Support CleanTechnica's work through a Substack subscription, on Patreon, or on Stripe. Help us produce all of the high-quality, original content we publish week after week despite the challenges of content-scraping AI, antisocial media, inflation, and other hurdles.
I truly cannot comprehend how someone with so much money and ability to hire people to help him understand things can be so completely detached from reality. Or perhaps that’s what a trillion dollars does to a person. In actuality, though, there is no excuse for Elon Musk — his completely fantastical ideas about the world cannot be excused away or brushed aside. He continues to say crazy things while proving the opposite with his own actions.
I’ve written a bit about the topic of this article in the past, but in a recent interview, Musk reiterated some beliefs and expounded on them, and I do feel like I have to return to them as well since 1) they are so absurd, 2) they relate to what he has been doing with the #2 EV company in the world (previously #1, by the way). Here is the segment of his recent interview with The Economist editor-in-chief Zanny Minto Beddoes that I’m referring to:
Some key lines:
- “Money won’t matter in 2036.”
- Asked about whether there needs to be much more redistribution from people like him to people losing their jobs, and whether he needed to pay more tax, he said: “I think that the Treasury should simply issue people checks.”
- Asked about how that wouldn’t lead to inflation, Musk said: “These things were relevant in the past. They will not be relevant in the future.” He also went on to say that robots would be providing so many goods and services that these things would essentially be free and thus money wouldn’t matter.
Everyone in the world could be fed and provided shelter right now. There’s plenty of money in the world for this. But they are not, because the systems humans have created do not care enough about people who are on the bottom of the economy.
“Around 733 million people faced hunger in 2023, equivalent to one in eleven people globally and one in five in Africa, according to the latest State of Food Security and Nutrition in the World (SOFI) report,” WHO wrote in 2024. “In 2023, around 2.33 billion people globally faced moderate or severe food insecurity, a number that has not changed significantly since the sharp upturn in 2020, amid the COVID-19 pandemic. Among those, over 864 million people experienced severe food insecurity, going without food for an entire day or more at times. This number has remained stubbornly high since 2020 and while Latin America shows improvement, broader challenges persist, especially in Africa where 58 percent of the population is moderately or severely food insecure.”
Naturally, we know that Elon Musk spent his brief time in US government slashing USAID, which is expected to lead to more than a million deaths. It was a completely cruel action. The “excuse” is that Musk thought all of that money was going to enrich corrupt people committing fraud and not a single person has died from the cuts — even as journalists have travelled to places affected by the cuts and talked to people about children and babies who have definitely, specifically died from the sudden lack of funding, food, and medicine. I simply cannot believe that Musk could be so dumb as to think cutting USAID wouldn’t lead to people dying.
And, yeah, in 10 years, robots are going to be making everything from cars to airplanes to TVs so cheaply that everyone can have everything they want and there’s no need for money. Really? A star football player won’t make a fortune, allowing him to buy things the rest of us can’t afford? Everyone will have so much stuff so cheaply that people who are extra skilled and talented at things won’t get paid more for their work? And the robots will of course teach our kids, run our schools, write and produce TV shows and movies, and take care of all of our health needs, yeah? No need to pay humans to be doctors and nurses?
Anyway, back to the interview. As the interviewer brings up, how are we going to get to such a utopia as people gradually lose their jobs. According to Musk, the US Treasury should simply issue people checks. How is that to be funded? Musk went into full crisis mode about the national debt several times, and he did not concede at all that billionaires and trillionaires and corporations need to pay more in taxes in order to fund the government in order to write these checks. As some commenters recently said, perhaps Musk has holes in his brain from certain drug use. Who knows? But something is clearly going wrong if he can’t connect a handful of dots in a way that makes sense in the real world.
In the United States today, around 48 million people — or one in seven Americans — live in food-insecure households. Does the largest economy in the world not have enough money to make sure that those 48 million people don’t have to worry about food — let alone health care! Why can’t the super rich country simply write people checks so that they can be well fed? Why can’t the US make sure that everyone can afford health care? Do I need to go down the route of detailing how many people die or go bankrupt or suffer from the high cost of health care in US society?
Are robots, within 10 years, going to quickly bring cheap food and health care to every American to the point that there is no actual need for money? How insane do you have to be to think this is going to happen?
What does this have to do with Tesla? I’m glad you asked. It has a few things to do with Tesla:
- In Elon Musk’s mind, it’s Tesla Optimus humanoid robots that are going to create this age of abundance. So, Musk is pouring money into their development, and now even their production despite the product not being ready to deliver on its promises. (Heard that one before?)
- Musk has been diverting resources away from developing more electric vehicle models in order to focus on these other things. In effect, he has been weakening the company’s car business when he should have been strengthening it in order to maintain its former position as the #1 EV maker in the world.
- And here’s the big one: If this is his level of logic and assumption, if this is a demonstration of his connection to reality and ability to forecast, how can anyone trust any of his decisions or forecasts about the company’s products and business? If he genuinely thinks there will be no need for money in 10 years, how can we trust that his 5- to 10-year roadmap for Tesla isn’t also completely looney and detached from reality?
I will just end with a handful of comments I saw under the short video embedded above:
- “He says this but isn’t he planning on selling the robots…for money…”
- “And food is just landing on your plate for free, as much as the people or robots who produce food, won’t need money to produce either, same for electricity? Oh I forgot, these are no costs for him and are payed with his pocket money.”
- “anyone who has grown their own food knows that yields without fertilizer consistently diminishes. Plants need food just like we need food. How will robots help make this process free?”
- “i mean when you’re worth $900B you have a distorted sense of reality…”
- “Economics lesson 1 (first 5 mins): wants are infinite.”
- “He’s not the first person to say this and he won’t be the last . . . every time, they’ve been wrong.”
- “he assumes that all these goods and services will be distributed equally among people, and we simply know that this won’t be the case. p.s. what I mean by ‘equally’ is not communism or socialism, it is just a fair system in which no one is systematically denied access to goods and services in a world where money stops being the means of exchange.”
- “There’s no way the billionaires would let us live a life without us giving them all our money”
- “I think the question to ask would have been, ‘How do the wealthiest people in the world hold onto their wealth and status without money?’ That would have been interesting to listen to.”
- “Don’t use drugs is the real message”
- “I don’t think we’ll even see the new roadster in 10 years.”
The sad thing is that there are also a ton of people in the comments buying this nonsense and thinking Musk is right. Perhaps the topic of another article….
Featured image by Artur Skoniecki from Pixabay
Sign up for CleanTechnica's Weekly Substack for Zach and Scott's in-depth analyses and high level summaries, sign up for our daily newsletter, and follow us on Google News!
Have a tip for CleanTechnica? Want to advertise? Want to suggest a guest for our CleanTech Talk podcast? Contact us here.
Sign up for our daily newsletter for 15 new cleantech stories a day. Or sign up for our weekly one on top stories of the week if daily is too frequent.
CleanTechnica uses affiliate links. See our policy here.
CleanTechnica's Comment Policy
Facts Only
Elon Musk stated that money will not matter in 2036.
Musk suggested the US Treasury should issue checks to people losing jobs to robots.
Musk claimed robots will provide goods and services so cheaply that they will essentially be free.
The World Health Organization reported 733 million people faced hunger in 2023.
2.33 billion people globally faced moderate or severe food insecurity in 2023.
48 million people in the United States live in food-insecure households.
Musk reduced funding for USAID.
Tesla is developing Optimus humanoid robots.
Tesla's current market position is the #2 EV company globally.
Zanny Minto Beddoes is the editor-in-chief of The Economist.
Executive Summary
Elon Musk posits a future "era of abundance" by 2036, suggesting that humanoid robots—specifically Tesla's Optimus—will automate the production of goods and services to the point that cost becomes negligible and money loses its utility. To manage the transition period of job loss, he proposes that the US Treasury distribute direct payments to citizens.
This vision stands in contrast to current global and domestic socioeconomic realities. Data from the WHO and US food security reports highlight persistent hunger and systemic instability that exist despite current global wealth. Critics argue that Musk's focus on robotic abundance is a diversion from Tesla's core automotive business and that his predictions ignore fundamental economic principles regarding scarcity and the distribution of wealth. There remains a significant tension between the theoretical possibility of robotic automation and the practical application of humanitarian aid and fiscal policy.
Full Take
The strongest version of this narrative is that we are approaching a paradigm shift where the marginal cost of production drops toward zero due to AI and robotics, potentially decoupling survival from labor. If labor is no longer required for basic needs, traditional monetary systems would indeed become obsolete.
However, the narrative relies heavily on "Exaggeration to Absurdity," framing a complex economic transition as a binary between current misery and a robotic utopia. The argument uses the stark reality of global hunger to create a moral contrast with Musk's perceived detachment, while simultaneously questioning his cognitive stability to invalidate his forecasts. The core tension lies in the assumption that technological capability automatically translates to equitable distribution.
The root cause is a clash of paradigms: the "Techno-Optimist" view, which believes engineering can solve systemic social failures, versus the "Institutionalist" view, which argues that wealth distribution is a political and moral choice, not a technical limitation. The implication is a potential erosion of human agency; if we defer social welfare to a future "robotic miracle," the urgency to fix current systemic failures is diminished.
Patterns detected: ARC-0022 Exaggeration to Absurdity
If this were a coordinated influence campaign, the playbook would involve "Rage Baiting" by juxtaposing an unpopular billionaire's luxury with starving populations to trigger an emotional response that shuts down nuanced debate on automation. The actual content aligns partially with this pattern, as it uses highly emotive language regarding "cruelty" and "holes in the brain" to frame the ideological disagreement.
Bridge Questions:
1. If the cost of goods dropped to near zero, what new mechanisms would determine the allocation of scarce non-reproducible resources (e.g., land, energy, specialized healthcare)?
2. Does the focus on a distant "abundance" serve as a psychological hedge against the immediate difficulties of scaling current green technologies?
3. How would a society without money maintain incentives for high-skill human innovation?
Counterstrike Scan: The content matches the pattern of an ideological critique using emotive framing to mobilize a specific audience, though it remains grounded in verifiable data.