There is one question that will decide more about wealth in the next ten years than every stock market combined. It won’t make the front page of any major business magazine, because it is too simple. But it will change our relationship to work, to the economy, and to the value of time itself. The question is: Who will own the robots?
When people talk about the robot revolution, most imagine futuristic humanoids from science-fiction films. That is romantic and wrong. The real revolution is more sober, quieter, and has been underway for years.
In July 2025, Amazon crossed the mark of one million robots in its warehouses worldwide. Three quarters of all orders are now handled with robot support. Hotels across Asia deploy service robots to move food between floors. Hospitals move medicines with them. Cleaning robots work at night in office buildings, shopping centres and airports — quietly, without pause, and without anyone noticing.
The global robotics market is projected to grow from around 90 billion US dollars in 2024 to over 205 billion US dollars by 2030. And that is only an interim figure. The real wave is coming with humanoid robots, whose market is expected to grow ninefold by 2030.
These numbers aren’t extraordinary. They are boring, because they are real. But they point to a question no one is asking.
Three industrial revolutions — and a recurring pattern
The first industrial revolution began in the late 18th century with the steam engine. It replaced the muscle power of humans and animals. The second, in the late 19th century, came with electricity and the assembly line. It automated mass production. The third, from the 1970s, came with computers and the internet. It replaced routine office work.
Each of these revolutions followed the same pattern. A small group recognised the potential early. They invested in the new technology. They captured the productivity gains. A larger group recognised the potential later and was still able to position themselves. The broad public recognised the potential only after the biggest value jump had already happened.
Carnegie became rich not because he invented steel, but because he concentrated steel production in his own hands early. Rockefeller became rich with oil, not because he discovered it, but because he controlled the pipelines. Page and Brin became rich not because they invented the internet, but because they owned search.
The robot revolution will show no different pattern. The only question is: Who will own it?
The old pattern: capital concentration
The obvious answer: the large companies that already have the capital to invest in robots today. Amazon. Tesla. Hyundai. Foxconn. They buy the robots, operate them, harvest the profits. The labour previously performed by millions of people becomes visible on the balance sheets of fewer companies.
This isn’t meant cynically. It is the mechanical logic of capitalism as we have known it for 200 years. Whoever has the capital buys the means of production. Whoever owns the means of production reaps the profit from the labour those means of production perform. Marx described it, Adam Smith hinted at it before him, and it has worked exactly this way since industrialisation.
The problem is not that companies want to own robots. The problem is that this time it is labour itself that is affected — not just the tools with which work is performed, but the work output itself. And if work output disappears into the balance sheets of fewer companies, one has to ask what the other 99 percent of humanity will do economically.
The uncomfortable question
Economists from across the political spectrum agree, oddly enough: the coming wave of automation will be more disruptive than any before. It will replace not only physical routine work, but mental routine work too. Not just clerical work, but analysis. Not just workbenches, but creative professions — at least in part.
What this means for labour markets is the subject of fierce debate. Some economists expect massive reshuffles with short-term pain and long-term gains — as in earlier revolutions. Others expect a fundamental shift in which productivity gains are no longer redistributed into new jobs, but remain on the balance sheets of capital owners.
Which view is correct, we will know in ten years. What we can already know today: if the robot revolution follows the same pattern as all previous ones — capital collects capital — then the losers of this revolution will be those who are not participating today.
The new question
A different perspective begins precisely here. Not: how do we cope with the losses automation brings? Rather: how do we ensure that as many people as possible share in the gains the robots will generate?
This is not a political question, but an economic one. If a small number of robots performs a large part of future economic value creation, then this value creation must be distributed to many people — not for moral reasons, but so that the economy as a whole functions. An economy in which few own and the majority buys nothing collapses within a few years.
The intelligent answer is not redistribution after the fact. The intelligent answer is participation from the start. If people are already invested today in the robots that will take over their work, then they gain economically when these robots take over more work.
This isn’t impossible
Participation in robots was, until now, something only large investors and institutional players could manage. Who would have wanted to buy a single industrial robot, have it maintained, find it a deployment site, sign contracts with operators? The barriers were so high that robotics remained inaccessible as an asset class for the broad public.
This is changing. Models are emerging in which people can participate in robot fleets through structured platforms — diversified, professionally operated, without each participant having to worry about maintenance, deployment or renewal. Asset tokens on the blockchain make it possible to represent such participations transparently and with legal certainty. Switzerland created one of the world’s clearest regulatory foundations for this with the DLT Act of 2021.
One of these models is beep, which we are developing at Beep Labs AG in Zug. We are building a pool of industrial, service and humanoid robots in which people are automatically invested through a monthly subscription. The tokens they receive are backed by real economic power — by robots that work in warehouses, hotels, hospitals, workshops. We are not the only project thinking in this direction. But we are one of those building it concretely.
Back to the question
Who will own the robots? The honest answer: this is not yet decided. In ten years we will see whether the robots follow the same concentration path as all means of production before them — or whether we manage to organise the next industrial revolution differently from the previous three.
It’s not a question that will be answered in Davos, or in the boardrooms of the tech giants. It is a question that will be answered through the decisions of many individual people — through whether they participate in this development, or watch until it is too late.
The robots are already here. A million at Amazon alone. Hundreds of thousands in Asia’s hotels. Thousands in European warehouses. They are working right now. Every day.
The question is no longer whether they are coming. The question is: who will they work for?
