12/18/2025
Elon Musk believes money itself may eventually become obsolete as artificial intelligence and robotics reshape how society functions. Speaking on a recent podcast, Musk argued that rapid technological progress could remove the need for most human labor altogether.
In his view, work will become optional within the next two decades. Machines will produce so much value and output that people will no longer need jobs to survive. Humans could still choose to work, but necessity would no longer drive it.
That shift changes how income works. Musk has long dismissed universal basic income as incomplete and instead points to what he calls universal high income. If productivity reaches extreme levels, scarcity fades and debates about wages lose meaning.
Musk described a future where goods and services are abundant enough that access becomes nearly universal. When production is no longer constrained by human effort, the traditional role of money starts to erode. Money today acts as a system to allocate labor, but that system breaks down if labor is no longer required.
Under those conditions, Musk argues that money stops being useful. If AI and robotics can meet all human needs, money no longer serves a clear purpose and gradually fades away as a concept. Value still exists, but it is no longer measured or exchanged the same way.
Musk acknowledged that such a future is hard to predict and deeply uncertain. He referenced the idea of a technological tipping point where outcomes become difficult to model, though not necessarily negative.
The core of his argument is abundance. As technology scales without human input, society moves away from labor based economics and toward systems built entirely around automation.
In that world, the biggest shifts are not about jobs or paychecks, but about who builds the technologies that make scarcity irrelevant.