Imagine landing at JFK Airport today in a time machine from 1970.

As you step out into 2025, what would surprise you most? Probably the pocket supercomputers everyone carries around.

Your mind would be blown that you can video call someone half a world away with crystal clarity—for free—and access more knowledge on demand than contained in the world’s greatest libraries.

Then you look up from the six-inch screen. Your awe melts into… disappointment.

The same old planes lumber down runways. The same traffic-clogged highways lead into Manhattan. The same century-old subway system rattles underneath the city.

For half a century, American innovation squeezed into a narrow digital lane. Silicon Valley churned out photo filters and food delivery apps while the hard problems gathered dust.

The stock market tells the story. In 1970, America’s corporate giants—General Motors (GM), ExxonMobil (XOM), and General Electric (GE)—built things you could touch.

Today? Apple (AAPL), Microsoft (MSFT), and Alphabet (GOOG) dominate, moving bits through the air.

But the digital revolution, for all its limits, planted the seeds of something much bigger.

It created a new class of wealth unlike anything in history. Nvidia (NVDA), Apple, Microsoft, Amazon (AMZN), Alphabet, Meta Platforms (META), Tesla (TSLA), and Broadcom (AVGO) have crossed the trillion-dollar mark.

Together, they’re worth more than the annual economic output of Japan and Germany combined.

• These companies didn’t just make their founders rich. They created a new class of millionaires: ordinary engineers, programmers, and early investors...

Since going public in 1986, Microsoft has created at least eight billionaires and 12,000 millionaires. Most of these folks were simply early employees who benefitted from Microsoft’s stock option program.

Nvidia has showered investors and employees with even greater riches.

The Wall Street Journal recently profiled ordinary investors who bought Nvidia stock before it soared. (I hope there were some RiskHedge readers among them. We first recommended the stock in 2018.)

Source: The Wall Street Journal

The vast sums of wealth created by the digital revolution turned once-scrappy startups into corporate kings. Having billion-dollar bank accounts allowed these companies and their founders to fund a revolution in the physical world.

Elon Musk took his PayPal Holdings (PYPL) millions and bet everything on electric cars and reusable rockets. Now, Tesla and SpaceX are reinventing transportation on Earth and beyond.

Jeff Bezos channeled his Amazon fortune into Blue Origin's space exploration, while Amazon pioneers delivery drones and warehouse robotics.

Alphabet’s cofounders, Larry Page and Sergey Brin, invested billions into self-driving cars and AI.

Welcome to the digital revolution’s second act. The wealth created from reshaping our screens is now flowing into reshaping our cities, skies, and lives. What started as a narrow stream of digital progress is becoming an avalanche of real-world breakthroughs.

• The future isn't just in your phone anymore—it’s taking physical form before our eyes.

I recently took a self-driving Waymo in San Francisco. Just me and a steering wheel turning by itself. It felt like I’d arrived in the future. Alphabet’s self-driving car unit Waymo is now completing more than 175,000 trips across Los Angeles, Phoenix, and San Francisco each week.

In 2024, nuclear power came roaring back to life, awakened by an unexpected force. The companies that revolutionized our digital world—Microsoft, Amazon, Alphabet, and Meta—went “all in” on atomic energy.

Why? They need massive amounts of energy to power their AI dreams. ChatGPT might live in the cloud, but it runs on a lot of hardware. This year alone, tech giants will pour $250 billion into AI data centers.

Last year, more solar power was installed worldwide than between 1956 and 2017. In 2004, it took a whole year to install 1 gigawatt of solar power. Now, we’re deploying that much every 12 hours!

Neuralink’s brain chips allow paralyzed people to work by controlling computers with their minds.

Boom Aerospace is making America supersonic again. The startup successfully completed 10 test flights last year.

Scientists retooled the tech behind the COVID jab, mRNA, to create cancer-killing jabs. In trials for the deadliest form of skin cancer, personalized vaccines halved death rates. Similar trials for pancreatic, lung, colorectal, and other deadly cancers are showing promising early results.

SpaceX is launching and catching skyscraper-sized rockets. Every 2.3 days in 2024, a SpaceX rocket blasted off somewhere in America. This year, it’ll complete more missions than NASA’s Space Shuttle program did in its entire 30-year history.

Drone delivery startup Zipline made its millionth autonomous delivery, serving 4,500+ hospitals. Want a Sweetgreen salad? A drone might drop it at your door. In Dallas, Alphabet’s Wing delivered 30,000 Walmart (WMT) packages last year alone.

Robots are learning to think. Physical Intelligence just demonstrated a robot that folds laundry and cleans messy tables—tasks it figures out on its own, even if it’s never done them before. Rosie from The Jetsons is stepping out of the cartoon and into our homes.

That’s just a taste of the innovation explosion happening right now. Every morning you wake up, and some new tech breakthrough hits you in the face.

For half a century, most of the greatest public investment opportunities lived almost entirely in the digital world. Social media. Smartphones. Online shopping. Cloud computing. That narrow slice of progress created thousands of millionaires.

• Now, areas that were investment deserts just a few years ago are suddenly bursting with opportunity.

Space travel—once the domain of government agencies—now has dozens of promising companies. Nuclear power—written off as yesterday’s technology—is roaring back to life. Robotics, genetic engineering, and AI—previously the stuff of science fiction—are becoming real businesses.

We’re witnessing the birth of entirely new industries. Each one has the potential to create the next Microsoft, the next Amazon, the next Nvidia. For investors, it’s like having a time machine back to the early days of the internet boom. Except this time, the revolution is everywhere...

• AIs that are boosting our productivity
• Self-driving cars ferrying kids to soccer practice
• Miracle drugs like Ozempic that melt fat off waistlines
• Drones delivering Amazon parcels
• Solar panels pulling power from the sun
• Skyscraper-sized rockets launching into space
• Startups that are building nuclear reactors small enough to fit inside your garage
• Gene editing tackling rare diseases
• 3D-printed homes

The world is changing before our eyes. It’s opening up a whole new world of investing.

How can you set yourself up to capitalize on these opportunities?

Every week, in my free investing letter The Jolt, I cover the wave of innovation happening across different sectors of the market… and how to find the best investment opportunities from the companies making this disruption happen.

If you’re interested in learning more about the companies reshaping our future, you can join The Jolt here.

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Stephen McBride is Chief Analyst, RiskHedge. To get more ideas like this sent straight to your inbox every Monday and Friday, make sure to sign up for The Jolt, a free investment letter focused on profiting from disruption.