Elon Musk, the richest man in the world, doesn’t think you should bother saving for the future. Not because he’s finally decided to go mask-off Bond villain and threaten to destroy the world, but because there’s going to be infinite money available thanks to the development of superintelligence.
Weird. Why was he recently so worried about the national debt and federal “waste” then?
Earlier this week, a Twitter user going by the handle @battleangelviv posted, “Justifying each of my questionable financial decisions with the fact that we’re headed towards a future of abundance. Don’t be like, totally reckless, but also most of it won’t matter in a few years anyway.” Musk later replied, “Saving money for the distant future is pointless with the advent of super intelligent abundance.”
This is actually a bit of a refrain for the trillionaire. Earlier this year, during an appearance on the podcast Moonshots with Peter Diamandis, Musk told listeners, “One side recommendation I have is: Don’t worry about squirreling money away for retirement in 10 or 20 years. It won’t matter,” later reiterating, “Saving for retirement will be irrelevant.”
And hey, it’s hard to argue that wouldn’t be extremely cool. A little strange that the guy who is so fundamentally opposed to communism is also basically advocating for a communist future, but whatever, we can just let that one go unexamined.
One question that does at least feel worth asking, though: Does Elon Musk act like someone who believes abundance is coming? Does a trillionaire need to go to court in order to secure a compensation package of $139 billion if he believes that he’s discovered an infinite-money glitch? Would he care about the national debt if he believed that it’ll be wiped out in no time the second the “superintelligence” dam bursts?
You’ll remember that Musk is the guy who spent most of the first year of Donald Trump’s second term leading the Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) with the explicit goal of reducing government waste (it didn’t) and ultimately shrinking the national debt (it’s gone up).
DOGE did cost about 300,000 people their jobs, and cuts made by Musk and his “efficiency” hounds to federal programs have already cost an estimated 780,000 lives, mostly from health programs that were axed over perceived “wokeness.” Experts warn that as many as 14 million people may end up losing their lives by 2030 because of the sudden lack of care and treatment available for curable and preventable diseases, all stemming from Musk’s chainsaw approach to government spending that, by his own suggestion, won’t even matter in a couple of years.
“I came to the conclusion that the only way we’re going to solve the national debt is with AI and robots. We’re not going to solve it by trying to save our way there,” he said in an interview with Walter Isaacson earlier this month.
Now, maybe Musk had to go through the process of DOGE to come to that conclusion. Or maybe he needed to see AI development accelerate to feel comfortable enough to say abundance is coming. But here’s another theory: You are not real to him; he does not care if you live or die, and if his prediction about our abundant future is bunk, he knows it’ll have no impact on him while you will spend your retirement years in abject poverty.
Ghouls like Elon Musk have already done everything in their power to make saving for retirement difficult for you—it was the giants of industry like him who killed private pension funds and shifted the risk and responsibility of retirement accounts to workers, killed and diluted unions to weaken employee bargaining power, and suppressed wages to make it harder to build up a nest egg. Don’t also let him convince you to throw caution to the wind with promises of robot-powered luxuries.
