Is Energy the Next Big Trade? + How to Actually Tax Billionaires

**Scott Galloway** (0:01)
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**Ed Elson** (0:23)
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**SPEAKER_3** (1:35)
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**Scott Galloway** (2:22)
Welcome to Office Hours with Prof G. This is the part of the show where we answer your questions about business, tech, entrepreneurship and whatever else is on your mind. Anyway, if you'd like to submit a question for next time, you can send a voice recording to officehours.profgmedia.com. Again, that's officehours.profgmedia.com. Or post your question on the Scott Galloway subreddit, and we just might feature it in our next episode. Our first question comes from Reddit user, The Green Lawn, who says, Scott, energy is arguably the defining capital story of the next decade. AI's turbo charging electricity demand and critical mineral supply chains are reshaping geopolitics. Yet, as an industry insider, I feel that the overall topic rarely gets the same narrative treatment as tech or finance. Do you see energy as the next great investing story? Thanks, and I disagree. I think it's getting a ton of attention, whether it's sort of adjacent to data centers or nuclear powers rejuvenation or it's just there's a ton. I think the best-performing stock of the last three or four years might be Bloom Energy, and so people are sort of going down the stack, if you will, of the supply chain and everything sort of leads to energy. So I think it's getting a lot of attention.
Why? Because the scale of the AI build-up, AI's CapEx boom is the second largest as a share of US GDP in history, bigger than the railroads, second only to the, I think, the Louisiana purchase, not as big as, I think, the railroads at one time, there was two railroad booms and I think at one point it was like 8 percent of GDP or even greater and then there's the build-out of the electrical grid, the highway system, the Apollo program, although that wasn't very big, and then the Internet and sort of the telco infrastructure. What's interesting is typically kind of two or three years post any build-out or infrastructure build-out that takes more than two or three percent of GDP, there's a crash because you can't justify the build-out economically. And so, unlike past tech booms, Facebook, Instagram, DoorDash, it's fundamentally a supply side story about making chips, building data centers, empowering them. It's money creating demand for energy, not the reverse.
So what does that mean for electricity? The IEA reports that data center electricity demand grew 17 percent in 2025 against just three percent growth in overall global electricity demand and projects will double by 2030 with AI focus centers tripling. To put the investment scale in context, the five biggest tech companies spent more on CapEx in 2025 than the entire global oil and gas industry invested in production. So then why is your electricity bill going up? You might ask. Prices are rising near data center hubs, but the real culprit is an AI stealing electrons from consumers. It's the cost of transmission infrastructure, transformers, wires hit by tariffs, post-COVID labor costs, and decades of deferred investment. Isn't that interesting? It's maintenance, the supplies to build this shit as opposed to the actual energy itself.