Elon Musk, Richest Man On Earth, Predicts Money Will Disappear 'As A Concept' When AI And Robotics 'Satisfy All Human Needs'
Jeannine Mancini
Tue, December 16, 2025 at 12:31 PM EST
4 min read
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Money is supposed to be the reward for effort. Elon Musk thinks it eventually becomes unnecessary paperwork.
While talking with Indian entrepreneur and investor Nikhil Kamath on the "People by WTF" podcast last month, the Tesla and SpaceX CEO and richest man in the world returned to a theme he's raised before. It's one he treats less like a theory and more like an inevitability. As artificial intelligence and robotics accelerate, Musk believes society moves past jobs, past income debates, and straight into something stranger.
Work, he says, stops being required.
"My prediction is, in less than 20 years, working will be optional," Musk said. He didn't soften it. "Working at all will be optional."
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This was not framed as a utopia pitch or a lifestyle trend. Musk tied it directly to productivity. As machines handle more of the output, humans are no longer needed to sustain the system. People can still work if they choose to, but necessity disappears.
"It'll be optional, in that way, is my prediction," he said.
That idea naturally leads to income, where Musk has long argued that universal basic income would fall short. On Kamath's podcast, he reiterated the alternative he has discussed before.
"Yeah. I think it will be Universal High Income," Musk said.
The reasoning is simple in his telling. When productivity reaches a certain level, scarcity fades. At that point, debates about wages and jobs stop making sense, because production is no longer the bottleneck.
Musk described a future where AI and robotics advance far enough that material constraints loosen dramatically. "Working will be optional, and people will have any goods and services that they want," he said. Then he distilled it to a single line. "If you can think of it, you can have it."
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That framing sets up the real punchline. If people can have what they want without trading labor, money loses its purpose.
"I think, long term… I think money disappears as a concept, honestly," Musk said.
He explained that money functions today as an organizing system. "In a future where anyone can have anything, I think you no longer need money as a database for labour allocation," he said.
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The condition is explicit. "If AI and robotics are big enough to satisfy all human needs, then money is no longer… Its relevance declines dramatically," Musk said. "I'm not sure we will have it."
Musk acknowledged that this path leads into uncertainty. He referenced the idea of the technological singularity, where outcomes become difficult to predict. "It doesn't mean that something bad happens," he said. "It just means you don't know what happens."
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Musk has never fit the billionaire mold, sleeping on factory floors, showering at the YMCA, and keeping a bare-bones setup even while running companies worth hundreds of billions. When someone who has treated money as a tool rather than a lifestyle talks about a future where it fades away, it lands less like speculation and more like a glimpse of how he already operates.
For people watching the startup world, that framing matters. Musk is not arguing that value disappears. He is arguing that value migrates — away from labor and toward systems that remove the need for it. In that future, the biggest opportunities are not built around jobs, salaries, or even income, but around technologies that scale without humans in the loop.
The endgame, as he sees it, is abundance — and the race is about who builds it first.
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