Key Takeaways
- Elon Musk told The Economist money will not matter by 2036 as artificial intelligence (AI) and robots outproduce demand.
- Critics including Tyler Cowen argue energy, land, and attention will stay scarce even by 2036.
- Musk called the shift bumpy, pointing to income transfers as the likely next policy fight.
Musk made the prediction during an extended interview with Economist editor-in-chief Zanny Minton Beddoes, recorded at the Texas Gigafactory and published in late July 2026 as part of the outlet’s Insider series.
“You want money for food, housing, transport, entertainment,” Musk said. “If that is so abundant, what do you need money for in that case?”
He predicted deflation rather than inflation, arguing output would outrun the money supply as robots and AI take over production. He also suggested governments could simply issue checks to citizens once goods become abundant enough.
A Prediction With a History
Musk has floated versions of this idea before. In past conversations with entrepreneur Peter Diamandis, he has described “universal high income” replacing basic income, work becoming optional, and money losing relevance as AI and humanoid robots outproduce human needs.
Musk has pointed to Iain M. Banks’ Culture novels as a model for what a positive AI future looks like. In those books, advanced machine intelligences called Minds handle production and logistics, citizens face no material want, and money is treated as a marker of poverty rather than a tool. SpaceX names its drone ships after vessels from the series.
Diamandis has pushed a similar abundance argument for years through the XPRIZE Foundation. He argues that exponential gains in energy, computing, robotics, and manufacturing will push the cost of many goods toward the cost of raw materials and electricity.
Other technologists share pieces of the same outlook. Mustafa Suleyman has discussed a universal basic provision built on abundant intelligence. Sam Altman has funded basic income experiments while building AI systems that could make large-scale transfers necessary. Ray Kurzweil’s singularity forecasts have long assumed a similar abundance follows accelerating computation.
Economists Question the Timeline
Not everyone accepts that AI will do such things and the 2036 date. Economists at the American Institute for Economic Research and writers at The Daily Economy argue that scarcity does not disappear when robots make physical goods cheap. It shifts. A house with a specific view, a seat at a top school, or the attention of in-demand people remains scarce, no matter how cheap manufactured goods become. Money, or something like it, still rations access to those things.
Critics have also raised governance questions. If a small number of companies own the robots and the energy infrastructure that powers them, distributing the resulting abundance does not happen automatically. Tesla’s own valuation, built partly on Optimus robot ambitions, still depends on investors who expect returns paid in the currency Musk says will soon matter less.
Economists Tyler Cowen and Noah Smith have pointed to comparative advantage as a limiting factor. Even in a world where AI outperforms humans at most tasks, people may still command wages where the scarce input is human presence, judgment, or accountability. Energy availability, land for data centers and robot factories, and the pace at which institutions can absorb labor displacement may end up as the real constraints, not the intelligence of the machines themselves.
Why It Matters
The prediction lands at a moment when governments, investors, and workers are already grappling with how fast AI and automation are moving through the economy. If Musk is right even partially, it points toward:
- Falling prices for goods and services tied to automated production
- Growing pressure on governments to fund large-scale income transfers
- A shift in where scarcity and value concentrate, toward energy, land, and attention rather than manufactured goods
Musk has acknowledged the transition will be “bumpy” and could bring social strain as jobs disappear faster than new roles replace them. That acknowledgment sits closer to what past waves of automation have actually produced: uneven gains, real disruption, and institutions forced to adapt under pressure rather than a clean shift to abundance for everyone at once.
Money functions as a way to coordinate trade-offs under scarcity. Robots assembling houses or generating entertainment do not remove every scarce resource. Energy, land, political power, and genuine novelty stay limited. Whatever system allocates them will still need a pricing signal, whether or not it goes by the name money.
The next decade will test which constraints actually hold. Musk’s forecast raises real questions about what happens once machines can produce more than people need. Whether the answer arrives by 2036, and whether it removes money’s role rather than changing its form, remains an open bet.
