Naval: If Your Most Admired People Are Investors and Financiers, Then Your God Is Money
Naval posted on X that if your most admired people are investors and financiers, then your god is money.
He believes this value orientation essentially places wealth at the spiritual core.
This viewpoint continues Naval's long-term philosophical reflection on life priorities and inner drives.
Source: Public Information
ABAB AI Insight
Naval has long been a tech philosopher, previously emphasizing in discussions like "How to Get Rich (without Being Lucky)" that wealth is a means rather than an end. This time, he directly addresses the essence of "idol worship," continuing his critique of treating money as the ultimate faith.
In the capital path, many young professionals focus their resources and attention on following top investors' trends and replicating trading strategies, rather than creating actual products or value. Their motivation is to gain identity recognition through quick wealth signals, but they easily fall into a short-term speculative cycle.
The historical replacement of religious idols with modern wealth idols, and the contrast with Silicon Valley's early emphasis on mission over mere wealth accumulation, highlights the current entrepreneurial and investment circles' shift from value creation to wealth worship.
This essentially represents a transfer of pricing power: when society places investors and financiers on a pedestal, pricing power shifts from genuine value creation to capital narratives and attention allocation. The mechanism lies in the idol effect amplifying wealth signals, leading to resource misallocation towards zero-sum games rather than long-term construction.
ABAB News · Cognitive Laws
Who you worship is who your god is.
Treating investors as idols makes life a subsidiary of money.
Truly free people never let wealth become their faith.