Tuesday, July 21, 2026 -Tesla and SpaceX CEO Elon Musk has said that AI and robots will do 'so much stuff' that humans will run out of things to do for work and "we'll basically just issue money to people".
Musk painted the picture during a conversation with
XPRIZE founder Peter Diamandis at the Abundance Summit.
Rather than warning that artificial intelligence will simply
replace workers, Musk described a world where AI and humanoid robots become so
productive that scarcity itself starts to disappear, leaving governments to
rethink how people earn an income.
Musk said the explosion in AI and robotics won't simply
automate repetitive work. He believes it could eventually produce more goods
and services than people could reasonably consume.
"Yeah, it's basically AI and robots are going to make
so much stuff and provide so many services that they will actually run out of
things to do for the humans," Musk told Diamandis.
"They'll just run out of things to do for the
humans," he continued. "There's only so much that humans can even
express that they want."
Musk said that if the economy became hundreds or even
thousands of times larger than it is today, human demand would eventually hit a
ceiling while machines continued producing at extraordinary levels.
Musk said that abundance will change the economic equation
entirely.
Rather than focusing on universal basic income, Musk
described what he called universal high income, arguing that governments
could simply send people money because AI-generated output would dramatically
outpace growth in the money supply.
"I do think we'll have universal high income," he
said. "We're basically just issuing money to people."
Musk explained that the massive increase in goods and services would create
deflationary pressure instead of inflation.
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