Work will be optional, money will vanish, and energy will become the new currency — that’s Elon Musk’s vision of a world transformed by artificial intelligence.
In a two-hour conversation with Zerodha co-founder Nikhil Kamath on the People by WTF podcast, the Tesla and SpaceX chief predicted that AI and robotics would one day meet all human needs, erasing the foundations of today’s economy. “If AI and robotics are big enough to satisfy all human needs, then money is no longer necessary,” he said. “Energy is the true currency.”
What did Musk say?
Musk described an AI-driven future where human labour is a choice, not a necessity. “In the future, working will be like a hobby,” he said, though he added that anyone building companies or solving difficult problems would still need to “put in serious hours.”
The discussion ranged across AI, investing, politics and the evolution of X, formerly Twitter. Musk said the platform, with around 600 million monthly users, could reach a billion during major global events, but stressed that its purpose was far larger. “It would be great to bring together what people say in many different languages — automatically translated — so you have the collective consciousness of humanity,” he said, describing X as a “global brain.”
Asked about his 2022 acquisition of Twitter, Musk dismissed it as a power play. “Twitter had gone in a direction that had more of a negative influence on the world,” he said. “What I’ve tried to do is just restore it to be balanced and centrist.” His goal, he added, is to create “a global platform that becomes as close to the collective consciousness of humanity as possible.”
Musk on the future of communication?
Musk also predicted that communication will soon move toward “real-time video comprehension and generation” enabled by AI, though he maintained that text will continue to hold value as “more densely compressed information.”
On investing, he applied first-principles thinking: “A company is just a group of people assembled to create products and services. If they’re likely to continue improving, buy the stock and don’t worry about daily fluctuations.” He said the U.S. debt crisis could only be solved through technology, warning, “Interest payments on the debt exceed the entire military budget,” and calling large-scale AI adoption “pretty much the only thing that’s going to solve it.”
He was equally candid on politics: “Politics is a blood sport. Once you get to a certain scale, politics finds you. It’s quite unpleasant.”
In lighter moments, Musk reflected on friendship — “A friend is someone who supports you in difficult times” — and joked about his fixation with the letter X: “Sometimes I wonder what’s wrong with me.”
