Elon Musk has repeatedly promised that future Americans won’t have to work and will get paid to sit around doing nothing. The billionaire insists this will happen all thanks to his humanoid robot Optimus, which he predicts will be able to do everything from laundry to babysitting kids. Optimus will somehow deliver a perfect society where humans no longer have to work and there will be no need for money, according to Musk.
It’s funny, then, that Musk so frequently whines about people getting things from the government for free. The latest example was a quote-tweet on Monday where the Tesla CEO complained that ancient Rome distributed free bread, implying that it was one reason the Roman Empire collapsed.
Musk tweeted “They faced the same issues in Ancient Rome,” on Monday, quoting a long tweet from an account called Handre, described as a “free market pamphleteer.”
“Rome handed out free grain to 40,000 citizens in 73 BC. By 46 BC, Julius Caesar found 320,000 people lining up for their monthly ration. That eight-fold expansion happened in under three decades, and it shows you how welfare states actually grow,” the Handre account tweeted.
“What did the dole require? Massive grain imports from Sicily, Sardinia, and Egypt, organized through state logistics at state expense, funded by taxation and conquest. When the conquest revenue dried up, the obligation remained. Rome had written a check against future military success, and future military success eventually failed to arrive,” the account insisted.
“The lesson is not complicated. Distribute a benefit and you distribute dependency. Distribute dependency and you distribute political power to whoever controls the distribution. The grain dole didn’t weaken Rome overnight, but it made every subsequent reform politically impossible.”
They faced the same issues in Ancient Rome https://t.co/50FKEJoiAI
— Elon Musk (@elonmusk) August 23, 2026
Musk thought this was a genius observation, clearly applicable to modern politics.
The modern Republican complaint is that when you give people free food in the form of SNAP, it incentivizes them not to work and to simply rely on the government. Musk said similar things as the head of DOGE, the Department of Government Efficiency, last year. The wealthiest man in the world, who depends on countless government contracts, was put in charge of decimating the federal government in the name of cost savings. He oversaw the departure of about 300,000 government workers and his cuts made everyone less safe. A study published last year in the Lancet linked USAID cuts to about 4.5 million projected children’s deaths by 2030.
It’s impossible to square Musk’s repeated insistence that government shouldn’t be providing free things to regular Americans with his claims that robots will deliver a society where everyone is wealthy and doesn’t have to work. Those ideas are obviously in conflict. Why should only the people of the future get access to a strong social safety net or a utopian government? And what is it about Musk’s robots that would make that happen?
Musk has made many predictions for robots that have already failed. In Jan. 2025, Musk said the company would have produced about 10,000 robots by the end of that year. But even if Musk is able to eventually produce Optimus robots at scale, there’s no reason to believe they’ll lead to a post-scarcity utopia. That’s simply not how anything works.
Universal basic income (Musk likes to promise universal high income) is something that can only be achieved through political means, not technological. Gizmodo has written about his several times now. Back in 2025, we called it Musk’s most ridiculous lie. Creating advanced robots doesn’t automatically create a society where everyone gets free stuff. If it did, we’d have a vastly different economic situation right now.
Work is automated in 2026 in a way that would blow the minds of Americans in 1826. We’ve got all kinds of advanced technologies like the internet that allow us to get the answer to any question in the world instantly thanks to the magic rectangle in our pocket. That same rectangle can take photos, create movies, and calculate equations that are impossible to do in our heads. But none of this technological advancement automatically translates into distributing resources to the poorest among us. Things like Medicare, Medicaid, and SNAP are all part of a social safety net that had to be created through government. They didn’t materialize because wealthy industrialists of the 20th century delivered them.
But Musk and his fellow Republicans (the dude is reportedly planning to spend about $200 million on the midterms in November to elect them) have done everything they can to destroy that social safety net. About 4 million people, including 1.5 million kids, have had their SNAP benefits taken from them in the past year thanks to the Republican budget legislation known as the Big Beautiful Bill. Why on Earth would you trust Musk to deliver a society of wealth and leisure when he’s already helped steal food from the mouths of children?
Building some robots doesn’t fix that. Humanoid robots might be cool and beneficial for many future use cases, whether they’re Elon’s Optimus or made by some other company that’s way ahead of Tesla technologically. But they’re not going to deliver a world of abundance where everyone gets to sit at home and do nothing. Musk complains about those kinds of people constantly on X. And he doesn’t seem to understand how stupid it makes him look.
