In July twenty twenty-six Elon Musk sat down with The Economist and
predicted that ten years from now money will stop mattering.
His logic is clean - money is a claim on scarce things,
so if nothing stays scarce, the claim quietly loses its meaning.
He expects artificial intelligence to exceed
the sum of human intelligence in five years,
leaving nothing it cannot do better than we can.
But thinking alone moves nothing, so the plan needs hands -
enough humanoid robots turning intelligence
into what he calls a quasi infinite economy.
Those hands have not arrived -
in January he admitted no robot was yet doing useful work,
and the assembly line starts only this summer.
Still, he says work becomes optional,
like growing tomatoes at home when the shop already sells better ones,
labor kept purely for pleasure.
His precedent is real - the word computer once named a person,
and from nineteen thirty-five a lab hired
hundreds of women to calculate by hand.
But those computers did not retire into gardening,
they taught themselves to program the machine that replaced them,
and not everyone got that chance.
Displacement is measurable -
payroll data on millions of workers shows twenty-two to twenty-five
year olds down thirteen percent in the most exposed jobs.
Asked how people eat meanwhile,
he answered that the Treasury should simply issue checks,
and predicted the result would be deflation rather than inflation.
America has run that experiment - between eighteen seventy-three and
eighteen ninety-six output grew while wholesale prices fell a third,
and it ended in political revolt.
Six weeks earlier his rocket company raised
seventy- five billion dollars of that money,
and deflation never bills the lender, it bills whoever owes.