David Solomon

We see enormous productivity opportunities and you move people around to different places.

The firm today has 12,000, 13,000 engineers.

If you go back 20 years ago, we had a fraction of that.

My guess is we're going to have more leverage for coding and engineering with fewer people, but that will free up capacity to invest in other areas where we still need people to scale some of the work that we need to do.

So it's a very interesting time with change, but not as binary and linear as I think a lot of people are talking about it.

My guess is the growth trajectory of the overall headcount of the firm will flatten for a period of time.

So if you want to say 36 months, you know, it'll be a flatter trajectory for the next three years than it's been for any other three year period.

You know, going back, you know, three, six, you know, nine years, it'll be flatter.

But if you want to take, you know, five, 10 years out, I think we'll have more employees.

Well, I think the macro setup is very, very constructive.

And I think the things that keep me up or keep me worrying that could kind of set us off what's a pretty constructive environment are exogenous things that we don't see.

I mean, they can center around things like geopolitics and, you know, events, you know, in the political realm of the policy realm that really change confidence in the short term.

You know, an example of it last year was Liberation Day and the way the trade policy was rolled out.

That's certainly, you know, sap confidence for a period of time.

Cyber is a big risk that we don't talk about a lot, but a big cyber event in some way, shape or form can sap confidence.

But generally, if you step back, the macro setup is very strong.

We have enormous fiscal stimulus.

The big bill last year, a bunch of which comes into impact in 26, puts more fiscal stimulus into the economy.

We've got Bitcoin.

big, big capital investment around AI infrastructure, which is also very stimulative for growth in the economy.