Hierarchy of Energy Food Chains
A drawing has been making the rounds: a small fish labeled xAI being swallowed by a larger fish labeled SpaceX, itself disappearing into the gaping mouth of the biggest fish — Tesla. It's a cartoon about corporate consolidation, market cap hierarchy, the usual predator-prey logic of big business. But look closer and you'll see a much older structure hiding inside the joke.
Every one of those fish runs on energy. xAI's GPU clusters consume megawatts. SpaceX converts kerosene and methane into orbit. Tesla manufactures machines that convert stored electrochemical energy into motion. The cartoon is a food chain — and all food chains terminate at the same place.
"The sun is the ultimate energy monopoly. Every other power source on Earth — fossil fuels, wind, hydro, biomass — is just solar energy with extra steps."
Every Joule Has a Solar Origin Story
This is not metaphor. It is thermodynamics. Coal is compressed ancient sunlight — photosynthesis locked into carbon bonds 300 million years ago and pressure-cooked underground. Oil is the same: dead marine organisms that fed on solar-driven plankton, concentrated over geological time. Natural gas, peat, biomass — all stored solar flux, accessed on different timescales.
Wind is a solar derivative. Differential heating of the Earth's surface creates pressure gradients that move air. Hydroelectric power is solar energy that evaporated water, lifted it to altitude, and let gravity return it through turbines. Even the food you eat is a solar energy transduction chain — photons → glucose → ATP → thought.
Nuclear fission and geothermal are the only significant exceptions — energy from stellar nucleosynthesis and planetary formation respectively. But on the surface economy, the economy humans actually live inside, the sun is the sole upstream supplier.
The Thermodynamic Stack
Thermoeconomics gives us a framework for seeing this clearly. Every economic actor is an energy transducer — an entity that takes in low-entropy energy, extracts useful work, and exports high-entropy waste heat. Corporations, blockchains, governments, organisms — they're all the same thing at the thermodynamic level. They differ only in what kind of work they extract and on what timescale.
The cartoon's food chain (xAI → SpaceX → Tesla) maps directly onto a free energy cascade. Each fish absorbs the useful work-product of the fish below it. But the cascade has to start somewhere. Trace it far enough and you're always staring at fusion reactions inside a G-type main-sequence star 93 million miles away.
The Real Hierarchy
So the cartoon needs one more fish. Behind Tesla — behind every corporation, every nation-state, every blockchain — there is a fish so large it doesn't fit in the frame. The sun. It has been the sole proprietor of Earth's energy budget for 4.5 billion years and it will continue to be for another 5 billion. No leveraged buyout is forthcoming.
This is why proof-of-work matters. A consensus mechanism anchored to energy expenditure is anchored, ultimately, to solar flux. The security of the chain is not an abstraction — it's a direct accounting of thermodynamic work, denominated in the only currency the universe actually recognizes: entropy production.
What This Means for Energy Money
If money is supposed to represent value, and value is the capacity to do useful work, then money is an energy claim. Fiat currencies are energy IOUs backed by political promises. Proof-of-work tokens are energy receipts backed by physics. The question for the next century isn't whether money will be energy-denominated — it already is, implicitly. The question is whether we'll make the accounting explicit.
Every watt produced on Earth either came from the sun recently (solar, wind, hydro, biomass) or from the sun anciently (fossil fuels). A monetary system that acknowledges this — that prices value in units of thermodynamic work — is not a radical new invention. It's a correction. It's aligning the map to the territory.
The biggest fish isn't Tesla. It isn't any corporation. The biggest fish is the 1.4 million kilometer wide thermonuclear reactor that writes every check the Earth cashes. Build your money on that, and you've built on bedrock.