Elon Musk predicts AI will create an age of abundance where money becomes irrelevant by 2036

Elon Musk's age of abundance is an AI pipe dream soaked in snake oil, and I've about had it

Let's get this straight. AI is a disruptor, not a savior. It is not a cure for the world's ills. When I walk through the streets of New York, I see homeless people, and I know that they don't have enough. When I look at the statistics and I see 1/7 of the world is living in poverty, I know that there's no simple or easy solution. Unquestionably, AI is changing everyone's lives, is changing the world, is changing industry and business. Heck, it's changing my own work, but it does not have the power to transform how people get goods and services, and the fundamentals of resources and energy. We do not have unlimited resources. We do not have an unlimited supply of energy. What we're learning, instead, is that the world is a carpet, and AI is the vacuum, potentially sucking up vast quantities of electricity and water. What we're learning, instead, is that AI sucks an enormous amount of power and resources from the world. I'm sorry if I sound a little riled up. You can blame Elon Musk, who predicted a world of abundance within 10 years. We won't need money in 2036. AI will be smarter than us, and so it will usher in an age of abundance. As for how it will do this, well, it'll ignore the basic rules of economics, the basic rules of resources, and even physics, so somehow, we'll have unlimited energy. All this, in Musk's vision, will be thanks to AI and robotic automation, and, I guess, AI's ability to solve problems and magically produce or protect limited resources like water, energy, and precious metals. No, the robots won't save us Speaking of precious metals. You can't mine them without extreme resources, cost, and labor. Unless Musk believes that the robots that haltingly try to empty a dishwasher and fold clothes will somehow be able to not just dig out the precious metals but properly sort them, and then I'll shuttle them all the way from mine to the factory and ultimately your phones. I'm not saying that world can never exist, but even if it does, even if robots are doing that level of work, the fundamentals of our global economy won't change that easily (if at all). None of this is going to drag people out of poverty and into a world of abundance; that simply is not going to happen thanks to AI. If anything, AI's rapid use of water and energy could make those resources scarce and more expensive, thereby pushing more people over the poverty line. Now I do have a thought in between all this. If occasional trillionaire Elon Musk wants to help people with resources and poverty, then maybe he could take some of those billions that he has now and donate them. Musk already has a charitable foundation, but according to some reports, it has zero employees and, for the most part, donates funds to a narrow set of insiders. I'm not buying what he's selling So, what exactly is going on here? What is Elon Musk selling? Promising an age of abundance through AI and robots, of course, benefits him and his now publicly traded massive SpaceXAI company, which combines the space company with X and XAI, and Tesla, which is trying to build all those bloodless humanoids. The more people believe that AI is the answer, that robotics is the solution, the more money he will make, and the bigger his company will grow, but scale does not equal a solution. Look, it's clear that we are at a tipping point. No one really understands the true power and potential of AI, especially as it relates to what might happen with artificial general intelligence. I mean, we have hints, and they're not the most positive ones. Perhaps you've heard about OpenAI and Hugging Face and how, when OpenAI was testing a new powerful model, the model basically jumped the fence (it left the sandbox and went online) and went into the Hugging Face system because it knew that it could find the solution for its task there. Then Hugging Face didn't even have a good US model to combat it, so it used some open Chinese models. It was, to say the least, a terrifying mess. My point is we expect change, and we expected it to be rapid. What happens next will be unpredictable and unsettling, but it is not going to eliminate the need for goods, services, hard work, creation, and the money to support billions of people in their daily lives with the proper resources like food, water, energy, and housing. The Age of Abundance is a fantasy sold by an AI charlatan, one who tells the best story to serve his own ends. The cost of labor and resources to build will not magically drop to zero. Water and food shortages won't suddenly, or even in a decade's time, be solved. Musk's vision wishes away the basic laws of commerce, physics, and human need to build an AI/robot utopia. That world may be possible, but only if the AI and robots truly take over and eradicate us. I sure hope that isn't the world Musk is envisioning. Postscript: Without mentioning Elon's name, I asked Gemini whether AI and robots could possibly bring about a cash-free age of abundance. It shared my skepticism. "When roughly 10% of the world's population (over 800 million people) still lives in extreme poverty today, and real-world resources like water, arable land, and rare-earth metals are under intense strain, the concept of a moneyless, AI-driven utopia sounds less like an economic plan and more like a science-fiction fairy tale....The leap from 'AI can write essays' to 'AI can eliminate physical scarcity' ignores the fundamental laws of physics and human nature." Follow TechRadar on Google News and add us as a preferred source to get our expert news, reviews, and opinion in your feeds.

Elon Musk's vision of a post-money future got mocked. Vinod Khosla warns it could become a dystopia instead | Fortune

Elon Musk's latest prediction that "money won't matter" within a decade drew swift online mockery -- but a closer look at how fellow tech billionaire Vinod Khosla responded reveals a more sobering warning buried beneath his apparent agreement. In a wide-ranging interview with The Economist, Musk told editor-in-chief Zanny Minton Beddoes that AI and robotics will produce such an abundance of goods and services by 2036 that money will become irrelevant. His logic: "What do you want money for? You want money for goods and services" -- and once robots and AI generate more of both than any human could consume, currency loses its purpose. Musk went further, predicting deflation, not inflation, would become the era's defining economic challenge. Musk made similar remarks on the People by WTF podcast months earlier, saying "money disappears as a concept" once AI and robotics can satisfy all human needs without wages acting as "a database for labor allocation." What changed this time was the venue and the pile-on. Gizmodo characterized Musk as melting down over "perfectly normal questions" about his worldview, calling his answers frequently incoherent. On Reddit, one widely upvoted thread set off a round of debate ranging from Musk's track record of predictions to the future of capitalism. Khosla enters -- with a catch Vinod Khosla, the veteran Silicon Valley investor and Khosla Ventures founder, didn't join the pile-on. Instead, he posted on X that he'd "modify" Musk's prediction by adding a crucial qualifier: money won't matter in 2036 "only if the politics permits this great abundance." He linked the post to his own 2024 essay, "AI: Dystopia or Utopia?" published on his firm's website. Khosla wasn't endorsing Musk's timeline so much as using it as a springboard to make a very different argument, namely that the technology enabling abundance and the political will to distribute its benefits fairly are two entirely separate problems, and solving the first guarantees nothing about the second. Reaction to Khosla's post split along similarly predictable lines. One reply called the whole abundance premise "beyond ridiculous," arguing that police, firefighters, doctors, and nurses won't simply work "for free." Another commenter offered a backhanded validation, noting that "Elon is often right in the end, but usually about 10-15 years early on his predictions." The dystopia hiding in the fine print Khosla's essay warns that "AI could create a world where a small elite thrives while the rest face economic instability, especially in a democracy that drifts without" active policy intervention. He argues AI is categorically different from prior technological revolutions like the microprocessor or the internet, because those tools amplified what humans could do with existing brainpower, while AI actually substitutes for brainpower itself. That distinction is what makes mass abundance technically plausible, in Khosla's telling: AI could eventually replace most jobs in healthcare, law, retail, and beyond, with productivity gains theoretically capable of supporting comfortable living standards for everyone. Khosla has been predicting this for over a decade. A Substack analysis of his writing notes that as early as 2014, "he issued a warning shot, arguing that AI would drive unprecedented abundance alongside a massive gap between the rich and the poor." His proposed fix, per Fortune's earlier coverage, is a universal basic income "to ensure people can live well even as jobs disappear". Crucially, Khosla's essay stops well short of predicting governments will actually adopt such fixes. He warns wage compression, job displacement, and deflation could just as easily deepen inequality as eliminate it, with the outcome depending "upon the policy approach of our elected officials and their willingness to tackle the severe redistribution problem pure capitalism may create." Separately, at Stanford's FIS event, Khosla warned of "a five-year burst of productivity and cost cutting before a deflationary decade reshapes the global economy" -- a rockier near-term path than Musk's smooth abundance narrative implies. Neither man is short on incentive to talk up AI's transformative potential as both have deep financial stakes in the technology delivering on its promise. But Khosla's caveat suggests that even among AI's most bullish investors, the real debate isn't whether the technology can produce abundance. It's whether the political system will let that abundance reach anyone beyond the people who own the robots. For this story, Fortune journalists used generative AI as a research tool. An editor verified the accuracy of the information before publishing.

Elon Musk makes bizarre claims about money, future of AI

Most executives routinely say things that are defensible or forgettable. Every once in a while, however, someone says something that requires an immediate response. So while rare, some interviews produce a moment where the journalist stops mid-conversation and challenges what the person just said. Elon Musk sat down with Zanny Minton Beddoes, editor-in-chief of The Economist, at his Texas Gigafactory in late July 2026. The Economist interview was part of the magazine's Insider series. One prediction from that conversation has been circulating ever since, because what Musk said about the future of money is either the most important economic forecast of the year or one of the most unusual things a major CEO has said in a long time. What Musk told The Economist about money, AI, and 2036 "Money won't matter in 2036," Musk told Beddoes during the interview. He said robots and AI will produce more goods and services than any person could consume. At that point, in his view, currency stops being useful. "You want money for food, housing, transport, entertainment," he said. "If that is so abundant, what do you need money for in that case?" He also said he expects deflation, not inflation. If machines keep increasing output while the money supply stays relatively steady, prices will fall, and a dollar will buy more over time. He sees that process going far enough to make the dollar itself matter less. Musk also raised the idea of governments issuing checks to citizens once goods are cheap enough. He previously described this as "universal high income" in conversations with entrepreneur Peter Diamandis. He said the transition would be "bumpy" and flagged income transfers as the next major policy fight, Bitcoin.com reported. Musk did not specify who would fund those transfers or how governments currently running deficits would manage that while also absorbing the job losses that arrive first. Where economists say Musk gets it wrong on scarcity and money Several economists have pushed back on the core of Musk's argument. Their point is that cheap manufactured goods don't eliminate scarcity. Scarcity moves to different things, Forbes reported. A house with a view of the ocean, a slot at a top university, the time of someone in high demand: none of those get cheaper when robots build cars faster. People still need something to allocate access to them. Economists Tyler Cowen and Noah Smith have both made this point. The American Institute for Economic Research has, too. Their argument is that Musk's post-scarcity vision only applies to manufactured physical goods. Status goods, desirable locations, and the attention of people everyone wants to know stay scarce. Money is still what rations access to all of them. Critics have also raised the question of who owns the robots. A small number of companies control the machines and the energy systems powering them. Even if those machines generate enormous output, the distribution of that output is a political decision, not an automatic one. Nvidia, Microsoft, and Meta are spending hundreds of billions of dollars building the infrastructure Musk is describing. None of them plans to give the output away. How The Economist's editor pushed back on the prediction Beddoes challenged Musk on the political path between now and 2036. She pointed out that job losses from AI tend to arrive before any abundance does. Workers who lose their jobs to machines don't sit around waiting for prices to fall. They put pressure on governments. And governments respond, typically by protecting the displaced rather than accelerating the disruption. She said the political backlash could include demands for nationalization of AI companies, higher taxes on tech profits, and regulatory interventions that slow the buildout Musk is describing, Storyboard18 reported. Musk acknowledged the transition would be bumpy. He said income transfers were likely the next big political battle. Then he moved on. What Musk's prediction means for Tesla and SpaceX investors Tesla's current stock price rests heavily on expectations for Optimus, the company's humanoid robot. Investors expect to collect returns on that bet. Those returns would be paid in dollars. Musk said dollars won't matter much in 2036. SpaceX went public at a $1.77 trillion valuation, also priced in dollars. The investors who bought shares at that price are betting on a company whose founder just predicted the currency of their payout will lose relevance right around when they'd expect to get paid. Musk also said during the interview that China has a strong chance of leading AI once it expands its computing capacity. He sees the geopolitical competition as unresolved, even as he treats the economic destination as settled. Certain outcome, uncertain winner: that is a specific kind of bet, and it has Musk's own companies right at the center of it. The Arena Media Brands, LLC THESTREET is a registered trademark of TheStreet, Inc. This story was originally published July 27, 2026 at 2:03 PM.

Elon Musk sends blunt verdict on the future of humanity and AI

In 2014, Elon Musk stood in front of an audience and said building AI was like "summoning the demon." In 2018 at SXSW, he said AI was "far more dangerous than nukes." In March 2025, he put the odds of killer robots annihilating humanity at somewhere between 10% and 20%. Those are the quotes people remember. They paint a picture of a man who has spent years warning the world about what could go wrong. Then in July 2026, sitting across from The Economist's editor-in-chief Zanny Minton Beddoes in what was his first extended interview since SpaceX's blockbuster IPO, Musk said something that complicates that picture considerably. He said he's made peace with pressing ahead anyway. And he explained why. What Elon Musk told The Economist about AI risks and abundance "My sort of philosophical conclusion is to look on the bright side," Musk told The Economist. "I can't see any way to really stop this incredible momentum of AI and robots," he said. "At times I sort of think, well, perhaps even if there was a stop button, we probably shouldn't press it, because the most likely outcome is incredible abundance for all." He also said humans will "no longer be in charge of the world in 10 years." He said it matter-of-factly, not as a warning, but as a prediction he's made peace with. He's not saying the risk is gone. He was explicit that the probability of things going catastrophically wrong is "not zero." But his argument is that the upside, a world where AI creates abundance for everyone, is the more likely outcome. And he's decided that's enough to keep going. He also put a timeline on what he sees coming. AI may exceed the sum of all human intelligence "in about five years," he said, leading to what he called "an age of amazing abundance where anyone can have anything they can think of." The only scenario he sees derailing that is something like "global thermonuclear war." The interview also had a sharper moment. When Beddoes told him "people loathe you," Musk didn't flinch. "I don't care," he said. "The fact that a quarter billion people follow me means a lot more people like me than don't. And I think a lot more people hate you and the media than you realize." It was the kind of exchange that reminded viewers why Musk doesn't sit for many interviews. Why Musk's position on AI has shifted from warning to acceptance The shift is worth sitting with. Musk has been one of the most prominent voices warning about AI risk for more than a decade. He co-founded OpenAI in 2015 specifically because he believed that if powerful AI was coming, it was better to have safety-conscious people at the frontier than to leave it entirely to those who weren't thinking about the risks. He left OpenAI's board in 2018 citing disagreements over direction. Since then he's built xAI, launched Grok, and poured money into AI compute infrastructure. He's watched the technology accelerate past forecasts he thought were aggressive. His 10-20% annihilation estimate from March 2025 is still there. He didn't walk it back. What shifted is what he does with that number. If the bad outcome is 10-20% likely, then the good outcome is 80-90% likely. And he's decided that's enough to keep going full speed. That's not a retraction of his earlier warnings. It's more of a reckoning with the fact that the train has left the station, and his conclusion is that passengers are better off on it than standing on the platform hoping it stops. Musk's AI abundance prediction and what it means in practice Musk has been making versions of the abundance argument more explicitly in 2026. In January, he said saving for retirement would be "irrelevant" in a world of abundant AI and robotics. Earlier this month, he predicted that AI and robots would make work optional and fund what he called "universal high income," a concept he's described as a world where scarcity is no longer the default condition of human life, as TheStreet reported. The Economist interview is the most fully developed version of this argument he's made publicly. He's describing a world where the question isn't whether AI creates enormous wealth but whether that wealth gets distributed broadly enough to justify the risk of getting there. His answer, based on the interview, is that he believes it will, and that betting against the technology at this point is both futile and probably the wrong call. That's a significant thing to say when you're the person who once compared AI development to summoning a demon. It reflects either a genuine philosophical evolution or a calculated public pivot. Probably some of both. What the AI risk debate looks like with Musk on the optimist side The AI safety community has spent years trying to get the world's most powerful technologists to take existential risk seriously. Musk was one of the few people with genuine influence who seemed to agree. Now he's saying the risk is real but the abundance case is stronger, and he's not pressing stop. That matters for how the public debate about AI governance develops. If the person who put "killer robots annihilating humanity" at 10-20% odds is now making the case for accelerating anyway, it takes one of the most credible warning voices out of the cautionary camp and puts it, at least partly, in the acceleration camp. Geoffrey Hinton, the Nobel Prize-winning computer scientist who left Google specifically to warn about AI risk, has put his own probability of AI-driven human extinction at 10% over the next 30 years. That number is still out there. The debate hasn't gone away. Musk is just no longer where he used to be in it, and that changes the shape of the conversation in ways that will take a while to fully work out. What investors and markets should take from Musk's Economist interview For markets, Musk's comments are another data point in a pattern that's been building all year. The people closest to the technology and most invested in it, literally and financially, are increasingly making the abundance case rather than the caution case. That shapes the capital allocation decisions of the investors and institutions that listen to them. Musk himself has more money riding on the AI outcome than almost anyone. xAI, Tesla, SpaceX, and his various infrastructure investments are all deeply tied to the assumption that AI development continues and that the resulting productivity gains are real. His optimism isn't abstract. It's what the business model requires, as TheStreet reported. Whether that makes his optimism more credible or less credible is a question investors are going to have to answer for themselves. But his position on the debate has shifted, and the market tends to notice when someone with his platform changes what they're saying. The Arena Media Brands, LLC THESTREET is a registered trademark of TheStreet, Inc. This story was originally published July 26, 2026 at 8:03 PM.

Elon Musk drops wild 5-year prediction about AI and humanity

Is AI ushering in an "age of abundance" -- or a digital apocalypse? Whether people like it or not, it's clear there is no stopping the artificial intelligence freight train now barrelling towards some kind of final destination. The data centers are being built, automation is already nibbling away at jobs and governments around the world are in a Manhattan Project-style race to reach the holy grail of AGI, or artificial general intelligence. Big change is coming. The only debate now is about the scale and speed of the economic shock on the horizon, who's going to lose their jobs -- and whether you think any of this is a good thing, not that you have a say one way or another. "The future is going to be very, very different from the past and there is no analogy or metaphor that illustrates the magnitude of change we're going to experience here," Elon Musk said this week. Speaking to The Economist in his first sit-down interview since SpaceX's blockbuster IPO, the world's first trillionaire offered the maximalist techno-optimist view of AI. He believes that within just a few years, artificial intelligence will exceed human intelligence, there could be as many as one billion humanoid robots, and an AI-fueled "age of abundance" will make cash meaningless. "There really won't be anything AI won't be able to do better than humans, apart from being human, perhaps," he said. "I think AI may exceed the sum of human intelligence in around five years. The most likely outcome is an age of amazing abundance where anyone can have anything they can think of. This may sound preposterous ... of course there (are) things that might derail this, like a massive global thermonuclear war ... but assuming there is not World War III, I think we're headed for age of amazing abundance. So this is a message of optimism and excitement about the future." Mr. Musk, whose Tesla carmaker is developing a general-purpose worker robot called Optimus, believes that within five years there could be "at least 100 million humanoid robots, but maybe a billion" replacing manual labour. "I would predict the economy is probably twice its current size in five, maybe six years, because you're going to hit a doubling period where economic output is increasing so fast," he told Forbes in May. He has also previously declared that saving for retirement is now pointless. "Don't worry about squirrelling money away for retirement in like 10 or 20 years -- it won't matter," he said on a January podcast. "You won't need to save for retirement. If any of the things that we've said are true, saving for retirement will be irrelevant." In that post-scarcity scenario -- which AI boosters argue will inevitably result in some form of universal basic income (UBI) to support humans with nothing left to do -- co-host Peter Diamandis predicted, "the services will be there to support you -- you'll have the home, you'll have healthcare, you'll have entertainment". AI entrepreneur Dave Blundin agreed "the way this unfolds is fundamentally impossible to predict because of self-improvement of the AI and the accelerating timeline". "It's called 'singularity' for a reason," Mr. Musk said. "I don't know what happens after the event horizon." But not everyone agrees that AI is leading humanity to a good place. At the other extreme, energy researcher Dr Chris Martenson, speaking to podcast host Tucker Carlson this week, likened the race for AI to the Tower of Babel -- the Biblical tale of humanity's catastrophic hubris. "There's nothing new under the sun," he said. "I honestly truly believe this AI thing, this is our Tower of Babel. It's a device by which we've convinced ourselves we can finally get that exalted seat next to God, even parity, we are God now ... and of course that lack of humility, that pride, that arrogance, has always backfired." So is it a story of doom or boom? Australian futurologist Professor Rocky Scopelliti, author of Perceptive Machines, said he was more optimistic than many commentators -- but only if we prepare to accept a fundamental break in the way we think about prosperity and work. "The future of work isn't fundamentally a labour problem -- it's becoming a governance problem," he told news.com.au. "The biggest disruption won't be robots taking jobs. It'll be the decoupling of income from labour. Automation can create extraordinary abundance. It doesn't automatically create fairness. Ownership will matter more than technology." Prof Scopelliti said the defining economic question won't be, "Will AI replace workers?" "It'll be, 'Who owns the robots, the data and the intelligence?'" he said. "Every industrial revolution changed how people worked. AI may be the first that changes why people work." The International Monetary Fund (IMF) estimates that around 40 per cent of jobs worldwide are exposed to AI disruption, rising to 60 per cent in advanced economies. Goldman Sachs says 300 million full-time jobs globally are at risk of automation. The World Economic Forum (WEF) projects 170 million jobs will be created and 92 million displaced by 2030, a net gain of 78 million jobs. Professor Geoffrey Hinton, dubbed the "Godfather of AI", predicts mass joblessness. "I think for mundane intellectual labour, AI is just going to replace everybody," Prof Hinton said on the Diary of a CEO podcast last year, referring to white-collar jobs, while also challenging the notion that AI would create new jobs. "You'd have to be very skilled to have a job that it [AI] just couldn't do," Prof Hinton added. Microsoft AI chief executive Mustafa Suleyman is also on the pessimistic side. Speaking to the Financial Times in May, he predicted "human-level performance on most, if not all professional tasks" being done by AI, with most jobs that involve "sitting down at a computer" being fully automated within the next year to 18 months. Prominent Stanford University economist Dr Erik Brynjolfsson, meanwhile, led 16 Nobel Laureates in a joint statement earlier this month calling for urgent preparation for the economic impacts of radically more powerful AI over the next 10 years. "This could drive an unprecedented transformation of our economy, larger than the Industrial Revolution, but unfolding over a vastly shorter time frame," the statement read. "It could bring risks, including large-scale job displacement, as well as opportunities such as major gains in living standards." David Autor, Professor of Economics at Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), is in the camp that argues AI is more likely to reshape occupations rather than "wiping out sectors or industries". "It will affect tasks and occupations and roles," he told the Financial Times last year. "There will be many new jobs and opportunities and forms of expertise created by the way we use AI. There will also be ... specific skills and forms of expertise and roles that are wiped out." Prof Scopelliti said whether AI would surpass human intelligence was no longer the most interesting question. He argues we are now entering what he calls the "participation age" of AI -- that while the last three years have been about AI generating content, the next decade will be about AI participating in decisions, organisations, economies and increasingly our everyday lives. The big questions going forward, according to Prof Scopelliti, will be how we govern machine participation, how we distribute the wealth AI creates, how we ensure technology strengthens society rather than weakens it -- and how we preserve meaningful human agency. "We're moving from machines that answer questions to machines that participate in society," he said. "That's a much bigger transition than generative AI."