Elon Musk told The Economist that money will not matter in 2036, and in the same conversation he suggested the U.S. Treasury should simply issue people checks. The interview was with editor in chief Zanny Minton Beddoes at Tesla’s Gigafactory in Texas and ran in late July, though clips of it have been circulating heavily this week.
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His actual argument is short. Money is a way to get goods and services. If artificial intelligence and robots eventually produce more goods and services than any person could ever use, then the thing you needed money for is already sitting there. So the money stops meaning anything. His words were that you want money for goods and services, and once machines make more of both than humans can consume, currency loses its purpose.That is where the Treasury line comes in, and it is the part worth paying attention to. Elon Musk did not just predict abundance and stop. He described what he calls universal high income, said work is going to be optional, and said the government should just simply issue people checks. Universal high income is his own upgrade on universal basic income, the older idea of a regular government payment to every citizen with no strings attached. His version assumes the payments would be large rather than survival level, because the cost of producing everything would have collapsed.
He has been building toward this for a while. On the People by WTF podcast months earlier, he said money disappears as a concept once AI and robotics can meet all human needs, because wages currently function as a database for labor allocation, meaning a paycheck is really just a system for telling people where to go work. On the Moonshots with Peter Diamandis podcast he told listeners not to worry about squirreling money away for retirement in 10 or 20 years because it will not matter, which is the opposite of what every financial planner alive tells people.
His timeline for the technology is aggressive. He predicts AI will exceed the sum of human intelligence in about five years, and he expects deflation rather than inflation to become the defining economic problem of the era. Deflation is when prices fall over time, which sounds great until you realize it also means wages fall, debts get harder to pay off, and people stop spending because everything will be cheaper next month.
Here is the context that makes this a story and not just a soundbite. Elon Musk said all of this in the middle of the worst stretch his own portfolio has ever seen. After SpaceX went public on June 12 at $135 a share, valuing the company near $1.77 trillion, his paper wealth hit roughly $1.45 trillion, making him the world’s first trillionaire. Over the following month it fell to around $832 billion. That is a drop of about $488 billion, which works out to an average of roughly $16.3 billion a day, according to a Benzinga tally. So the man declaring money obsolete watched half a trillion dollars evaporate while saying it.
Not everyone in his world is buying it, and the pushback is the interesting part. Vinod Khosla, the venture capitalist behind Khosla Ventures, posted on X that he would modify the prediction with a qualifier: money will not matter in 2036 only if the politics permits this great abundance. He linked it to his own 2024 essay on whether AI produces a utopia or a dystopia. That qualifier is doing heavy lifting. Khosla is saying the technology that creates abundance and the political will to actually distribute it are two completely different problems, and solving the first one guarantees nothing about the second. Cheap production does not automatically become shared prosperity. Somebody still decides who gets what.
Economists have raised a more basic objection. Tyler Cowen and Noah Smith have both argued that making manufactured goods cheap does not eliminate scarcity, it relocates it. You can flood the world with robot made televisions and shoes and the number of houses in a desirable neighborhood stays exactly the same. Prime real estate, status goods and people’s limited time and attention are all still finite, and money is still the thing that rations them. Cheap stuff does not mean everybody gets a place to live where they want to live.
Then there is the track record question. Elon Musk has made a long series of predictions on timelines that did not hold, including that robots would outnumber human surgeons within a decade. His own Optimus humanoid robot, the machine that is supposed to deliver much of this abundance, has hit repeated production delays. The prediction market Polymarket currently gives Tesla only about a 15 percent chance of releasing Optimus by December 31.
Meanwhile the bill for the vision is due now. Tesla is running a $25 billion capital budget, and last quarter capital expenditures hit $5.79 billion, up roughly 142 percent from the year before, while operating expenses jumped 47 percent to $4.35 billion. Whatever happens in 2036, the spending is happening in 2026.
