Naval Ravikant: “The smart and leveraged are getting richer”

“I’ve been saying this for a while, but the leverage in the system is insane,” Naval begins. “Leverage is a force-multiplier for your work. The oldest form of leverage is labor (you have people working with you or for you). Then it was capital (you’re investing money behind a problem). Then it was media (you’re writing a book and people are listening to you and your words are moving many people to do things)… Then code came along. Code is this incredible, permissionless form of leverage where you have robots and data centers cranking away for you. And now the leverage is increasing through AI, agents, robots, supply chains, 3D printing, and all the things you can do to amplify your work.”

Naval reflects on the claim that there will be 1-person, billion-dollar companies and points out that there actually already have been: Minecraft and Bitcoin were both 1-person projects.

“The leverage will just continue to increase, which means non-linear returns.” Naval explains. And he points out that this has important societal implications:

“Society is just not built to handle that. You can see all of the outcry against the rich getting richer and billionaires and all that, but it’s not really that the richer are getting richer. It’s that the smart and leveraged are getting richer. If you’re smart, and you’re highly-leveraged, you’re knowledge-creation power (earning-power is downstream of knowledge) is so much higher than your peers that you may have left behind in college and they just have no idea what’s coming. It’s going to be a kind of crazy time.”

Full video: Z Fellows “Naval Ravikant and Cory Levy at Internapalooza“ (Aug 2025)