On this Monday morning we are looking at US stocks rallying with the Dow hitting a new intraday high and last Friday Elon Musk officially became the world's first trillionaire after SpaceX staged the largest IPO in history, closing with a staggering $2.1 trillion valuation and new wealth into perspective if you stuffed a trillion dollar bills under a mattress, it would weigh 1 million metric tons and while that's well defined. traditional metrics, the pursuit of American fortunes is nothing new throughout history strategies for getting ahead have constantly evolved.
Nowhere is that more apparent today than in crypto as well as digital assets, which has grown into an asset class.
Well joining me live here at the New York Stock Exchange is Joseph Moore, a historian and best selling author of How to Get Rich in American History.
Great to have you here.
Thank you so much for joining me to be here.
Well we're here at the historic New York Stock.
We're talking about American wealth, the foundation of the stock market lies straight here.
But given the fact that we're coming off that historic SpaceX IPO, what do you make of where wealth stands in the country today?
Oh wow, what a great question.
So Americans have never been wealthier writ large, and most of the attention goes to the top, like having the 1st 1 trillionaire draws all the eyeballs.
What's not getting as much play is we have more. millionaires than ever before, more single digit millionaires than ever before.
The middle class is shrinking.
We hear that a lot.
It's shrinking because the upper middle class is growing statistically, the upper middle class is larger than it's ever been.
So it's not that we're shrinking the middle class and there's more poor people than before.
It's that we have a larger upper middle class than ever before, and that's largely what's driving a lot of this economic spending.
It's driving a lot of the economic growth.
So we're in a better place than we often think we are.
And you're joining me on this Monday morning where we have an interim peace deal between the US and Iran, and we're looking at US stocks rallying.
So I'm sure for those 401ks that continue to grow, the Dow at intraday highs actually helps intraday record highs.
But when it comes to this myth of getting ahead for a lot of Americans out there, what is the reality?
Well, Americans have been told they could not get ahead for about 300 years and they keep doing it anyway, so I Joke often and I can find people saying the American dream is dead about 300 years before the phrase American dream shows up, so we can find people burning down the capital of Virginia in the 1670s because nobody gets ahead anymore.
So we hear this a lot.
The reality is that over time in every era Americans have been getting ahead faster, farther than any place on the planet.
That continues to be the case today.
So as we as we look to the future, I mean, you know, there's a lot of interest of course right now in SpaceX and these.
These valuations and a lot of people are looking with weary eyes back to the 1990s and wondering, you know, does all this just revert back to the mean.
But the thing about history is the mean moves through time too.
It's following behind you, so every time really does have its own challenges and opportunities.
Yes, and Joseph, while I have you here, we're talking about Americans feeling as though the American dream is far out of reach because given the inflation that we've seen so far in 2026, gas prices are rising and the cost of seemingly everything, whether we're talking about grocery shopping or borrowing rates not coming down, affordability when it comes to housing.
All of that continues to be very difficult.
So what is one enduring wealth building principle that's actually stood the test of time?
Well, you know, we've had many, many tech tech booms and busts in American history, right?
And I talk about some of those in the book.
One of the enduring lessons for everyday people and everyday investors is it's actually a lot easier to help build the road to the future than it. to actually guess where it's going.
And so the people who get involved in each one of those tech booms, whether we're going back to the canal booms of the 1800s or the sugar boom, the beet sugar boom of the 1830s or the shell oil boom, I could do this all day, right?
We can do, you know, the 1980s tech boom.
All of those booms saw most of the wealth to the people who were working in those industries and investing in those industries as everyday workers.
Then trying to predict or guess exactly which one of the companies was going to be the one that won the race.
And right now we are looking at artificial intelligence as both a technology as well as an investment theme.
And within the AI ecosystem when we're looking at potential investments, there are a lot of moving parts here.
So this tech boom that we're watching right now, how do you expect it to play out?
Well that's above my pay grade to predict the future.
I will tell you that, um, again, having seen the history of so many of these tech uh booms that we talk talk about in the book.
We see over and over again that the future tends to get here.
It just takes its time, and there is a tendency to believe that the future must arrive tomorrow.
Therefore, everyone rushes into those investments, and what happens is there tends to be then the normal, you know, air comes out of that bubble, and then the technologies themselves really do play themselves out over 5, 1015, 20 years, and we start to see the dramatic increases in GDP, the increases in wealth for everyday people.
So these technologies are.
Real.
They really will change the world the way many people think they will.
They probably will take longer to get there than we often think they will.
So one of the analogies to this is to go back to GE.
So when you look at things like SpaceX and you know, one of the things that SpaceX is basically doing is what GE did.
I mean, as much as Elon loves to obsess on Nikola Tesla, he acts a lot like Edison, right, bringing together a bunch of disparate technological innovative industries which for GE was a light manufacturing company.
A manufacturing company and a railway line and bringing these together and saying there's synergies here that will build over themselves over time and for 100 years that was a great investment.
So we see times in the past where these things play out.
They do take their time to get here.
Yes, and while we're talking about technology, I thought of SpaceX because we're talking about profitability when we're looking at publicly traded companies, right?
So SpaceX, an AI company, defense company, satellite company.
AI, right?
So when we're looking at technology, I do want to get your take on blockchain and what it means for digital assets, especially since we're talking about potential currency.
Yes, so my opinion on this and what I talk about in the book may not land well with crypto enthusiasts, but I do think that the lesson of history for Bitcoin itself is pretty clear and for crypto itself is pretty clear, and those two are likely to diverge.
So when we think of American history, we've had self-issued peer to peer currencies before.
In 1860 there were 10,000 of them, and then we started to see in this world of disparate state regulations, the federal government came in in the 1860s with the Currency Act, the Legal Tender Act, and these things that basically in the span of just a few years brought money under federal regulation.
What was the result of that?
It actually took decentralized finance of the 1800s and pushed it to the side in favor of the US greenback dollar.
Now we're going through another period where Bitcoin's entire raison d'etre was that it was going to be able to operate outside of those kinds of regulations.
It had, it had a premium because it was outside of government control.
Well, with the Clarity Act likely to pass, we're seeing this now centralized back under federal regulatory authority and as that happens.
We're likely to see Bitcoin recede in the background and then the other historical analogy here is to euro dollars.
So as in the 1950s, 1960s we saw, and this is Nick Carter's argument that I agree with, we saw the people around the globe wanted to trade in the US dollar, but they didn't have a way to do it.
And so European banks were able to put dollar liabilities on their books and say trade against these and now there's more liabilities for the US dollar abroad than there are in the United States.
So where does that go as the Clarity Act comes into life, we're probably going to see something like dollar-backed digital currencies become the way of the future for crypto.
And as the crypto pie gets bigger, the Bitcoin slice gets a lot smaller.
Well, less than 60 seconds here.
So what does that mean for the everyday American?
Uh, if I'm an everyday American, I would certainly look at investing in some of these futures, but not rush to get there, right?
There's a general cycle that we see where we, we see the excitement start to wane, recede, and then that's a good point to get in and buy the future when it's on sale.
Well, Joseph, great talking to you.
Thank you so much for joining us today.
I appreciate your time as well, insight.
Thank you so much.
