Elon Musk sat down for a podcast episode with Nikhil Kamath, co-founder of Zerodha, where he talked at length about things, including his companies, money, AI, and even his personal life. During the episode, the discussion shifted to the Kardashev Scale, after Kamath asked Musk what he believes money will look like in the future.
Musk said that in the long term, money will “disappear as a concept”. “It’s kind of strange but in a future where anyone can have anything, I think you no longer need money as a database for labour allocation. If AI and robotics are big enough to satisfy all human needs, then money is no longer… its relevance declines dramatically. I am not sure we will have it,” he said on Kamath’s podcast, which went live on YouTube on November 30.
The world’s richest person added that energy is the “real currency” as one can’t legislate it. “Energy is the true currency. This is why I said Bitcoin is based on energy. You can’t legislate energy. You can’t just, you know, pass a law and suddenly have a lot of energy. It’s very difficult to generate energy or, especially, to harness energy in a useful way to do useful work.”
“Probably, we won’t have money, and probably we’ll just have energy… power generation as the de facto currency,” he further stressed.
What is the Kardashev Scale?
In the episode, which has now crossed more than 3 million views, Musk explained the Kardashev Scale, a theoretical framework created by Soviet astrophysicist Nikolai Kardashev to measure how advanced a civilisation is based on its ability to harness and utilise energy.
“I think one way to frame civilisational progress is the percentage completion on the Kardashev scale,” Musk said, before explaining the three types.
According to Musk, Type 1 is “Civilisation Planetary”. It stands for the percentage of a planet’s energy a civilisation can convert into useful work.
Type 2 is “Civilisation Stellar” and measures how much of a star’s energy can be harvested and used. “It stands for the percentage of the Sun’s energy you are successful in turning into useful work,” he said.
Type 3 is “Civilisation Galactic”. It stands for the percentage of a galaxy’s energy you are successful in turning into useful work.
A pop-up during the video highlighted that humanity is currently estimated at 0.73 on the Kardashev Scale. “That means we’re not even a ‘Type 1’ yet, we only use a tiny bit of energy our planet gets from the Sun, and we’re still stuck burning coal and oil like cavemen with fire,” the pop-up further read and attributed the information to Nature 2023, Wikipedia 2025, Sagan 1973.
‘Partner is half-Indian’: Musk
During the episode, Musk also spilt the beans on his personal life, revealing that his partner, Shivon Zilis, is half-Indian. He also revealed that one of his sons has his middle name after the renowned Indian-American astrophysicist Subrahmanyan Chandrasekhar.
“I’m not sure if you know this, but my partner Shivon is half-Indian. One of my sons with her; his middle name is Sekhar after Chandrasekhar,” the 54-year-old said on the podcast.
He further mentioned that Zilis was adopted as a child and raised in Canada.