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“There is a belief that global GDP is less than $100 trillion. AI will turn that $100 trillion into $500 trillion.”
—Jensen Huang
In 1901, U.S. Steel became the first company to reach $1 billion—an “unprecedented amount of money,” a history The company was surprised after 20 years.
“Hundreds of millions demanded respect,” it added. “But a billion, a million, a million – that seems like just numbers, that can’t be counted.”
Today, investors should try to count the trillions: they exist now 11 publicly traded companies valued at over $1 trillion.
For more information, consider that if you earned $1 every second of the day, every day (and you never spent any of it), you wouldn’t be a trillionaire for a year. 33,168.
Investors – who may not live that long – should expect their trillion dollar companies to receive dollars faster than that.
Scientifically, Aswath Damodaran acts like change DCF to calculate the amount of revenue that large companies need to bring in annually to justify the current valuation.
To invest in Tesla now, he reckons, you have to believe that the company will make at least one annual profit $2.2 trillion by 2030 — an idea that is “pushing the limits of possibility,” he says.
Nvidia’s shareholders are not very ambitious: They only need the company to make about $590 billion a year by 2030. “Although this is a reach,” Damodaran advises, “it is possible and reasonable.”
However, $590 billion is a big number.
At a glance, US Steel in 1901 was worth about $46 billion adjusted for inflation.
Now, OpenAI is he says to raise doubling that amount – $100 billion – in a one-time call to investors.
SpaceX was too report this week to raise funds at a cost of $ 800 billion, with plans for an IPO at $ 1.5 trillion..
Anthropic, a nonprofit that doesn’t want to maximize profits, may IPO for $300 billion.
Amazing.
It was 12 years ago that the word “unicorn” was he made meaning a new phenomenon of startups worth $ 1 billion.
Now we have “centicorns” – private startups worth 100x more than unicorns.
Perhaps the most surprising, however, is the introduction of AI – Thinking Machines – which raised $ 2 billion from investors in plant around earlier this year.
The crop around the growth of US Metals (adjusted for inflation) is a measure of how financial markets have grown over the past century.
Will these companies receive trillions of dollars to justify these calculations?
Calculated in dollars per second, it is hard to imagine.
But we have to think bigger than that, like the ChatGPT theme recently encouraged to do: “I think there is an eternal need for wisdom.”
If that’s the case, I think there should be an endless supply of stocks, too.
Let’s look at the charts.
Unicorn World:
The US has 712 unicorns, worth $2.9 trillion, vs. 157 only in second place in China. 80 of them were it was launched in 2025 alone.
Big companies are good to have:
An invalid readings found that, in 2024, the EU made more from tariffs on US tech companies than it did from all European companies. The corresponding figure (depending on for Goldman Sachs): In the last 50 years, only 14 companies with a market capitalization of more than $10 billion were founded in Europe against 241 in the US.
AI is concerned:
Bloomberg reports That Oracle debt now trades at junk-bond levels.
New jobs and prices:
Greg IP they write that because US unemployment is rising and wage growth is slowing, jobs will soon replace prices as the focus of our economy.
Where jobs end:
Bloomberg reports that tariffs have hit small businesses hard, forcing them out of business.
Good and bad news on tariffs:
A a new lesson The good news reports: U.S. prices so far have been about half the headline number because of the slowdown, discounts and pressure gaps. The bad news, however, is that “almost 100%” of the costs are passed on to consumers through higher prices.
Where am I starting?
Joe Brusuelas reports that “The gap between US productivity and hourly wages for non-supervisory workers continues to widen. If anything, the gap is widening as the American economy continues to be transformed by global trade and technological advances.”
Read on:
The FT reported earlier this year on lack of literacy: The percentage of Americans who read for good has dropped by 10 percent since 2005, even as children’s literacy rates remain steady. Are newsletters considered personal interest? If so, please consider reading this article to a child.
A few children to read:
Torsten Slok says the number of US families with children has been declining.
YouTube Format:
About 50% of young people in the United States say they “don’t read” in their spare time, up from 20% in 1990. It seems alarming, but you can learn more on YouTube.
The world of productivity growth:
The yield on 10-year Japanese government bonds is around 2% for the first time since 1999. Higher yields mean that Japanese investors will sell US dollars to repatriate at home, but the opposite seems to be happeningpossibly due to the attractiveness of US AI stocks.
Prices based on weight:
Weighing everything at cost per pound, Andrew McCallip they find that the Tesla Model 3 costs less than Camembert. “We pull sand, oil, and rock from the bottom and turn it into a machine that’s cheaper than old milk.”
Maybe that’s the kind of thinking we need to understand the calculations of trillions.
Have a great week, millions of readers.
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