The Last Word

Elon Musk has just become the world’s first trillionaire following SpaceX’s initial public offering (IPO) on the New York Stock Exchange. With an estimated US$1.11tn to his name, Musk is now five times richer than when he acquired Twitter three years ago and ~40 times richer than he was in 2020, when he had ‘just’ US$28bn to his name.¹ His wealth is about the same as all US military spending for the current financial year,² or just shy of the entire UK budget for 2025 - 2026.³ Assuming a capacity cost of US$100/t, he could purchase the world’s entire 4.1Bnt/yr of global cement capacity for around US$410bn,⁴ and still have twice as much money as the world’s second-richest man Jeff Bezos (~US$260bn). Perhaps we should be grateful that cement is not a ‘sexy’ industry.

I’ve recently finished reading a book called ‘The art of spending money,’ by Morgan Housel. It’s quite a good read, so I thought I would share some of Morgan’s conclusions, since workers in the cement industry commonly complain that, although they may have a reasonable wage packet, they do not have a great work/life balance. Working out how to spend your money wisely might go some way to balancing the scales. It’s important to say that it hardly matters whether you have a lot of money to spend, or just a little: The lessons are the same.

I suspect that it may have been one of the most momentous telephone calls of recent decades. Someone in Iran who knew the movements of the very top leadership of the country called or texted their handler in Israel and informed them that the Supreme Leader and several of his top officials were meeting in Tehran. The decision was taken to act on the information. At some point the US was informed. At some later point, the US decided to become involved in what has come to be known as the Iran War¹ (Marco Rubio said “We knew that that would precipitate an attack against American forces, and we knew that if we didn’t pre-emptively go after them before they launched those attacks, we would suffer higher casualties.”) Presumably there was a pre-existing list of targets in Iran and the bombing quickly started (unfortunately one of them turned out to have been part of an army base that had been turned into a school for girls, and which was obliterated by Tomahawk missiles, killing around 170).

It’s clear that AI will change everything, as mentioned in last month’s ‘Last Word.’ In the cement industry, it’s likely that fewer workers will be required, and that they will be doing different jobs - essentially supervising the AIs that are doing the work. In this issue’s article on the Cemex Miami plant, we can already see this trend underway. If you are not already adept at using AI to boost your own productivity, then it might be time to look into it (or into a career change to something that can’t be done by AI, like ballet dancer or professional football player).

Bill Gates - can we still mention him? - has previously said, “We always overestimate the change that will occur in the next two years and underestimate the change that will occur in the next 10.” Well, here’s my strong forecasts for the next 10 years: