---
title: "Token Leverage"
date: 2026-03-28
canonical: https://solmaz.io/x/2037798411173257244/
x_url: https://x.com/onusoz/status/2037798411173257244
license: CC BY 4.0 (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/)
---

There is an economic theory waiting to be uncovered here

Token Leverage (TL) = Token spend / Human labor spend

The higher Token Leverage a company has, the more automated and productive they are

If you have TL=1, you are spending as much money on AI as your human employees

The goal of a company should be to increase TL as much as possible, while keeping a positive profit margin. It will be the only way to compete

You don’t need to muddy the definition with wasted tokens vs useful tokens, because a company will always be incentivized to reduce token waste in a competitive environment. By that logic, monopolies will always waste more tokens, similar to how they waste other resources

Scaling TL higher to 2x, 10x, 100x will require a skilled workforce of engineers. It will be a very complex job similar to those working at the big labs. Burnout will be a defining feature of teams scaling TL

Most incumbents will fail to scale their TL over 1. Some will get decimated by new entrants with TL much bigger than 1

Curious how the average TL will end up in different sectors. Whether it will stabilize at a certain value like 5.7x, or will just keep growing…

*Quotes a post by @t_blom (https://x.com/t_blom/status/2037591830150426704); its text is omitted here because it is not covered by this site's license.*