by Peter Diamandis: On January 7th at 11:30am, I looked out my home-office window to see black plumes of smoke billowing over a nearby hill.
My first thought: What the hell is going on?
That was the beginning of a 5-week forced evacuation from our Santa Monica home, on the boarder of Pacific Palisades.
I’m writing this from a friend’s home, where we’ve taken refuge. We’re among the lucky ones – our house is still standing. But more than 18,000 homes have been destroyed, and 200,000 Angelenos have been displaced. The devastation is estimated between $100 billion to $200 billion, and honestly, I think that’s a low-ball estimate.
But here’s what really pisses me off: This was preventable. ALL of it.
My Chief AI officer, Steve Brown, and another close friend Scott, both lost their homes for the second time. The second time!
This is happening because we’re stuck with systems and institutions that are centuries old and business models that are sub-linear and fundamentally broken.
Take the insurance industry, it’s perverse and inappropriately incentivized.
Fire insurance pays you after your house burns down. Life insurance pays your next of kin after you’re dead. Health insurance pays you after you’re sick.
What kind of backwards thinking is this?
What if instead:
Health insurance keeps you healthy. Life insurance
prevents you from dying. And, Fire insurance prevents your home from burning down!
This is how a Moonshot entrepreneur thinks, and this is what is now possible as AI, drones, sensors, and networks allow us to do what was previously thought impossible.
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The reality of our insurance industry is even more disturbing.
Major insurers are abandoning us: State Farm dropped 1,600 policies in July 2024, followed by Allstate and Farmers Insurance pulling out of the LA market entirely. In Pacific Palisades, where the average home is worth $5 million and the annual fire risk is around 5%, homeowners are facing potential insurance premiums of $250,000 per year.
This is insane.
And it’s just the beginning – the canary in the coal mine. LA has seen devastating wildfires in five of the past ten years: 2025, 2023, 2020, 2018, and 2017.
But here’s where I see hope: What if insurance actually prevented your house from burning down in the first place?
Imagine buying fire insurance, and instead of just promising to rebuild after a disaster, your insurer installs cutting-edge technology to protect your property!
We already have the beginnings of this technology. Through our $11 million XPRIZE Wildfire competition, we have over 100 teams working on systems that can monitor 1,000 km² of land, identify fires at ignition, and autonomously extinguish them within 10 minutes.
We’re talking about aerial drones, sound cannons, high-lift UAVs, and swarm technologies that can respond instantly to fire threats. Palmer Luckey, one of our competition partners, put it perfectly: “At the end of this competition, we are going to make wildfires a thing of the past.”
This isn’t just wishful thinking – it’s a multi-trillion-dollar opportunity. The U.S. insurance market alone represents 7.3% of GDP, with annual premiums totaling $2 trillion:
- Health Insurance: $1.2 trillion
- Property & Casualty Insurance: $700 billion
- Life Insurance: $150-160 billion
To the entrepreneurs reading this blog: The world’s biggest problems are the world’s biggest business opportunities. We need you to help reinvent this centuries-old industry. We need you to build new business models that leverage exponential technologies to prevent disasters, not just pay for them after the fact.
The first few weeks of January were a health disaster: wearing an N95 mask, grateful for my Tesla’s HEPA filter mode, installing HEPA filters in everyone’s bedrooms, and working to avoid breathing in poisonous chemicals that could take years off our healthspan.
This isn’t the future I want for my family or anyone else’s.
The solution isn’t just about better old-style insurance. It’s about reinventing insurance to make it proactive, personalized, and predictive – using technology to solve problems before they become catastrophes.
That’s the insurance industry we need, and that’s the future I’m committed to building.
Let’s make wildfires a thing of the past.
With urgency and optimism,
Peter
P.S. If you’re interested in joining the fight against wildfires or learning more about the XPRIZE Wildfire competition, visit www.xprize.org/prizes/wildfire
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