cat is out of the bag you can’t get it back in. When we will look back in a few years this weekend could have been the watershed moment for Bitcoin as a reserve asset for nation states. One of the reasons I started to invest in Bitcoin years ago was that I knew this moment would come one day. However, I am surprised to see how quickly it could now all of a sudden happen. My expectation was that this would start bottom up, with small countries like El Salvador (that has been buying BTC regularly for years) leading the way, not with the US as the main cheerleader for Bitcoin. There will be very interesting times ahead!

When you ask people what kind of company Tesla is, almost everyone will say it’s an Electric Vehicle company. The same is the case for Wall Street, most investors see and value Tesla as an EV business. I think they are wrong though. Right now most of Tesla’s revenues still come from the sale of EVs, but that is changing fast and within a few years selling EVs may just be a side business. In reality Tesla is an AI company disguised as an EV company.

The company is in the early stages of a complete transformation. As Elon put it a few weeks ago, they are not just writing a new chapter for Tesla but a completely new book. Because of that I believe the company is extremely undervalued and will be one of the best long term investments you can make right now. Once I realised how big of an opportunity there was I started investing in Tesla and I plan to keep adding to that investment. 

When I try to put a value on Tesla, I do that based on its upcoming Robotaxis, on the Optimus humanoid robot, and on its energy business. The sale of EVs is not relevant long term in my opinion, so I won’t even take that into account when calculating the potential future value of the company in this blog post.

Tesla Energy

The energy business will be important for Tesla and it could double or triple Tesla’s valuation over the next 3 years. Tesla produces Powerwalls (batteries for homes, sufficient to power a small home for one day) and Megapacks (large battery packs for industrial solutions). Because the demand for energy is growing extremely fast due to Generative AI, Tesla is doing very well in this sector. In Q2 they produced double the amount of battery storage from Q1 and they will keep on ramping this up in their Lathrop factory, with a new factory in Shanghai opening before the end of the year. I expect margins for the energy business to be potentially a lot higher than analysts expect, therefore I believe that the Q2 results (due on July 23) for Tesla Energy will turn out to be much better than expected, which might lead to another surge in the stock price. Because Wall Street only looks at the next 12-18 months and doesn’t really see the opportunity in Tesla’s long term plans yet, over the next 2 years Tesla Energy will be very important for the Tesla stock price, possibly even more important than the current EV production and sales. But in the long run most of the market cap will come from Robotaxi and Optimus. Therefore I will only focus on these 2 products in the rest of this post. I will explain what they are and what their potential is and what will likely happen to Tesla’s stock price. 

Robotaxi

I am convinced that the automotive world will change completely before the end of this decade. I think we will see a major shift from people owning their own cars to people using Robotaxis to get around. This will start in big cities where it’s hard to get around and where parking is expensive, but will quickly happen in smaller cities and more rural areas as well.

A Robotaxi is a fully autonomous electric vehicle that works likes an Uber, but without a driver. You will use an app to get one and there will be no interaction with any human beings etiher before or during the trip. The major difference with Uber or a taxi is that it will likely be 80%-90% cheaper. Nobody knows what the price per mile will be, it will likely depend on the location and on future competition. As an example, geo-fenced robotaxis in China currently charge less than $0.10 per kilometer. I don’t expect prices to be that low in the US, but over time it may happen. 

Many people don’t believe Robotaxis will be possible anytime soon, likely because they have not been following how quickly Fully Self Driving (FSD) has developed over the past years. Tesla self-driving systems have gone from an autopilot where a human being had to be at the steering wheel at all times, to an AI-based FSD where the car does everything for you and human intervention is not needed anymore. No other car companies come even close to what Tesla has built. Where regular drivers have an accident rate of about once every 200,000 miles, Tesla’s old FSD only gets into an accident once every 3.2 million miles. That’s an improvement of 16 times and it’s not even the latest FSD yet. Tesla got here by collecting all driving data for many years, but it also went from a rule-based system (“if A happens then you do B”) to a neural network that ’thinks’ like a human driver would think. That means you can drive anywhere, even in places where a Tesla has never been before. I would compare it to how Large Language Models like ChatGPT have changed the way we work and create content, that is the leap that Tesla has made in this field. You have to see it to believe it. Watch some YouTube videos if you are not convinced or even better, try it out by doing a test drive in a Tesla with FSD 12.4.

Having the best FSD is not sufficient to start a Robotaxi company though. You will need a huge network of cars to get started, the same problem that Uber faced when it launched. My assumption is that Elon will use his existing fleet of Tesla cars that have FSD installed for this. It basically means that anybody who owns a Tesla can use it as a Robotaxi and make additional money with it (depending on which assumptions you use a Tesla owner could potentially make $50,000 of profit per year, after Tesla gets a big cut). This will be a game changer, because cars that are used maybe 5% of the time could suddenly be used 50% or more. Suddenly Tesla vehicles will go up in price instead of depreciating over time. Uber could shut down right away, because no company with physical driver can compete against Tesla’s prices.

The next step will likely be a dedicated Robotaxi that Tesla will build. Nobody knows yet what it will look like, but it will probably be revealed later this year. Originally a Robotaxi presentation was planned for August 8, but it now seems that may not happen until October. My assumption is that it will be a 4 seater without a steering wheel, but that there may be other versions as well (a larger van or maybe even a future sleeping version). I believe that Tesla may not sell these vehicles to the public, but keeps them for its own fleet. In that way they can get 100% of the revenues that these vehicles make. 

The estimation is that by 2030 the global market for Robotaxis will be in the $8-10 trillion range. At this point Tesla has no real competion. Nobody else has FSD as advanced as Tesla’s and even existing players like Waymo (owned by Google) or Cruise (owned by GM) still have regular remote human intervention, even though the cars have no drivers on board. Waymo and Cruise are no competition for Tesla because they are geo-fenced, meaning they only operate well within a predefined area. Next to that no other competitor will likely be able to scale as fast as Tesla can. Because of that Tesla has a good chance to dominate this industry.

But let’s be conservative and assume that China’s car companies can scale as well and will be able to get to a similar vision-based neural network type of FSD. In that case Tesla will still have at least 10-20% global market share, meaning revenues of $1-2 trillion per year just for robotaxi. Given Tesla’s current P/S ratio this would mean a market cap of $10-20 trillion for the robotaxi businesss. The current market cap is only about $800 billion, so there will be a HUGE opportunity here.

Optimus

The Robotaxi business will be huge, but the biggest opportunity for Tesla will be its humanoid robot Optimus. I believe that we are seeing a new industry forming that will become the largest in the world – humanoid robots will transform how we make things and create a massive new industry. 

This week Elon Musk announced on X that Tesla will finish the design of its Optimus robot this year, so Optimus is something that will probably happen sooner rather than later. What is special about the Optimus is that it can basically learn to do anything that a human can do. So it’s not a specialised robot that can do just one thing, but you can teach it anything. You want a robot to clean your house or do the dishes? Optimus will be there for you. Don’t like to hang up the laundry? Optimus is ready to help. Do your kids need a tutor for their homework? Optimus can do that as well. Almost anything that we as humans can do Optimus will be able to to, and likely faster, better and longer than we can do it.

But not just household tasks, it can do any physical labour job that humans do as well. At a much lower cost than humans and for much longer periods of time. Factory workers might work 8 hours a day, Optimus can work 22 hours a day before it needs to recharge itself. Optimus won’t get bored if it needs to do the same job over and over again. And if a job is dangerous Optimus has no problem doing it. Security guards will soon be replaced by robots and I expect that wars will soon not be fought by human soldiers anymore. Firefighters don’t need to risk their lives, Optimus will do their work for them.

Optimus will completely change the way we live our lives. Almost any job can eventually be done by Optimus for a fraction of the cost of human beings, which will lead to huge deflation. That means that over time almost everything could become almost free. It will take some time to get there and I expect there to be a lot of chaos during that time, but we will eventually get to the other, much brighter, side. I don’t want to go into that in this blog post, but the dark side of mass unemployment and chaos is something we have to keep in mind when discussing robots. 

There are already a number of humanoid robot producers, with some humanoids already being sold to companies and doing real work. However, even though Tesla is not the first to market, I expect the company to dominate the sector, like they have done with electric vehicles. They have everything lined up for success: they have the batteries (Tesla Energy can produce them) and they know how to scale up production (something that many robot makers will struggle with). They have the AI models available for these robots and they have the data centers that are needed for the model pre-training and for the inference.

Just Optimus itself could catapult Tesla to the most valuable company in the world and make Elon the world’s first multi-trillionaire. If we would have 1 billion robots and these robots would earn a profit of $10,000 per year, and we would assume that Tesla would have 10% of this market, that would mean $1 trillion profit per year for Tesla annually. At a P/E ration of 25 the market cap of Tesla just because of Optimus would be $25 trillion. Likely there will be a lot more than 1 billion robots though, I actually expect that we will have more robots than human beings in a few years time. And possibly Tesla will have a market share of more than 10% of the market. It’s all speculation right now, but the point is that if they pull this off the stock price of Tesla will go up exponentially over the next couple of years. Based on the current valuation the stock price would go up at least 30 times, and that seems still very conservative to me. 

What’s next for Tesla?

If you follow robotics and AI closely like I have been doing, you might start to understand that Tesla could become the most valuable and most important company in the world. Elon has all the ingredients to pull this off, but the world doesn’t see it yet. That’s the real reason I am investing in Tesla. To me it feels similar to when I first had my Eureka moment with Bitcoin (11 years ago, when it was still below $100). Yes, there are many hurdles and many risks, but Elon has shown time and time again that he can pull things off that nobody else has been able to pull off. If he manages this it will make him incredibly rich, but also the many people that believe in him and that own Tesla shares. Wall Street doesn’t see it yet, even Cathie Woods (ARK Invest) has not put a valuation on Optimus yet. But once Wall Street will understand what’s going on the sky is the limit for Tesla. 

This is part 2 of this blog post, part 1 is here. If you are interested to follow Tesla more closely you could follow this Twitter list I put together. The list has been super valuable for me and it’s how I get most of my Tesla news. I also listen to a number of podcasts and YouTube channels, one of my favourites is Herbert Ong. If you want to go deeper into the Robotaxi check out this report by ARK Invest’s Cathie Wood. The best humanoid robot expert on Twitter is Cern Basher. His calculations are a hidden gem, this tweet has links to all his previous bot research.

As always, my posts reflect my personal opinions, are not related to any of the companies I am involved with, and are not meant as financial advice. Do your own research before you invest.