If I Had A Trillion Dollars.

June 15, 2026

“If I had a million dollars…”

Most people of my generation can finish the lyric. In the 1990’s, the Barenaked Ladies turned a million dollars into a playful thought experiment. A house. A car. A green dress. Maybe some fancy Dijon ketchup. At the time, a million dollars felt unimaginably large.

Today, we live in a world of billionaires, trillion-dollar companies, trillion-dollar market valuations, and a trillionaire. With the SpaceX IPO and all the money thrown behind Elon Musk, he has achieved the pinnacle of success. Papers today are calling him the first-ever trillionaire. What to do with all that wealth? If I had a trillion dollars…In my view, it’s a spectacle. Some may stop reading here because they will call me an Elon hater. Please keep reading. I am hater. I’m a hater of poverty and the endless cycle of food insecurity, chronic hunger, and senseless starvation. There is enough financial capital and actual food production, globally to feed the entire planet. It’s a matter of political will and what I call leadership will. We don’t have enough Steward Leaders in this world.

So keep reading, and I just might convince you of the pathway to ending the human suffering, and how? By investing for THIS planet. You see, investors routinely place extraordinary amounts of capital behind compelling visions of the future, some practical, some spectacular, and some that require us to suspend disbelief just long enough for the pitch deck to clear the room. Now, all of this is calling for a new Barenaked Ladies release by raising a different question: If I had a trillion dollars, what would I spend it on?

human energy.

Many people would choose artificial intelligence. Others would choose energy. Some would choose space exploration. I would choose agriculture, not because farmers and the industry needs sympathy, and not because I am nostalgic for a simpler way of life. I would invest in agriculture because its output (calories) is the most important energy system on Earth, and calories—the right kind of calories—need massive capitalization.

The financial markets are over-indexing toward non-essential, future-focused investments at the expense of investing in real-time essential human needs.

For years, I described myself as working in the agriculture and food business, and then I realized I was wrong to describe my profession that way. All along, I have worked in the human energy business. Food is simply the delivery mechanism of calories, packed with macro and micro nutrients. The real product of agriculture production is energy. Human energy.

Every day, more than eight billion people require energy to think, learn, create, innovate, build, heal, teach, govern, dream, and love. Unlike most energy systems, the human energy system cannot be paused. It cannot be shut down for maintenance. It must be renewed every day for every human being on the planet to survive. That’s a tall charge, and that is also built-in demand. Guaranteed demand. That’s an industry to get behind, one that guarantees people not only want your product, they very much need it.

Agriculture is the system that makes human energy possible.

Farmers perform one of the most remarkable acts in the natural world. They transform sunlight, soil, water, biology, and human ingenuity into the energy that powers civilization itself. Every breakthrough begins with agriculture. Every economy begins with agriculture. Every innovation begins with agriculture. Every future begins with agriculture.

Yet throughout history, agriculture has often been viewed as a supporting industry rather than the foundational industry. Early on in my career, people used to ask me, “Why would you study agricultural economics, that sounds so obscure.” Well, is eating obscure? I’ve always thought it strange that society celebrates other inventors, entrepreneurs, financiers, engineers, and explorers and doesn’t collectively hold up ag innovators as heroes to admire. We build monuments to leaders and other innovators. We marvel at technological achievement, and at the same time take agriculture’s progress for granted.

Meanwhile, the farmer quietly produces the energy that makes all of it possible. It’s more of a modern oversight, I believe. In ancient times, food production was central to society. As civilizations have evolved and as population has exploded, with more people dependent on fewer farmers growing for the whole, many people have taken the agriculture industry and the opportunity to personally invest in it for granted.

Perhaps that is because the most important things in life often become invisible. We notice the breakthrough. We forget the foundation beneath it. It’s not until there is a shock to the food system that people care. It’s the age-old adage, “You don’t know what you’ve got until it’s gone.”

IS AGRICULTURE SEXY?

A few years ago, while returning from the World Economic Forum meetings in Geneva, I found myself reflecting on the extraordinary flow of capital toward technologies that promised to transform the future. In all of these forums, tech most often takes center stage while those focused on feeding people get our own special groups and conversations on the side. It’s where I had the ah-ha moment that people don’t see agriculture as sexy or interesting. Afterall, it’s just food. So I thought about the great reframing of agriculture as energy. Agriculture is about producing food as our planet’s most important energy source, juxtaposing that with the future the tech industry is selling society.

Sure, the investments in tech are impressive, and many of the ambitions are inspiring and necessary. At the same time, I am frustrated. Why is capital not blasting off like a rocket ship toward feeding the growing population of hungry and chronically hungry people? Also, I cannot escape a simple question: What future are we trying to create with AI, space neighborhoods on distant planets, and other tech over food? This is not the first time I have written about this topic. I wrote a companion article here earlier in the year. I continue to wrestle with how to gain momentum for investment in agriculture.

It seems capital follows imagination. Capital follows trends. Capital follows aspirations for giant and swift payouts to the investor. Capital follows the sizzle of a wealthy entrepreneur. Investors do not always fund what exists right in front of them, which is the human imperative. They fund what they believe is possible, and in this case, all these investors that boost trillion-dollar IPOs must not believe ending hunger is possible through investing in agriculture and food systems.

I ask: What needs to be true for investors to direct their capital to the greatest opportunity to advance human flourishing in the world, which is hiding in plain sight?

Maybe the better question is: Can investors imagine the value that would be created by a well nourished world?

Investors understand value creation. They understand productivity. They understand unlocking potential. They understand identifying opportunities before everyone else sees them. They understand ROI and IRR. Yet when conversations turn to hunger, the discussion often shifts into the language of charity, aid, and humanitarian intervention. Those conversations matter, and at the same time, they may unintentionally obscure something much larger.

CREATING VALUE BY ENDING HUNGER.

What if hunger is not merely a humanitarian challenge? What if ending hunger is one of the largest unrealized value creation opportunities in the global economy?

Every hungry child represents human potential that has not yet had the opportunity to emerge. Every undernourished community represents economic activity that never materializes. Every food-insecure region represents innovation, entrepreneurship, leadership, and creativity that remain trapped behind a biological barrier that agriculture is uniquely positioned to solve.

Investors spend their careers searching for untapped sources of value. They scour the globe looking for emerging technologies, disruptive business models, and overlooked markets. Yet one of the largest reservoirs of unrealized human potential is staring us in the face.

If food is energy, and agriculture is the system that produces that energy, then agriculture is not simply producing crops. Agriculture is producing the conditions that allow human potential to become reality.

And when I say agriculture, I do not mean agriculture narrowly. I am not only talking about farms, fields, tractors, and combines. I am talking about the entire ecosystem that transforms sunlight into sustenance and sustenance into human possibility. I am talking about the farmer in the field and the scientist in the laboratory. I am talking about regenerative food systems and the underlying infrastructure necessary to support them. Agriculture is not a single entity. It is an interconnected system whose ultimate purpose is the production of human energy.

In fact, I believe that agriculture represents one of the greatest opportunities for innovation on Earth. It’s a tech-savvy industry. It’s sexy. Every advancement that increases resilience, productivity, sustainability, accessibility, affordability, nutrition, or efficiency strengthens humanity’s capacity to flourish. The question is not whether agriculture deserves more innovation. The question is whether we fully appreciate what is at stake when an influx of capital is applied to the system that powers every human life.

Consider the numbers. Nearly 700+ million people continue to live in extreme poverty. Hundreds of millions experience food insecurity.

Credible analyses suggest that ending hunger globally would require between $33 billion and $267 billion annually, depending on the scope of the intervention (Ceres2030 research initiative, backed by the International Food Policy Research Institute). Those are significant numbers, yes, and they are less than a trillion dollars. So, in a world that routinely creates trillion-dollar valuations, they are not unimaginable numbers.

Maximo Torero, Chief Economist at the Food and Agriculture Organization, maintains the latest statistics on the state of food insecurity across the globe. I suggest you follow him on LinkedIn. He is ringing the alarm bells that, yet again, the world is on the brink of another food crisis. The data is sobering, especially coming on the heels of Russia’s actions in Ukraine over the past three years, the war with Iran, and the compounding disruptions to global food, energy, and shipping systems.

I believe the data points to something profound, which is the barrier to investment is not capability. Rather, the barrier is imagination. I will ask again:

Can investors imagine a world without hunger? More importantly, can investors imagine the value that would be created by a world without hunger?

If investors can collectively imagine living on different planets or extending AI to the dark reaches of the earth, why can’t investors imagine an end to hunger?

Let’s stop framing conversations about hunger as only humanitarian discussions (although, I know one trillionaire who could work to end hunger through his humanitarian aid, yet I digress). Important as humanitarian discussions are, I believe they miss something larger with those who hold the financial capital keys to the kingdom.

When a child goes hungry, we do not merely witness suffering; we witness unrealized human potential. You see, when communities lack reliable access to nutrition, we do not simply lose calories. We lose creativity. We lose productivity. We lose innovation. We lose future leadership. We lose the contributions those individuals might have made to their families, communities, economies, and the world. If we imagine a world filled with robots, and we invest in those versus actual human lives, what is that saying about our vision for the future of humanity? Why would we as investors value robots over human lives and living?

Every hungry person represents capacity that remains locked away, and when our current humanity underinvests in food systems, humanity underinvests in itself. That is why I believe agriculture deserves a different narrative. For generations, we have described agriculture through the language of yields, acreage, commodities, and inputs, and those measures matter, but they are incomplete.

Agriculture is not merely producing crops. Agriculture is producing possibility. Agriculture is the mechanism through which natural capital becomes human potential, and agriculture is the industry that powers every other industry. Agriculture is the foundation beneath every economy.

Trillion Dollar Question.

So, this brings me back to the trillion-dollar question. What would you do with a trillion dollars?

We live in an age captivated by distant horizons. We dream about artificial intelligence. We dream about new technologies. We dream about other planets. Human curiosity has always pushed us forward, and it should. But before we imagine life somewhere else, perhaps we should fully appreciate the extraordinary opportunity beneath our feet.

Planet Earth already possesses the resources, ingenuity, agricultural knowledge, technological capability, and productive capacity to nourish billions of people and unlock untold human potential. The opportunity before us is not simply to grow more food. The opportunity is to cultivate more human flourishing, more human energy. The opportunity is to invest in the systems that allow people to become everything they were created to become.

So if I had a trillion dollars, I would not buy a bigger house. I would not buy a rocket ship. I would not buy an island. I would invest in agriculture. Why?

Every breakthrough we celebrate is powered by the human mind.

Every human mind is powered by food.

And every investment in agriculture is ultimately an investment in what humanity might become.

If I had a trillion dollars, that’s the future I would buy.