Elon Musk and the Mirage of Post-Scarcity.
Why the 2036 economic prophecy crumbles against the laws of monetary theory, positional goods, and human nature.
In this year of 2026, the global economy observed (for some days), torn between fascination and skepticism, the crowning of Elon Musk as the first trillionaire in history. This dizzying milestone, crossed thanks to the triumphant IPO of SpaceX, does not, however, mark the apex of purely capitalist ambition. On the contrary, it serves as a springboard for one of the most iconoclastic statements ever made by a captain of industry of this magnitude.
Interviewed by Zanny Minton Beddoes, editor-in-chief of the prestigious magazine The Economist, during a marathon 90-minute interview, the boss of Tesla and SpaceX brushed aside questions about the future revenues of his industrial empires. Instead of projected balance sheets and growth charts, Musk delivered a prophecy with sci-fi undertones, raw and disarming: “Money will no longer matter in 2036.”
This postulate, of an almost naive simplicity on paper, deserves an in-depth analysis. At a time when generative artificial intelligence algorithms are upending the labor market and humanoid robotics are making giant strides, the idea of an absolute society of abundance is beginning to take root in the minds of Silicon Valley technologists.
The thesis is as follows: if robots and AI manage to produce a quantity of goods and services vastly superior to what a human being could ever consume in an entire lifetime, the very notion of savings, capitalization and, ultimately, money, becomes obsolete. What is the point of hoarding bank notes or financial assets if energy is virtually free, if intelligence is an abundant commodity and if the workforce is infinitely mechanized?
Nevertheless, this highly seductive equation leaves immense grey areas in its wake. It presupposes a harmonious transition, erases the fundamental laws of scarcity and ignores the intrinsically competitive nature of human desires. More troublingly, it emanates from a man whose colossal fortune rests precisely on the financial architecture he promises to see disappear.
This in-depth article proposes to dissect this economic prophecy, to analyze its theoretical foundations, its literary inspirations, but above all to confront it with the unforgiving realities of modern macroeconomics and the heavy track record of its author regarding bold predictions.
The Asymmetric Infrastructure Trade: Why Oracle is the Ultimate Proxy for OpenAI's Success.
In the rapidly evolving landscape of artificial intelligence, market participants are perpetually hunting for the most efficient vectors of capital allocation. While the retail focus remains fixated on the consumer-facing applications of generative AI and the underlying designers of graphics processing units (GPUs), a profound mispricing has emerged in the infrastructure layer.
The Monetary Theory of Abundance and the Deflationary Trap
The macroeconomic reasoning outlined by Elon Musk during his exchange with The Economist seems, at first glance, mathematically clear. To understand this vision, one must delve into the fundamental mechanisms of money creation and price formation. The classic equation of the quantitative theory of money is written:
where M is the money supply, V the velocity of money, P the general price level, and Q the quantity of goods and services produced. Historically, a massive increase in M (money printing by central banks) without a proportional increase in Q (production) inevitably leads to an increase in P: this is inflation.
However, Musk introduces a disruptive variable: Artificial General Intelligence (AGI) coupled with omnipresent humanoid robotics (like Tesla’s Optimus project). Under this paradigm, the variable Q is destined to explode exponentially. If robots can extract raw materials, design factories, build other robots, assemble consumer goods, farm the land and transport products without any human intervention, the marginal cost of production moves inexorably towards zero. In such a scenario, the money supply, however gigantic, could grow indefinitely without ever triggering the slightest inflationary spark.
Better still, the billionaire goes so far as to predict the reverse phenomenon: massive structural deflation. The superhuman efficiency of the machine would crush costs to such an extent that the price of the overwhelming majority of manufactured goods would collapse. Faced with this chronic overproduction, governments would have no choice but to implement a universal basic income. Musk suggests that the state would only have to “hand out checks” once this era of abundance is comfortably installed, allowing citizens to devote themselves to leisure activities, art, or contemplation.
However, the rub lies in the concrete mechanics of this titanic transition. During his interview, the first trillionaire in history contented himself with lip service, furtively admitting that a “need for funding” would remain between now and 2036. No real macroeconomic roadmap has been sketched out to navigate the turbulence of the coming years. What will happen during the decade when human labor is destroyed at a rate far exceeding that of the creation of the famous “abundance”? Who will fund the government checks before the economy becomes a perpetual robotic motion engine? On these thorny questions, the technologist’s silence is deafening, leaving the audience facing a gaping theoretical void.
The Illusion of GDP: Why Economists Are Dead Wrong About China.
An observer reading the financial press in the West might assume the Chinese economy is perpetually teetering on the brink of total collapse. For years, American economists have published relentless warnings about China’s impending doom—citing local government debt, an over-leveraged real estate sector, demographic cliffs, and insufficient consumer spending.
Science Fiction as a Roadmap: The Shadow of Iain M. Banks
To truly grasp the genesis of Elon Musk’s thinking, one must not look in the classical economics textbooks of Keynes, Friedman, or Hayek, but rather on the shelves of science fiction literature. The head of SpaceX has publicly and repeatedly cited “The Culture” series of novels, a masterpiece by Scottish author Iain M. Banks, as the absolute model of a positive and desirable future for humanity under the aegis of artificial intelligence.
In this sprawling and deeply utopian universe, humanity has merged with a multitude of other biological species and entrusted the entirety of the political, economic, and logistical management of its society to omnipotent, benevolent, and infinitely complex artificial intelligences, called “Minds”. These colossal computers manage immense space habitats (Orbitals), produce goods without any limitation, and ensure the absolute comfort of billions of citizens. The human workforce is totally obsolete, not through enslavement, but through liberation. Abundance is such that money itself no longer exists within the Culture; it is considered an archaic relic, a barbaric remnant of an era of deprivation, and its use by other civilizations in the galaxy is perceived by the citizens of the Culture as an indisputable marker of poverty and moral underdevelopment.
The imprint of Banks’ work on Musk is so profound that it can be read right on the metal of SpaceX’s drone ships, those gigantic autonomous barges serving as landing platforms for Falcon 9 rockets in the open ocean. Names like Of Course I Still Love You, Just Read The Instructions or A Shortfall of Gravitas are direct, verbatim tributes to the eccentric names the Minds choose for their own interstellar ships in the novels. The billionaire makes no secret of it: he hopes to build the technological foundations that will allow humanity to access this post-scarcity paradise.
However, directly transposing the romantic and utopian poetry of a millennia-old intergalactic civilization to the globalized, fractured and fragile economy of the 2020s is a leap of faith. Iain M. Banks himself, a writer with deeply left-wing convictions (he described the Culture as “utopian space socialism”), was sometimes amused to see leading figures of libertarian capitalism appropriate his work. Banks’ utopia presupposes a prior resolution of class conflicts, impulses for domination and national egoisms. Imagining that the simple deployment of GPU clusters and servomotors will be enough to magically abolish human greed and dissolve the importance of money within a dozen years bears witness to a technological solutionism pushed to its climax.
Too Big to Fail 2.0: The Financialization of AI.
There is a terrifying fragility built into the foundation of the modern financial system. We are currently living through one of the most spectacular, capital-intensive technological arms races in human history. Trillions of dollars are being marshaled, committed, and deployed based on a single, unwavering assumption
The Wall of Economic Reality: The Mutating Scarcity
Faced with this glittering utopia, the community of economists opposes a wall of skepticism forged by centuries of studying human behavior. The academic consensus, echoed in particular by publications such as The Daily Economy and supported by leading thinkers, is clear: scarcity is a fundamental law of social physics. It does not disappear on contact with innovation; it metamorphoses, it relocates, it mutates.
While advanced robotics can indeed shatter the manufacturing costs of millions of objects, making smartphones, basic clothing, standardized food or transport vehicles almost free, it does nothing to alter the finitude of our physical and psychological world. This is the economic concept of “positional goods”, theorized by economist Fred Hirsch. The value of these goods does not depend on their cost of production, but on their absolute scarcity compared to others.
Take real estate, for example. An artificial intelligence will be able to design the plans for a villa in a second and swarms of builder robots will be able to erect it in a few hours at a derisory cost. But no technology will be able to multiply to infinity properties with breathtaking views of San Francisco Bay, the cliffs of the French Riviera or the heart of Manhattan. Exclusive geographical space is finite. Similarly, a seat in the lecture halls of an elite university like Harvard or MIT will retain immense value, not for the transmission of knowledge (which will be available for free online and explained by perfect AI tutors), but for the social network, status and prestige it confers. Social recognition, access to circles of power, the exclusivity of an authentic experience: all these elements will see their value skyrocket.
Therefore, how will individuals fight over these limited resources in a world without money? There will inevitably have to be an allocation system, a rationing mechanism, a register of value, a price system, or “something furiously resembling it”, to arbitrate access to these spatial and social privileges. If the dollar is replaced by a system of social credits, attention points or drawing rights granted by the State, we are merely reinventing money in another form, often more pernicious and less free. Money, as an instrument for measuring relative scarcity, will therefore survive beyond 2036, because human rivalry will not disappear.
The 90% Shock: How America's Silicon Supremacy Just Ended the Global AI Race.
The global artificial intelligence race has entered a paradoxical phase. If you look purely at the volume of tokens flowing through the global economy today, you might conclude that China has already won. Chinese open-source models—most notably from labs like DeepSeek and Alibaba’s Qwen—have achieved a staggering feat
Comparative Advantage and the Sanctuary of Human Judgment
Beyond the scarcity of exclusive physical goods, it is the very nature of human work in the face of artificial intelligence that raises profound questions. Influential voices in the economic world, such as Tyler Cowen (professor at George Mason University) and Noah Smith (former finance professor and respected economics columnist), point to a gaping blind spot in Elon Musk’s reasoning: total ignorance of the law of comparative advantage.
Formulated at the beginning of the 19th century by David Ricardo, this law stipulates that even if an economic actor (here, Artificial Intelligence) is better than all others in producing all goods (absolute advantage), there will always be areas where it will be rational to employ the least productive worker (here, the human). Why? Because the time and computational resources of expert AI, even vast ones, have an opportunity cost. It will always be more profitable to allocate the best artificial intelligence systems to fundamental cancer research, piloting nuclear fusions, or optimizing global logistics flows, rather than to empathetic listening to a person in emotional distress or the conception of certain visceral works of art.
In this new world, it is no longer raw cognitive skills (calculation, synthesis, programming) that will be rewarded, but fundamentally human attributes: moral judgment, true empathy, legal responsibility, and “presence”. A patient might prefer that a relentless diagnosis delivered by an infallible machine be announced by a human doctor capable of holding their hand and understanding their terror in the face of mortality. The jobs of tomorrow will be remunerated where the scarce resource is no longer strength or intellect, but human attention. We are very far from the binary, simplistic, and unnuanced scenario of absolute abundance that Musk likes to sketch out during his interviews.
The $200 Billion Suicide Pact: Why Google is Funding Its Own Replacement.
The financial media operates on a predictably simplistic loop: observe a metric, compare it to a consensus estimate, and trigger a panic if the two diverge. On July 23, 2026, this reactive machinery went into overdrive.
The Trillionaire’s Paradox in the Face of Market Demands
The irony of the situation is glaring, almost theatrical. There is something profoundly savory, and perhaps cynical, in this idealized image: the richest man ever recorded in the history of humanity — a trillionaire whose fortune is measured in dollars, in shares, in venture capital and in stratospheric stock market valuations — predicts in the same breath the disappearance of the very utility of his own mountain of wealth.
This is not the first time Musk has flirted with this post-labor philosophy. On entrepreneur Peter Diamandis’s podcast, he had already developed related ideas, comparing future work to a recreational hobby. According to him, if humans work in 2036, it will be out of pure personal choice, a bit like amateur Sunday gardening today: you plant tomatoes not to avoid starving to death, but for the simple pleasure of the act, the psychological satisfaction of contact with the earth.
However, this permanent balancing act between the prophetic discourse of abundance and the budgetary, balance sheet and industrial reality of his companies raises questions. He may acknowledge with disturbing casualness that the transition will be “chaotic” and that it will likely lead to major social tensions if millions of obsolete jobs disappear faster than they are recreated, but no concrete method supports this shift. Worse still, this philosophical vision is in total contradiction with the current management model of the boss of Tesla and SpaceX. His companies are renowned for their hellish paces, their absolute pressure on margins, their brutal waves of layoffs to “optimize costs,” and their relentless quest for government subsidies.
As long as Wall Street institutional shareholders demand growing quarterly returns from Tesla and SpaceX paid in hard cash (very real US dollars, subject to inflation), the 2036 prophecy retains the appearance of an out-of-touch intellectual bet, a worldly stylistic exercise much more than a true strategic roadmap.
The Kimi Panic: Wall Street Still Does Not Understand the Economics of AI.
China’s new open-weight model was treated as a death sentence for chips, memory, data centers, and power. In reality, Kimi K3 may be another powerful demonstration that cheaper intelligence creates more demand for compute—not less.
The Clash of Visions: Redeeming AI vs. Cryptographic Scarcity
Elon Musk’s announcement of the end of money takes on even more fascinating relief when put into perspective with other radical visions of the financial future emerging within the tech sphere itself. The American economy is currently bending under a colossal federal debt, and two radically opposed schools of thought clash to solve this impossible equation.
On one side, we have Musk’s thesis: artificial intelligence and robotics will generate such phenomenal growth in global GDP, such a titanic explosion of value, that it will mechanically suffice to absorb and dilute the crushing debt of the United States. It is the gamble of fleeing forward through hyper-productivity, the hope that the economic pie will grow so fast that the share of debt becomes microscopic.
On the other side, an influential faction of the technological and financial sector, championed by leading figures like Michael Saylor and his company Strategy (simply renamed Strategy), bets on the exact opposite. For Bitcoin maximalists and the cryptosphere, the idea that an explosion in the production of material goods will suffice to save the dollar from devaluation is a dangerous Keynesian chimera. According to them, faced with the frantic money creation by central banks, it is not infinite growth that protects from ruin, but the strategic holding of a numerically and deliberately rare, unalterable and uncensorable asset. Where Musk sees salvation in the absolute abundance generated by AI, Saylor sees survival in the absolute mathematical scarcity imposed by cryptography.
These two radically opposed bets attempt to answer the same civilizational anxiety: the loss of value of work and traditional currency. For now, neither camp can claim to be definitively right, but the confrontation of these visions illustrates the profound crisis of confidence striking contemporary capitalism.
The Illusion of Alpha: The Only Chart That Matters for the U.S. Equity Market.
If you spend enough time on Wall Street, you will be drowned in a relentless, deafening cacophony of data. Every millisecond, trading terminals flash with a dizzying array of metrics: price-to-earnings ratios, forward guidance, moving averages, Fibonacci retracements, gross domestic product prints, consumer price index fluctuations, and geopolitical headlines. Thousands of analysts spend millions of hours building discounted cash flow models, dissecting quarterly earnings calls, and trying to divine the future of the global economy from the tea leaves of corporate balance sheets.
The Weight of the Past: Autopsy of a Visionary’s Broken Promises
While it is easy to be mesmerized by the businessman’s rhetoric, a basic principle of caution dictates that the 2036 prophecy be confronted with the rear-view mirror of recent history. Examining the last twenty years reveals a character trait inseparable from the Elon Musk persona: a sickly propensity to set utopian deadlines and make predictions that systematically crash into the wall of industrial and technological reality. Looking closely at the past for listing his resounding failures, one can see the extent of the gulf between word and action. The autopsy of the past fifteen broken promises of Elon Musk is essential to understand the true value of his prediction on the end of money.
1. Robotaxis by Next Year (2019, 2020, 2021, 2022...)
The robotaxi saga is the archetype of reality distortion at Tesla. As early as the “Autonomy Day” event in 2019, Musk asserted with disconcerting aplomb that a million Tesla robotaxis without steering wheels would crisscross the roads the following year. The mantra was repeated, year after year, becoming a cruel farce for investors. This perpetually postponed promise masks a dramatic miscalculation of the difficulty of achieving Level 5 autonomy. Handling “edge cases” (unforeseen situations) in complex human traffic requires an AI of a completely different nature than that currently onboard the vehicles.
2. Tesla Roadster Delivery by 2020
Unveiled with great fanfare in November 2017 as the fastest production car in the world (even going so far as to promise cold gas thrusters from SpaceX to make it levitate), the new Roadster was due for delivery in 2020. In 2026, the automotive industry is still waiting for the start of the assembly line for this ghost on wheels. Industrial priorities have fluctuated, demonstrating an inability to maintain a pipeline of premium products that were nonetheless essential to the initial brand image.
3. $25,000 Model by 2023 ($20,000 by 2024)
The ultimate promise, the one that was to seal the total democratization of the electric vehicle, was the release of a compact model for 25,000 dollars, informally dubbed “Model 2”. Faced with soaring interest rates, raw material inflation, and fierce Chinese competition (BYD), this project has been shelved, favoring the mirage of the dedicated robotaxi. The people’s car will have to wait.
4. Optimus Humanoid Robots in Homes by 2025
In his perpetual quest for buzz, Musk promised that Optimus humanoid robots would take care of our household chores, our shopping, and elderly assistance by 2025. While it is true that the prototypes have progressed (going from a dancer in a suit in 2021 to an automaton capable of vaguely folding a garment), asserting that these machines, of unheard-of mechanical and software complexity, would be deployed in millions of complex and unpredictable homes in 2025 smacked of confounding naivety in the face of Moravec’s paradox (what is easy for AI is difficult for a robot, and vice versa).
5. FSD Robotaxi will cover 50% of US population by end of 2025
Linked to the first promise, this one ventured into the realm of scale. Deploying a network covering half of the American population meant overcoming state-by-state regulatory barriers, obtaining NHTSA approvals, and guaranteeing flawless safety in extreme weather conditions (snow or fog literally blinding the cameras of Tesla’s “Vision Only” system). A widely missed challenge.
6. $TSLA $4000 Price Target by 2025
Fueled by investment funds with dubious mathematical models (notably Ark Invest), this delirious stock market valuation prediction assumed that Tesla would monopolize global auto markets, urban transport networks, car insurance, and energy production simultaneously. The post-COVID stock market correction brutally brought the stock back to more earthly valuation multiples, proving that even Musk’s magic cannot eternally defy the gravity of traditional finance.
7. Infinite Demand and 50% CAGR in perpetuity
In fundamental economics, infinite demand and a compound annual growth rate (CAGR) of 50% indefinitely in a market for material and finite goods are theoretical absurdities. The saturation of the “early adopters” market, range anxiety, and the constrained purchasing power of the middle classes logically broke this exponential growth curve, forcing Tesla to slash its prices to clear its inventory in 2023 and 2024.
8. 1 Million Annual Cybertruck Sales
Presented in 2019, the dystopian pickup truck with the stainless steel body (whose armored window broke during the demonstration) was to conquer the most lucrative market in North America. Between the nightmarish manufacturing challenges linked to folding the steel and its extremely polarizing design, production capacity struggles to reach a fraction of the announced volumes. The figure of one million units per year belongs to mythology.
9. Tesla Semi Will Take Over Freight
The heavy electric truck, promised to revolutionize global logistics, ran into the harsh reality of the laws of physics. The immense weight of the batteries needed to tow heavy loads over long distances drastically reduces the commercial payload (paying freight). Not to mention the almost total absence of the megawatt charging infrastructure (Megachargers) needed to operate fleets on a national scale. Diesel still reigns supreme on the highways.
10. Legacy Auto will all go bankrupt
A spectacularly arrogant prediction. The automotive dinosaurs were all supposed to perish in the face of the Tesla meteor. However, not only are giants like Toyota, Volkswagen, or Hyundai not bankrupt, but they have remarkably adapted their offerings. The explosion in demand for hybrid vehicles (HEV) has generated record profits for traditional manufacturers, demonstrating that the advantage of the global supply chain and industrial capital is extremely resilient against purely software-based disruption.
11. Margins will remain best-in-class and equal to tech
Elon Musk long maintained that Tesla should be valued like a Silicon Valley (SaaS) company rather than a Detroit metal bender. The illusion held for a while, until the price war intensified. To maintain its market share, Tesla had to drastically slash its sales prices, leading to a vertiginous drop in its operating margins, which have inevitably returned to the upper average of traditional automakers.
12. Dojo Will Be a World-Leading AI Supercomputer
Designed in-house to break free from reliance on Nvidia’s powerful processors, the Dojo supercomputer was supposed to be the crown jewel of Tesla’s artificial intelligence, propelling FSD towards perfection. Although the project is technically bold with its D1 chip, Tesla was forced to continue buying tens of thousands of Nvidia GPUs at premium prices to keep pace with the industry. Jensen Huang’s CUDA architecture monopoly proved immovable, relegating Dojo to the rank of a prestigious but insufficient research project.
13. Energy Business Will Be as Big as Automotive
The energy division (Megapack, Powerwall, Solar Roof) has certainly seen robust growth, but asserting that it would equal the gargantuan revenue of the automotive division was a monumental error in scale. Tesla’s residential solar rollout collapsed under the weight of litigation and failing customer service, while car sales still account for the overwhelming majority of the Texan firm’s revenue.
14. Coast-to-Coast Autonomous Drive
From late 2016, Musk announced that before the end of 2017, a Tesla would cross the United States, from Los Angeles to New York, “without a single human touch on the steering wheel”. Eight years later, this foundational feat of autonomous driving has never been achieved by the company in this strict form, and the carefully choreographed demos could not hide the countless system disconnections on long and complex routes.
15. 20 Million Annual Car Sales
The ultimate goal for 2030: to produce and sell 20 million vehicles per year, more than Toyota and the Volkswagen Group combined at the height of their glory. This ambition would require opening dozens of massive Gigafactories, extracting an amount of lithium, nickel, and copper that exceeds current global mining capacities, and above all, a market large enough to absorb these volumes without saturating. Today, this goal has been quietly erased from the company’s strategic presentations.
Final Thoughts: The 2036 Mirage and the Permanence of Power
These fifteen predictive failures, documented, sourced, and painful for thousands of gullible investors, in no way diminish Elon Musk’s fundamental industrial genius: the man has nonetheless succeeded in resurrecting the electric automotive industry and popularizing the reuse of space rockets. However, this impressive track record of unfounded claims must serve as an absolute intellectual filter when analyzing his latest prophecy for 2036.
Musk uses what social psychologists call the “distant mirage technique”. By setting utopian time horizons that are close enough to captivate the imagination (here, a dozen years), he creates a powerful pull effect, a reality distortion field that attracts the world’s best engineers, galvanizes crowds, raises colossal capital, and justifies present sacrifices (extreme working conditions, volatile margins) in the name of a bright future.
If money is no longer to matter in 2036, why devote every hour of one’s life to amassing a fortune that would make Pharaohs pale? Why fight fierce legal battles to unlock multi-billion dollar compensation plans with Tesla’s board of directors? The answer likely lies in the profound function of money in our contemporary society. Money is not just a means of acquiring manufactured goods made by robots; it is an instrument of power, of control, a voting right on the direction civilization should take. Elon Musk understands this perfectly, as he uses his gargantuan liquidity to buy global social platforms, influence presidential campaigns, and shape technological research in his image.
In conclusion, while the year 2036 will undoubtedly see the emergence of spectacular artificial intelligences and lightning-fast robotic advances that will drastically alter the cost of labor and the nature of certain goods, the collapse of the importance of money belongs to pure fantasy. Human scarcity — time, attention, prestige, trust, empathy, space — will remain the unshakeable pillar of exchange. Money, in whatever form (fiat, cryptographic, social points or energy credits), will continue to quantify this scarcity and arbitrate our competing desires.
The prophecy of absolute abundance is a tremendous science fiction narrative, a powerful marketing tool for tech conglomerates, but in the face of the inflexible laws of economics, it is, at heart, just one more promise on a trillionaire’s already crowded board of illusions.
The Sovereign of the Stack: How Elon Musk Conceded the AI Battle to Win the Compute War.
“Anthropic has done it. There is no model on Earth as strong as Mythos or Fable right now. They are the clear leaders in artificial intelligence, and from what I am seeing, Mythos 2 is already close.”
The Ultimate Binary: Why SpaceX is Worth Either a Quadrillion Dollars or Absolutely Nothing.
If you look at the modern financial landscape, you will find a myriad of companies that fit neatly into traditional models of valuation. You can calculate their Discounted Cash Flow (DCF), analyze their Price-to-Earnings (P/E) ratios, project their steady-state growth, and arrive at a reasonable estimate of their intrinsic value. These are continuous stories. They grow by 5% here, capture 2% of market share there, and occasionally suffer a cyclical downturn.
Deconstructing the Memory Stock Sell-Off—And the Generational Disconnect Between Narrative and Reality.
The financial markets are, at their core, a pendulum that swings violently between irrational exuberance and unfounded terror. Right now, in the semiconductor and memory sectors, we are witnessing the latter. Billions of dollars in market capitalization are being wiped out, retail investors are panic-selling, and institutional algorithms are triggering stop-losses based on a narrative that belongs in a science fiction novel, not a serious investment thesis.