A note from Peter Diamandis
This is for the obsessed—for those who have no choice but to build, create, and act. The ones who believe that ‘leaving the Earth better than you found it’ isn’t a suggestion, but a dare.
This is for those who build while others debate. The engineers shipping carbon capture tech while politicians argue about carbon credits. The founders using AI to cure diseases while lawyers argue clinical trial protocols. The entrepreneurs deploying solar microgrids while others debate permitting reform.
The world has real problems. Climate change is real. Inequality is real. But so is human ingenuity, exponential technology, and the fact that pessimism has never built a single useful thing. Over the past two centuries, extreme poverty is down 90%. Life expectancy has doubled. Fusion is here and we’re building spaceships for Mars. The doomers act like this is all some cosmic accident. No—this is what happens when builders actually build.
Here’s something most people miss: the future gets imagined before it gets built. Roddenberry envisioned the communicator on Star Trek and a generation of engineers built the smartphone. Clarke imagined geostationary satellites and the world got GPS. Verne dreamed of submarines decades before they existed. Fiction has always been civilization’s first draft of the future—a blueprint disguised as entertainment.
But somewhere along the way, we stopped imagining bright futures. Hollywood got addicted to dystopia—rogue AIs, killer robots, civilizational collapse—as if the only story worth telling about technology is one that ends in ruin. That’s not just creatively bankrupt. It’s dangerous. The stories we tell shape the futures we build.
So we created the Future Vision XPRIZE—a $2.5 million global film competition, in partnership with Google, Range Media Partners, XPRIZE, and the Roddenberry family, challenging creators anywhere on Earth to produce 3-minute trailers depicting an optimistic, technology-forward vision of humanity’s future. The grand prize winner gets $2 million in production funding to turn their trailer into a real film. This is the largest film competition in history, and its mandate is simple: inspire the next Star Trek.
Not naive utopianism. Earned hope. Stories can start in the dark—they just can’t stay there.
But imagining the future isn’t enough. Someone has to build it. Right now, millions of talented developers are using AI tools to build trivial apps—silly games, products nobody needs. The barrier to real impact has collapsed, and the only question is whether we’ll direct that energy toward things that matter. The Moonshot Hackathon is our answer—a $1.5 million global competition challenging AI-powered builders to solve real problems for real communities over a 5-month sprint. Not a 48-hour prototype that gets forgotten on Monday. Working solutions, real users, measurable impact.
These are two sides of the same conviction: optimism isn’t naive—it’s executable. One competition asks creators to imagine the future we should be building. The other challenges builders to prove it’s possible right now. Dreamers and doers. Storytellers and engineers. Filmmakers and hackers. Together, they form something entirely new.
Both culminate on September 25th, 2026 at the Moonshot Gathering in Los Angeles—a single day we’re calling “The Oscars for Moonshot Builders.” Not another tech conference. A live, high-stakes event where filmmakers screen their visions of tomorrow and builders pitch the solutions they’ve proven over the preceding months. Real money. Real judges. Real consequences.
We believe a 3-minute film can do more to change civilization’s trajectory than a thousand policy papers. We believe a solo developer with the right tools and the right problem can outbuild a hundred-person team in a fraction of the time. We believe that when you put $4 million in prizes behind optimism and execution—not credentials, not connections, not geography—the builders come from everywhere.
We’re building the future, and we’re going to have an unreasonable amount of fun doing it. Whether you imagine the future or build it—or both—there is a place for you here.
If you’re reading this thinking these people sound like my kind of crazy, congratulations—you’ve found your tribe.
Come build the future with us.
Peter Diamandis