This post about America’s upcoming 250th anniversary of our nationhood is not about the past—as glorious as that may be—but rather this is about America’s future. The future is so bright, gotta wear shades.
This is not a matter of opinion. This is a summary of the facts. Let’s begin with the current Top 10 in the Forbes World’s Billionaires List:
- Elon Musk — $839B (United States) — Tesla, SpaceX
- Larry Page — $257B (United States) — Google
- Sergey Brin — $237B (United States) — Google
- Jeff Bezos — $224B (United States) — Amazon
- Mark Zuckerberg — $222B (United States) — Meta/Facebook
- Larry Ellison — $190B (United States) — Oracle
- Bernard Arnault & family — $171B (France) — LVMH
- Jensen Huang — $154B (United States) — Nvidia
- Warren Buffett — $149B (United States) — Berkshire Hathaway
- Amancio Ortega — $148B (Spain) — Zara/Inditex
50 years ago, when we were about to celebrate the bicentennial, J. Paul Getty was the richest man in the world with a wealth of $6 billion—which would be $26 billion today’s money. He’d be in 70th to 100th on the list today.
8 of the 10 are Americans. 80% of the phenomenally successful people in the world represent a country that is but 4% of the world’s population.
Three of the 8 were not born in the USA: Musk (South Africa), Brin (USSR) and Huang (Taiwan). Five were, however. Always bear that in mind. Sure, Fermi defected from Italy to work on the Manhattan Project, but Feynman and hundreds of other native Americans helped build Fat Man and Little Boy.
In 1976, many people believed America’s best days were in the past. We suffered stagflation and a post-Vietnam loss of confidence. As president in 1979, Jimmy Carter gave his infamous Malaise Speech.
A year later, Ronald Reagan thumped him at the polls with a Make America Great Again campaign. He told the RNC in his acceptance speech on July 19, 1980, “For those who’ve abandoned hope, we’ll restore hope and we’ll welcome them into a great national crusade to make America great again.”
We did. We are again. Obama gave a weak rebuttal decades later, “I believe in American exceptionalism, just as I suspect that the Brits believe in British exceptionalism and the Greeks believe in Greek exceptionalism.”
The difference is we are exceptional—and we will stay that way for a long time to come. Dustin tweeted with video:
Jensen Huang just made the case for American empire. Said it plain. Didn’t flinch. Didn’t walk it back. And almost nobody caught what he actually admitted.
Jensen Huang: “The amount of compute in the United States is a hundred times more than anywhere else in the world.”
One hundred times. That is not a market lead. That is a monopoly on the future of intelligence. The kind that compounds every six months until no one else can close the distance.
Jensen Huang: “We make sure that the US labs are the first to hear about it and the first chance to buy it.”
Every chip Nvidia designs. Every architecture they ship. America gets first access. Everyone else gets what is left.
That is not a sales strategy. That is arms distribution with a quarterly earnings call.
Jensen Huang: “And if they don’t have enough money, we even invest in them.”
The company building the weapons is bankrolling the people who fire them.
Nvidia is no longer a public company. It is a state instrument with a stock ticker.
Jensen Huang: “Why would you want the United States to give up the world?”
The CEO of the most valuable hardware company on earth did not hedge that. Did not qualify it. He said it like it was obvious. Because to him, it is.
Nations used to be measured by steel output. Then oil reserves. Then warhead count. Now it is how much intelligence they can produce per second. Compute is no longer a commodity. It is a strategic resource. Like uranium in 1944. Except this one doubles faster than anyone can respond.
Europe understands none of this. They are drafting AI regulations. Compliance frameworks. Ethics panels. Risk tiers. They are bringing paperwork to a physics war. You cannot govern intelligence you do not have the silicon to produce.
China gets it. That is why they are building fabs, not filing comment periods. Nvidia already made sure the gap is not annual. It is generational.
Silicon Valley still thinks it is building consumer software. Huang just told them they are building American infrastructure. Every model trained here runs on machines that exist nowhere else. Every company that scales here scales on silicon no rival can touch.
The world thinks Nvidia sells chips. Nvidia sells the ability to think. And they only sell it under one flag.
Then there is Elon Musk.
Ian Miles Cheong tweeted with video:
Marc Andreessen just revealed the Elon Musk philosophy that completely broke his brain: “The best product in the world shouldn’t even need a logo.”
We all know Elon is relentless about quality. As Marc puts it: “Do you want the best car in the world or not, right? Like that’s Elon’s mentality… And it’s working very well.”
But at a recent event, Elon took this mindset to a completely different level. He dropped a perspective so jarring that Marc initially thought it was a joke.
Elon’s thesis? “You shouldn’t even have to have your name on the product. It’s just obvious. Everybody knows.”
The logic is brutal but simple. If you build the undeniable, undisputed best thing in the world, everybody uses it. And because everybody uses it, you don’t need to slap your branding all over it to prove it’s yours.
Think about that. We spend endless hours agonizing over marketing, tweaking brand colors, and putting our logos on every square inch of what we build. But the ultimate flex isn’t a flashy logo. The ultimate flex is building something so undeniably brilliant that its mere existence is the brand.
The rich are important to a free people, which is why communists like Elizabeth Warren, Chuck Schumer and Hakeem Jeffries keep blaming the problems of big government on the rich.
The rich solve problems. Consider this tweet with video from Gunther Eagleman:
Trump saved America $298 MILLION on the Lincoln Memorial Reflecting Pool:
The historic pool, where MLK gave his “I Have a Dream” speech, was a leaking, filthy disaster.
Government bureaucrats wanted $300 MILLION and 3+ years to rip it up.
Trump said hell no.
Called in real pool experts, scrubbed the original granite, sealed it, and topped it with American Flag Blue industrial coating.
✅ $1.5–2 MILLION
✅ Done in 2 weeks
✅ Will last 40–50 years and look better than 1922
This is how you run government like a business.
Promises kept! Taxpayer dollars saved!
Trump is not unique in our history.
The six richest men in America in 1776 were Robert Morris, John Hancock, Charles Carroll of Carrollton, Benjamin Franklin and George Washington. Five of them signed the Declaration of Independence. Washington was too busy fighting the Revolutionary War to return to Philadelphia to sign the document.
Those men were replaced over time. New generations of Americans created new wealth from new technology. Cornelius Vanderbilt was a successful ferryman in Staten Island when the steamboat came along. He sold his ferry company to competitors and signed on as the captain of a steamboat, learning the business firsthand.
Vanderbilt started a steamship company and adopted the name Commodore Vanderbilt. Then locomotives came along and he went into the railroad business.
The first 250 years of America were exceptional. The next 50 will be too.
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This article first appeared on Don Surber’s Substack. Reprinted here with permission.
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