An entertainment lawyer recently appeared on a podcast and declared that one of her most significant business ventures right now is placing creators’ YouTube channels into their children’s trusts, because they’re now more valuable than real estate.
This single equation captures the state of the world in 2025:
Subscribers > seaside villas.
This is not as outlandish as it might seem at first blush. Attention has always served as a form of influence, but it has never had as high a value as it does today. It is now more important than labor, money, or power, and can be transformed and traded into all of those currencies. It is both a store of value and a form of leverage.
The ability to attract, retain, and direct other people’s attention is becoming the prime economic asset of our era.
In other words, Attention is Capital today.
The Big Idea: Attention behaves like capital now, not just metaphorically but functionally.
What is Capital?
In economics, capital is any non-consumable resource used to produce goods or services.
This includes:
- Money used to invest
- Tools, machines, and factories
- Technology and intellectual property
- Human capital, such as skills and knowledge that produce value
Capital is not spent; it’s invested to generate future value (via returns, leverage, or capability). In other words, capital is not just wealth: It’s wealth that is used to create more wealth.
Attention as Capital
I define “Attention Capital” as the accumulated capacity to capture, hold, or direct the attention of others in ways that can be converted into other forms of capital.
• Capture = draw attention to you or your ideas (through a platform)
• Hold = sustain engagement over time (serially or continuously)
• Direct = steer that attention toward a desired action or belief (subscribers, votes, product sales, and investment)
Crucially, like any true form of capital, Attention Capital has the following properties:
1. Scarcity: There’s a limited pool of high-quality attention in the market. MIT Researcher Tim Hwang made this financial comparison explicit in his provocative 2020 book, “Subprime Attention Crisis,” where he described how Big Tech financialized attention and warned of a looming crash in digital advertising.
2. Convertibility: As I argued in my piece on the physics of Attention (below), an audience can be exchanged for money, status, influence, or access.
3. Compounding value: It grows with strategic reinvestment. Professional credibility, for example, earns attention at a discount: future attention becomes easier and cheaper to acquire.
4. Leverage: It amplifies returns on other forms of capital, such as reputation, skill, and network.
5. Decay: It depreciates if not maintained; the attention you attract is perishable and ephemeral. This is true on multiple levels; it’s easier to attract attention, for example, than to hold it.
Today, attention behaves like capital, not just metaphorically but functionally.
Why This Matters Now
- AI is multiplying information abundance. This makes attention ever scarcer and the competition for it ever fiercer. Take it from one of the industry insiders: Emad Mostaque, founder of Stability AI, recently stated that “the battle for human attention is the next battle for revenue, and the AI companies are getting their GPUs ready for it.” All the frontier models are adding features to gain “lock-in”—another way of monopolizing your attention.
- Careers and companies are already demonstrating elements of the Creator Economy. Every organizational leader has to become a micro-media company to draw the oxygen of attention to their product or service.
- The fulcrum of value is shifting from product quality to platform quality. Attention is the new capital amplifier. As I like to say,
Today “Meme Work” (promoting your business) is just as important as “Deep Work” (creating a high-quality offering).
- Recognizing that attention is professional capital bridges the gap between the macro idea that we’re in an attention economy and the development of a personal playbook for thriving within it.
How To Become an Attention Capitalist
This is the new reality we’re all facing, whether we like it or not: the ability to attract, retain, and direct other people’s attention is the most valuable asset in the world now.
Whether you are a solopreneur or a CEO, you must have an Attention Capital strategy today.
What does that mean, exactly? You have to be able to answer the following questions, for starters:
1️⃣ How are you going to accumulate your Attention Capital?
VC firm Andreeessen Horowitz understands that attention is the ultimate form of leverage today. That’s why in 2025, they have more podcast shows (9) than new funds spinning up (3). That signals where they believe alpha truly originates.
Similarly, executives who can attract and direct attention command the new marketplace of influence. The CEO of Friend, an AI wearable, intentionally placed provocative billboards in New York City subway stations to boost his product’s name recognition and was able to break through the noise in a commoditized category.
It’s no longer enough to build a brilliant service or find product-market fit. You also have to consistently attract people’s attention for your idea or business to have the impact you desire.
Leaders today must leverage modern media tools, such as short-form vertical video, podcasts, and email newsletters, to establish a consistent presence and, ideally, a platform to promote their organizations.
Executive Question: How are you going to attract the attention of your clients or investors?
Today, you need a strategy for virality as much as for utility.
2️⃣ What will you invest your Attention Capital in?
Attention Capital is social wealth that creates more wealth. For the first time in history, attention can be exchanged frictionlessly for money, power, status, or influence. It has become the most fungible capital of the modern age—the ultimate form of liquidity:
- Kansas City Chiefs Tight End Travis Kelce converted his fiancée Taylor Swift’s star power into a top-charting podcast (the “New Heights” show with his brother) and even a broader media footprint for his sister-in-law’s podcast, Kylie Kelce’s “Not Gonna Lie.”
- When Hailey Rhode Baldwin became Hailey Bieber in 2018, she transformed from a mere model into a social media influencer and parlayed that fame into selling her beauty brand, Rhode, to e.l.f. Cosmetics for a billion dollars earlier this year —proof that attention can be directly converted into enterprise value.
- Gavin Newsom is converting political position into attention—through his own podcast and appearances on others’ shows—so he can trade that for more political power: the US presidency in 2028, he hopes.
- AI company Cluely raised $15 million in venture capital (led by Andreessen Horowitz, unsurprisingly!), selling a product that has been thoroughly commoditized and featurized now (an AI meeting assistant). Why did VCs invest? Because their real asset was attracting buzz, as they did with their viral “Cheat on Everything” marketing campaign. Attention is now a funding strategy.
- Meme coins in crypto convert notoriety into money through speculation, as my favorite maverick economist, Kyla Scanlon, has convincingly argued on Substack. That’s how Dogecoin, the OG meme coin, launched in 2013 as a joke parodying the crypto market, yet it is valued at $26 billion as of Nov 12, 2025.
Executive Question: Once you’ve built some Attention Capital, how will you deploy it — to gain market share, investment, or power?
3️⃣ What is the ROI on your Attention Capital?
Elon Musk spent $40 billion to acquire a platform (Twitter) that many valued at $10 billion — yet leveraged it to influence elections, secure contracts, and expand his empire. His ROI on attention was extraordinary.
By contrast, Andrew Cuomo’s backers spent $55 million on his 2025 New York City mayoral campaign and lost badly. That’s an attention investment with a negative return.
Not all attention is created equal, in other words. Elon spent money purchasing a platform while Cuomo followed the old pol’s playbook and bought paid advertising on commercial airtime.
There are lessons here, and they don’t just apply to politics:
Audiences beat ads.
Platforms beat placements.
Virality beats production value.
Executive Question: Are you investing in the highest-leverage form of attention available to you?
Not every CEO needs to be on Instagram Reels, but writing a book or appearing on CNBC is an attention play from the last century, not this one.
What This Means for You
The emergence of Attention as the supreme form of capital has redefined leadership.
We’ve moved from an era of attention capture to an era of attention conversion. The winners will be those who know how to invest attention, not just attract it.
Every organization now needs an Attention Strategy.
We’re all in the attention business now.