Elon Musk made some wild claims at the US-Saudi Investment Forum at the Kennedy Center in Washington DC on Wednesday, insisting that his Optimus robot will cure poverty, people will not have to work in the future and money will eventually become irrelevant. Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang was also on stage and joked that he wished Musk had warned him before the currency was no longer a thing.
“AI and humanoid robots will literally eliminate poverty,” Musk claimed on Wednesday. “And Tesla won’t be the only company making these. I think Tesla will be the leader in this, but there will be a lot of other companies making humanoid robots. But there’s basically only one way to make everyone rich, and that’s AI and robotics.”
The Tesla CEO has repeatedly stressed in recent months that his robots will provide a kind of post-scarcity future where no one has to work. The billionaire said this clearly on Wednesday when asked what he thinks about the future for those who are worried about jobs being replaced by AI and robots.
“My prediction is that work will be optional,” Musk said, noting that he was talking about 10-20 years from now.
The billionaire took his usual prediction even further, claiming that in a world where robots do all the work, money will no longer exist.
Musk said, “I would always recommend people to read the Culture books by Iain Banks to get a sense of what a potentially positive AI future looks like. And what’s interesting is that the money in those books no longer… doesn’t exist. That’s interesting.”
Musk added, “My guess is, if you go out long enough, assuming continued improvement in AI and robotics, which is likely, money will stop being relevant at some point in the future.”
The discussion moderator asked, “Jensen, any thoughts?” As the crowd laughed. “By the way, the Nvidia earnings call is later today,” Musk said, joining in the laughter.
Huang shifted uncomfortably in his seat and began to laugh to himself with a sort of bewildered look. “And by the way, since currency is irrelevant…” Huang said jokingly. “Elon just wants to share breaking news with you.”
After a good laugh, Huang became serious again and stuck to what Musk was saying. Huang has previously taken a contrary view to that of the crowd, which insists that there will be no work in the future. In August, Huang said that AI and automation will indeed make everyone busier. Huang acknowledged that things will be different, including things like how students learn and how people do their work. But he persisted in predicting that people will actually become busier simply because they can accomplish more of their goals.
“My guess is that Elon will be more engaged as a result of AI. I will be more engaged as a result of AI,” Huang said. “And the reason is that we have a lot of ideas that we want to pursue, there are a lot of things that are still in our backlog inside our company that we can pursue. If we were more productive, we could get those things done faster, and so in the near term, I would say there’s full evidence that we will be more productive and still busy because we have a lot of ideas.”
Huang then joked that since he frequently messages with Musk, he hoped the Tesla CEO would alert him before the currency was no longer relevant. “You’ll see it coming,” Musk said.
Musk has been constantly talking about how the robots he is developing at Tesla, known as Optimus, are the key to eliminating poverty. But, as we’ve written before, this is perhaps his most ridiculous lie. Improving efficiency does not redistribute wealth. Musk never explains who will pay Americans to simply sit and do nothing while billions of robots actually do the labor. Is this the government? Because this will require massive changes in the political and economic structure.
And why should we believe that Musk, of all people, wants to pay people to sit? This is the man who entered the federal government earlier this year with his so-called Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) and decided that too many people were taking advantage of government benefits. He is also the person who called the term homeless a “buzzword” for “violent drug addicts.”
Musk often tries to suggest that people experiencing homelessness do not have jobs, even though government estimates suggest that 40 to 60% of people who are unhoused are employed. He doesn’t care about poverty. He cares about making more money and is on his way to becoming the world’s first trillionaire. And he never talks about the mechanism by which his utopian idea for a leisure society would actually work.
The ideas Musk promotes were very common in 20th century futurism. And it’s clear that’s where he’s taking his inspiration from, even as he cited Iain Banks and his Utopian Culture series of books on Wednesday. But it doesn’t make any sense unless you establish some kind of radical socialist or communist entity at the center of this approach to distribute the necessities for living.
Musk wants to sell you his robots, and that makes sense in our current economic system. But when he sells you the robot, it does not mean that the person who owns that robot will no longer have to work. It’s a bit like imagining that all the appliances in your house are somehow paying for themselves right now. They are not. They may make your life better, but they do not establish a political or economic system under which people do not have to work. If all the wealth in this hypothetical system created by Musk came from robots, he would have to redistribute his wealth to pay everyone who is not working.
The end of the discussion with Musk and Huang was a good reminder of where we are actually located here in 2025. “My boss and your boss are going to talk next,” the Saudi moderator said, referring to Saudi Arabia’s Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman (MBS) and President Donald Trump. Both tech executives did not vocally object to Donald Trump calling them their “boss.” But it quashes the fantasy that Musk seemed intent on delivering utopias about robotics and AI any time soon.
Trump and MBS have no plans to let people sit and get paid for doing nothing. And they are creating a future where that will never be possible.