Cathie Wood on Tesla-SpaceX Merger, $1M Bitcoin, More AIs Than Humans | EP #296 | Moonshots Live

28:33Cathie Wood:And this would, sorry, this would segue, I mean, this would combine with the concept of distributed autonomous organizations, DAOs as well. So very crypto. DAOs perfected this idea of governance amongst a bunch of people who didn't know each other. And they were global. And agents are similar in that they are global. They don't know each other. And so DAOs did construct. And this happened about four or five years ago before they went out of fashion. but there is a lot of prior art for the agents to train on, on what worked, what didn't work. There's a whole notion of quadratic funding that got played with.

29:18So crypto has a lot of these primitives available for untrusted parties to coordinate. And agents are fundamentally new, novel entities that exist. And once they're a person who's even more amazing, you can go figure out what their provenance is, who gave them, why did they get the personhood? But yeah, so I agree. I think there will be new models of funding, and they won't look like the models of funding like going to a bank and raising money. They will probably be internet-native models of funding. I would not be surprised if one of these agents creates their own token and has their own version of proof of work and has a very complex economy built inside of it and using tokens to coordinate that.

30:04I think you can say that DAOs kind of lacked intelligence. Well, they were human intelligence. I think the advent of AI now to create decentralized intelligent organizations is fascinating. But a query about that. If you have digital organizations, digital entities, isn't that just the metaverse? You've come from meta to circle, where you did the air glasses and more. It's actually what we describe as the metaverse, not as this place that you play games, but a whole digital economy of humans and entities. Is that not actually coming true actually finally now? Plus you can make it look cool with the Meta glasses and other things.

30:41For me personally, I did work on the AR glasses at Meta. Are you happy with the results? I'm happy with the results, yes. I think the Ray-Ban glasses were a good first step. The Orion glasses were a good proof point. And now I'm not there, I'm sure they're working on new things. And so for me always the metaverse was less about the 3D. I think the 3D is exciting, being able to wear your glasses and walk around, like essentially CGI is exciting. But what is more exciting is that there's just layers and layers and layers of intelligence in the world that is just waiting to be discovered. Like Pokemon Go was a great example.

31:22Like it is a metaverse because like you don't know how many Pokemon are there at any given stop. And you see people tapping into these layers of intelligence, walking the world, trying to capture Pokemon. And I thought it was just fascinating as an example of where people find meaning and how that meaning sits in the physical world alongside us, which is what the metaverse should be. It doesn't need to be 3D. And so will these AI entities present meaning? Absolutely. they already have, I think they passed the Turing test three years ago. So I think they will present meaning, they will present connection.

32:02And so you will have these like new weird societies emerge, which will be hybrid between humans and AIs, where they will be meaning created, which is metaverse in my opinion. Yeah, you might continue. Yes, I think I'll take that to Kathy. You know, like, we have media, we have generative media all coming through. We have this new layer being attached. like what do you see as super exciting in that space? Because you've got kind of the physicality of, you know, Teslas and things like that. You have the financial rails, but it seems like there's a whole world that could come from entertainment, from education, from engagement.

32:35Like what's really exciting you around that and the potential there?

32:39Cathie Wood:Well, as you're saying that, I think, and the other thing we talk a lot about is space too, right? But there is another digital, I mean, another world that is happening, and it's happening and it's going to move at a much faster pace. We now have immutable property rights in the digital world. And so I think, and you know, the best way to lift people and countries and ecosystems out of poverty or inactivity is property rights. Amen. I think, you know, I'm excited about the space generally. You probably know a lot more and have a much better idea about what's going to happen. But we have set up our research team so that we have an enterprise AI analyst team and a consumer AI analyst team.

33:42Cathie Wood:And we're spending a lot of time, you know, talking about, okay, this new device has mused, the mused charm, is that going to amount to anything? And reflect on, okay, the handset, would we really, so could the handset just become a focus of entertainment, really, after all, and this other gadget moves into our work lives in some way? I don't know, so we're debating a lot of things right now. Nikhil, you're building a financial infrastructure for an economy that doesn't yet exist. It exists, but it's not built. It's nascent. It's just beginning. What are the hardest problems you still have to solve to get to the vision you have in five or ten years?

34:38And then why did you build your own blockchain? Yeah, I think the two answers are related. Let's start with something as simple as me making a payment to you on a blockchain. There is this concept of payment finality. And when two banks interact, like they need to have that method of interaction has to have this property of payment finality. No other blockchain today has this property in the market. So if you believe you want to get existing banks, existing institutions, existing enterprises on this infrastructure, you need to give them guarantees that are not possible to give using existing infrastructure.

35:23So one example is payment finality. Another example is a lot of public blockchains run on unknown validators. So validating a transaction is just looking at the block and making sure it's not ill-formed. And then everybody achieves consensus on it and says, this is a good block. This is how the transaction should be recorded. Now, for a lot of institutions around the world, not knowing who's doing the validation is a big problem. Because they worry about security. They worry about North Korea being in the money flow. There's just all kinds of things that they're worried about. So we have a known validator set on our blockchain.

36:05The next thing we tackled was privacy, because when you and I transact, it's not okay for the world to know how much money we have in our bank accounts, or for that matter, what is the value of this transaction. So how do you solve that problem at sufficient scale where you can achieve the TPS that you were talking about? Because a lot of privacy solutions are very expensive. They're computationally expensive. So how do you solve it in a way that's a systems way of solving it, but it preserves the sort of, it fits within existing regulatory frameworks, because you can't blow up the existing regulatory frameworks just because you have a good idea.

36:43So we solve privacy as being another example. And then then it's cost like we are I was just looking at some data today something costs like Point zero zero five cents on arc to settle and cost 89 cents on On a theorem to settle this is just some data we got yesterday on our p50 transactions So you can do the ratio on like what the cost is and so if you have a lot of these agents executing a lot of transactions and you have to believe that in the future if these markets are super efficient the way they get efficient is they transact right like they essentially move value back and forth there is price discovery you find the inefficiency and you sort of like remove the inefficiency by moving value around so your settlement cost has to be really really low and it has to be significantly lower than what it is today because you these are massive public databases right and you're competing with databases that you're running internally like a MySQL database or something like that but now you have to make it scalable to the world and auditable to the whole world.

37:47So cost was another issue. So these are the problems that we have been working on. I think like in terms of what needs to solve still I do think for the agentic stack we need we need to make this transition into this world in which these agents have personhood, that they are liable for making mistakes, that they have work history that I can rely on before I hire them. There are simple concepts like if we're coding agents today, if you're using them on the open internet, if you're not paying somebody$200 a month, you're actually paying first and then you're waiting for the coding result to come back.

38:29And so that could be really problematic. So there are all of these things that go into essentially reworking every layer and every assumption of what it means to be a financial infrastructure. So the woolly mammoth in the room, to use Alex's joke, is when do banks disappear? I don't think they disappear. I have no desire for... I know you don't, but I hear the list of things that is going to be possible. Yeah. It feels like it's substantially a significant amount of what banks do today. Yeah. Do they know they're cooked?

39:13My hope is the banks are going to work with us and, like, make this transition. I think every new technology change presents, like, new challenges and new opportunities. At least some people will transition with us and some won't. So I don't know if they're cooked. I think that's a tough one. I understand you work with them. Yeah. Imad. Yeah, so Kathy, last year Unitary sold 11 ,000 robots, humanoids, right? We have the Optimus and other things coming up. We have GDP growth forecasts going through the roof. We make about 70 million cars, 70 million motorcycles a year. When are we actually going to see robots out in the world making a real impact on GDP, like humanoid robots.

39:58What's your timeline?

39:59Cathie Wood:Yes. So we, according to our research, and our director of research, Tasha Keeney, she's director of research for Autonomous Technology and Robotics. She's here today. Awesome. Will she be there tonight? So Kathy's doing a session this evening on her 2026 Big Ideas report, and come and dive in deep with her on this? Yeah, I think Tasha has... Oh, maybe she's coming. I don't know. Okay, okay. Anyway. You'll be there. So we have, from a research point of view, concluded that compared to a robo-taxi, a humanoid robot is 200 ,000 times more complex with obviously the hands being the most complicated part.

40:52Cathie Wood:So while Elon says maybe late 28 into 29 scaling, we would put that a couple of years later. You mean he would be off on timing? Yes, it's Elon's time. So, but yes, I mean, one of the, I mean, because it's such a personal question in a sense, everybody thinks, oh my gosh, could I have a robot in my house who would do all my housework? Is that possible? Will that happen? And the answer is yes. It's going to take years, but we do think so. And we think, you know, the reason Tesla is, we believe, furthest ahead on this is the same three technology platforms that are converging in humanoid robots as it is in robotaxis.

41:48Cathie Wood:So they are robots. They are effectively battery-operated electric. And they're powered by AI, just like robotaxis. so he's you know from a complexity point of view we're we're very close to solving completely the robo taxi problem i think if any of you uh are driving with now your fsds with the latest software update i love it i don't touch the wheel we you know at home we have two teslas and it's like it's magic yes it truly is i would never drive another car that's not a commercial for tesla It's like, just, I want my time back. And it's such a better driver than I am. Just ask my wife. Well, you know what?

42:36Cathie Wood:It is true. Statistically, yes. Ten times better. Oh, well, I don't know about your driving.

42:45Cathie Wood:And I'm not even funny. I don't know what that lies. I'm not. I'm not at all. No, both Waymo and Tesla, I think, I'm not sure if Tesla has disclosed, but we believe, Waymo has disclosed that it has surpassed human drivers in terms of safety. And we believe Tesla is there as well. I don't think they've put out those stats yet. So, yes, and they're going to be 10 times and 100 times and 1 ,000 times safer. So, yes. Yeah, the Waymo stats, I did the numbers. if all cars were as safe as Waymo's, there'd be 40 ,000 less deaths per year and about 400 billion less in medical fees. Ooh. Yeah, well, that's right.

43:30Cathie Wood:That's right. There are roughly 40 ,000 deaths in the U.S. And we could save those. I think there are 1.25 to 1.5 million around the world auto deaths per year. You know, the secondary externalities are fascinating, right? If that happens, the number of organ donors goes down significantly, right? Which is why the other side of the business, the work of Martine Rothblatt and George Church on being able to generate replacement organs is so extraordinary. And what's fascinating is the counter movement coming from the liability lawyers saying we've got far less business if cars aren't crashing. 180 billion a year they get.

44:15Amazing. Amazing. Kathy, we opened up the show today talking about fear, the pandemic of fear that's going on. And I think very unfortunately, and my mission and the mission of our podcast is to give people hope and optimism, try and counter that fear with what I call data-driven optimism. Absolutely. Right? Not just empty, like data-driven optimism. How is that impacting the markets today? That must have some current or future. We're seeing, the numbers are insane. Like 80 % of Americans fear AI. 73 % say no data center in my backyard, which is more than people say no nuclear reactor in my backyard.

45:00And the flip is true in China, where it's 80 % pro. How is this impacting you? I love your investment thesis. I always have. You're investing in the singularity. Anyway, your thoughts.

45:17Cathie Wood:So on the data center, it is fascinating. I agree with you. Because I think there's already proof out there that putting a data center in your state or your city or whatever is actually over time going to lower your electricity costs. Nuclear power, it stopped in its tracks. in the 70s because of regulation. Now we're going full steam ahead and sure it's going to take a while for this to play out, but if we had not gone off nuclear, if we had not regulated it, and this is a lesson we need to tell policymakers today, if we had not regulated it, electricity prices in the United States would be 50 percent of what they are now.

46:06It's a travesty.

46:07Cathie Wood:It is. It is. So regulation is a menace, and it's up to us. And we're going out there with this, you know, the scares about AI generally, and we're going out there and all of us on our team trying to bring data to light for these politicians. I even faced, in Florida, there's been a political backlash, and it's a business-friendly state. But you face the policymaker with facts, and I noticed the advertising has dropped a lot of that dynamic. So I think we have to face them, approach them and say, do you understand? And we give our research away, and we hope it gets into policy circles. Sometimes it does, sometimes it doesn't.

47:01I did a podcast with Michael Kratios at the White House, the head of the Office of Science and Technology Policy, and I'm like, Michael, who inside the government is dealing with this misinformation and trying to actually help Americans be more confident? And they didn't have an answer. And that worries me. It feels a runaway in that regard. We have to tell the stories, though. I think like if we are constantly in the news talking about AI taking away jobs I think we should expect this reaction AI has to make housing cheaper it has to make education better and it has to make healthcare more accessible not just people living longer and so like if we can tell those stories I do think like we have a real shot of like turning the net narrative around but nobody's telling those stories right like those stories get anchored in like oh yeah is going to come and like, you know, you will have less office jobs and okay, great.

47:57Then what are my kids going to do? I call it the crisis news network. It's my abbreviation for CNN. Yes.

48:03Cathie Wood:Yeah. And what's so surprising is the numbers are, are not supporting that job loss. Maybe at entry level, as I mentioned earlier today. But I actually think we're going to end up with labor shortages, and that's what we should go out talking about. Technology is a net job creator always. Sure, there's short-term discipline. Yes, it's true. It's a net job creator. It is. It is. And what you have to say, because people say, okay, well, what are the jobs? Well, in the early 90s, did we know anything about influencers or Airbnb or Uber? No, we didn't. We couldn't conceptualize it, right? There are many jobs we cannot conceptualize right now.

48:50Cathie Wood:So I do an exercise, go to ChatGPT or to Grok and say, okay, I want you to consult with futurists, scientists, engineers, science fiction, economists, strategists, and tell me what the new jobs associated with, and I would put in our five major platforms. What will they be? And, you know, the reason I talk about new worlds like space, obviously it is a new world, but Asteroid Miner did come up in one of those jobs. And it was like, gosh, I haven't even been using that. Near and dear to my heart. Yes. Yeah, exactly. Exactly. So, and same with the digital world, you know, property rights, you know, You know, what I love about this country, you know, if you look at, I saw the statistics, this statistic this week, 90 % of all the corporate bonds to fund data centers, 90 % of them are U.S.

49:57Cathie Wood:And I go to the rest of the world and they are, you know, I don't see the animal spirits. I do see the fear there. So the irony is the headlines might be reading this, but the animal spirits are alive and kicking, and we're beginning to... Look, the market's near all-time highs. It's crazy. Yeah, right? Even though interest rates are going up, and interest rates will go up if growth really picks up dramatically, and they should go up. That's the market working. Yeah, I think this is the bull case for America, right? Yes. DC, circulating faster, the build-out that you've seen. We have no securitization in Europe.

50:36We have no energy. And surely this could kind of be the bull case. You have the muses, the instincts, the grok bots of the world. The base case is be more, do more. You've always felt constrained by creativity, by access. And this is breaking down all those barriers. And in fact, look at bonds. Bonds are so cumbersome. Like, Nikhil, what do you see about the future of securitization of all assets? Because if you can securitize a dollar, why can't you securitize anything, particularly with the intelligence we have today? Yeah, you should. Like, I think ex-US, that is more common. I think the US securities laws are a little more complicated.

51:12They need to evolve or to allow for more experimentation. And like, the SEC just is putting out new rules as we speak, right? So I do think for one of the things that is amazing about USDC is that it essentially exports the dollar into the world why is exporting the dollar into the world good it's because people do real work they make they take their local currency and then they sell their local currency and then they buy the dollar they're essentially lending us their labor they're lending us their money right so that's why stable coins are really important strategically for a country because if you want to raise debt if you want to grow and you you you have such high interest rates, like you want to lower those interest rates, you want to go out and like collect money from people so they can invest in your growth and then you can pay them back.

52:03And one way of doing that is stable coins, right? So that is why, that's why it's sort of, I've been at Circle for five years and for the first couple of years I was so confused. I was like, why don't you want this, America? Because you can get, you can raise more money. Exactly. Yeah, you can raise a trillion dollars from the world and people are willing to give you money because they believe in the dollar. It's so important. So from there, I do think there are other assets. I think treasuries will get tokenized. I do think bonds are already being tokenized. When you tokenize, you do two things, both inside the U.S.

52:43and outside the U.S. First, you make it possible to access 24-7 markets. Why is accessing 24-7 markets valuable? Because that means you're more capital efficient. Like you cannot trade a treasury after five o 'clock, yeah, or four o 'clock Eastern, you'll know this better than me, till like Monday morning. And so - Great, no more sleep anymore ever. Yeah. No more with everybody. Your agent will handle it for you. And so, one is like the, you're essentially constantly managing capital efficiency, capital allocation, and you'll be surprised at how much money that is stuck. So in just one example Just in the international banking system the money that is being sent sent between Countries at any given time right now.

53:30There's about three trillion dollars. That is probably in motion That is not being used to go back into the economy And that is not being used to go back into the economy for the simple reason that the technology and the settlement protocols are very old So imagine a world and if you believe the world is a hundred trillion dollar economy and making numbers numbers up If you had three trillion dollars more afloat to invest in the world economy, what would that mean? That's a pretty significant thing right and so that's why some of what we do matters The other thing it'll open up is secure to securitization will open up is like access For people and it works both ways people in the rest of the world want to own Tesla Circle stock, we went public last year.

54:14Circle stock has been tokenized by third parties, and it is one of the most traded tokenized stocks in the world. And it's all ex-US. And people traded ex-US because they want to participate in Circle, but they have no good way of doing it outside of owning a tokenized version of Circle. And so all of that should get normalized. Why is that good for America? It's good for America because now people in like other countries are investing in America They are saying like look I believe American companies are the best I want to give my money to this company versus some other company and it works the other way around too If these countries are able to tokenize their securities if they're able to modernize their financial systems More money will flow in because you will you will not be reliant on The local regulator just telling you something your money's not going to disappear because it's going to be in a smart contract Because you can audit how the financial ecosystem works So if you want to raise money if you want to for these other countries that don't have the AI infrastructure They want to raise money they want to bring capital in then you have to give better guarantees and better returns on the capital It cannot be the case that I invest a bunch of money And then the company I invested in gets nationalized or the money I invested in gets devalued significantly like all of that matters to investors so So tokenization is just an inevitability.

55:36I think it's just going to pick up much like agents doing more cognitive work is going to pick up. Taking that work, securitizing it, lending it, lending against it, borrowing against it. These are just all new primitives that are coming up. Can you guys feel the speed of the economy accelerating as we talk? Can I just add?

55:57Cathie Wood:Yeah. This is a really important conversation. You know, there has been a narrative out there that, you know, U.S. exceptionalism is dead, right? And everyone was pointing out the dollar going down last year. If you'll notice, the dollar has started to go up. And this happened in the 80s as well, when we had put in place very business-friendly policies. The dollar doubled in the early 80s with really good policies. So I think because of everything we've been talking about here, that the dollar is actually going to go up. So it's going to be a win-win for people who are using stable coins in the rest of the world.

56:38Cathie Wood:And then I'd be remiss, certainly my team would feel I'd be remiss, we just securitized our venture fund. Oh, nice. That was announced yesterday. Congratulations, Kathy, on that. I want to close us out on a topic that we've discussed a few times on the abundance stage. And Kathy, thank you for coming back to Abundance 360 in March. We're going to have Brett Adcock there, we're going to be the CEO of Helion, we're going to have Fei-Fei Lee. It's going to be an amazing, amazing event in March. When you were on stage, you were bullish about hitting a million dollars per Bitcoin. I am curious if you're still bullish about that.

57:17And then any concerns about the energy-sucking sound of AI over Bitcoin mining?

57:27Cathie Wood:Well, I do think that Bitcoin, well, there were three things that hit it. The flash crash, quantum computing fears, which we think are way overblown, and AI taking all the oxygen out of the room and taking miners away, right? So we have, there's been one change, it's stablecoins. stable coins are usurping a role that 10 years ago we thought Bitcoin was going to play. But it makes sense. This, you know, these people live hand to mouth and this makes a lot of sense. But it hasn't lost the three major roles. It's a, you know, it's a tech, it introduced a technology, a native currency, native to the internet.

58:13Cathie Wood:So wasn't there before. It's a global monetary system, private, rules-based, that's critical. And it's the first of its kind, or it was the first of its kind, in a new asset class, very low correlation, even between gold and Bitcoin. That correlation since 2019 has been 0.1, so hardly correlated at all. And now Bitcoin's going up relative to gold. I believe that Warsh is going to be very good for Bitcoin from this point of view. I think the gold price is going to go down. And yet, and that will, to the extent people were playing that, they'll be looking for the other... Safe harbor? Safe harbor, store of value.

59:06Cathie Wood:And so we have not changed our forecast. Those revolutions haven't been changed. And the more stable coins kind of grease the skids, and get more people talking about once you've got your stablecoin income and you're trying to figure out, okay, I'm actually making money now. Where do I put it? I think Bitcoin's going to get a bid from the emerging markets as well, as we always thought it would. All right. We're going to wrap it there. Ladies and gentlemen, please give it up for Kathy Wood, Nikhil Shandak, and Imad.

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