Remember the Gold Rush? Hundreds of thousands of people showed up with pickaxes, convinced they’d strike it rich. Spoiler alert: they didn’t. The real money went to the people selling shovels.
We’re living through AI’s version of that right now, and most people are too distracted by the hype to notice who’s actually pocketing the gold.
Here’s the uncomfortable truth: a massive wealth transfer is happening in real time. And unlike previous tech booms that took a decade to reshape the economy, this one is moving at warp speed. The window to position yourself on the right side of it? Closing fast.
The Modern Enclosure Movement
Think back to 16th-century England. The landowning class privatized common lands that ordinary people had farmed for generations. Fences went up. Farmers lost their independence and became dependent on the very people who enclosed the land. The enclosers called it “progress.” It was, technically—just not for the farmers.
AI is doing the same thing to cognitive labor. For centuries, intelligence was distributed. You got educated, you built skills, you had economic security. Now a handful of companies are encoding human intelligence into proprietary systems and charging rent for access to something that used to belong to everyone.
The senior product manager, the paralegal, the mid-level software engineer—they spent years building skills they were told would always be valuable. The fences are going up around those skills right now.
The Moment It Became Obvious
Jack Dorsey just fired 40% of Block’s workforce—the largest percentage layoff in S&P 500 history. But here’s the thing: he didn’t blame the economy or spin it as a strategic pivot. He said plainly that “intelligence tools have changed what it means to build and run a company.”
Translation: he fired the starting gun. Every CFO at PayPal, Shopify, and every financial services firm just got permission to do the same. In low-margin industries, there’s no choice—match the efficiency or compete at a permanent disadvantage. Fintech will cut. Financial services will follow. Then software, consulting, law, accounting. The logic applies everywhere people are paid to think.
Where the Real Money Is
The infrastructure of AI—not the applications, the infrastructure—is where the early wealth concentrates. Always has been. Railroads created steel fortunes before they created middle-class prosperity. Electrification made utility barons wealthy before it transformed households.
The plays:
- Semiconductors (Nvidia, TSM, Broadcom): The oil wells of AI. Nearly every model depends on their hardware.
- Hyperscalers (Microsoft, Amazon, Google, Meta): The landlords. Too embedded in the infrastructure to lose.
- Energy (Constellation Energy, Vistra, Eaton): The most underappreciated trade. Data centers need enormous amounts of power. This is contracted, long-duration revenue.
- Data Center Real Estate (Equinix, Digital Realty): The physical landlords of the internet. Irreplaceable assets with long-term contracted revenue.
What to Avoid
Any company whose business model depends on human cognitive labor, information asymmetry, or the inefficiencies AI eliminates will face structural pressure. Traditional SaaS without proprietary data advantages, financial intermediaries built on inertia, staffing companies—these are the hand-loom weavers of the AI era.
The Bottom Line
You can’t stop the enclosure. But you can position yourself inside it. The infrastructure of AI isn’t speculative—it’s being built right now at enormous scale, backed by hundreds of billions in capital commitments.
The people who own the infrastructure tend to benefit long before the rest of society figures out how to adapt.
