The Unnecessary Prologue
Before I jump to the meat of my rant-ish lament, I want to share with you a confession: I am neither an ‘Elonaut’ (my term for those who worship Elon Musk as the second coming of Christ in space) nor an ‘Elonoclast’ (my term for those who treat him as the antichrist and those who actively smash his status as the space messiah and expose his "false godhood”). I admit Elon remains one of the most influential (and maybe also consequential) humans alive. However, for me, the man appears to overshadow his great achievements (self‑sabotaging?) via his political interventions, personal feuds, and some of his unbelievably stupid rhetoric.
I think of him as the typical capitalist in the business of tech. I know it is innovation that gives us wings, but it is also capitalism that paid innovation's baggage fee. Hence, I have no bad feelings toward our good friend Elon any more than the next techbro; he is a necessary evil. My war is with our value system that is shaped by Monetary Capitalism, and the key word here is Monetary!
One thing I love about my culture is that there is no "family/surname," (which should give us the upper hand to evaluate a person by their merit instead of their family), and we call any one by their first name. Literally, my culture doesn't have a family surname, and since we are forced to adopt this bizarre convention on our passports, we simply put our grandfather's name as the family name. Anyway, I am stating this to let you know that in the entirety of this piece, I have referred to Elon by his first name, and I want you to know that this is not a sign of disrespect.
The Beginning of the Meat
I was reading; wait, wait... In the age of "Singularity," I should have said I was committing a sin! Nowadays, isn't 'reading' idolatry? Isn't it an act of worshiping another god of attention? Yes, in a world where billions of humans are trying to figure out how to put a fast-forward button on a 15-second TikTok video, it is indeed a monstrous act to read. Anyway, yes, I was engaged in the cardinal act of reading when a bold quote grabbed my attention: "I'll make another prediction: Money won't matter in 2036!" Elon Musk said it.
These comments were eye-opening enough to make me pause and search for the source. After a tiresome search (at that time, the video was not published on Youtube), I unlocked Elon's interview with Zanny M. Beddoes, the editor‑in‑chief of The Economist. Apparently, they enjoyed an 85‑minute interview video on a wide‑ranging tech conversation at his Texas Gigafactory. One persistent question was probing my mind as I looked for it: did the journalist ask for further explanation or not? Yes, Zanny asked for a goddamn explanation, and thank God she did, because it motivated me to write this!
Elon explained: robots and AI will produce more goods and services than any person could consume. Food, housing, transport, entertainment, and all are so abundant that currency stops being useful. "You want money for food, housing, transport, entertainment," he said. "If those are so abundant, what do you need money for in that case?"
Since this is the same Elon Musk who is a trillionaire, let me ask him my questions (Zanny didn't do her best here, so I have to fill in for her): So you need a trillion dollars for housing and food, or entertainment and health? Yet, since Elon will never address me (will he?), let me answer on his behalf: "NO, NO, NO".
The man became a trillionaire because he knows money better than almost anyone alive. MONEY IS POWER! The real question I have for Elon, or anyone who entertains predicting the future, is: when will power become obsolete, and untill that time what will even be the nature of power in the age of AI and abundance?
"I Didn't Mean to Accelerate AI"
Elon also ‘confessed’ (it is nothing of confession but more of self promotion) something that should annoy everyone paying attention. He originally helped create OpenAI as "essentially a counterweight to Google" when the tech giant "had more or less a monopoly on AI". According to Elon, the goal of this move was to slow down the concentration of AI power. I am annoyed.
He then states he accelerated it.
"In creating OpenAI and then having Anthropic spin out of that, and now currently Anthropics is leader in AI, I mean, these actions have actually resulted in knock-on effects that accelerated AI, which wasn't really my intention," Elon annoys, oh I mean Elon flatulates, ah gadman it, English is not my native tongue and the word I am looking for is ‘explains’, yes Elon explains how he single handedly accelerates the creation of AI.
The man who has spent years warning about AI's dangers, the very same man who also sued OpenAI for $150 billion, and again the very same man who has called for AI bans just admitted that his own ‘efforts to control AI’ made the problem worse.
"It just seems like all roads lead to the acceleration of AI," he said. “Even if I wanted to stop it, I couldn't”.
This is a dry joke; if he were a stand-up, I would have booed him. Hopefully, one can see the pattern of greed here: there is no demon, but there are those who control it!
The Billionaire vs. The Economist
I wanted to insert a commercial break in my article so I reflected some political views in the interview. Isn't politics more commercial than a commercial break?
As usual with Elon, the interview got tense when they talked about his politics. Beddoes pressed him on whether he supports "far‑right" views. I think she was challenging his popular rhetoric about immigration and racism. She pointed out that his own experience living in the U.S. told a different story from the one he portrays on X.
Do you remember again all the cliche jokes that go, “I have a black friend… ”? Elon said his partner is "half Indian" and he has four children with her. He said there are "senior executives of all races" at his companies. He called himself "not racist".
But when pressed on whether he was "anti-Muslim," he was less defiant. "If people are coming to a country with antithetical views, I am against that," he said. I said, Who isn’t? These people who come to your country with 'antithetical' views are mostly called the US Navy, the NATO Army, Putin's Soldiers, ISIS, Fundamentalist, Terrorists, and this is the first time I have heard them being called immigrants. If it is true to say a billionaire knows, then who am I to criticize a trillionaire: aren’t they the ones who manufacture what we should know?
Anyways this was a rare moment of the interview where the world's most powerful man had failed to defend himself with another dry joke.
This concludes our commercial break.
The Fate of Money in the Near Future
I am very skeptical of Elon's "money won't matter" prediction. As I sated in the begining money is power. Just consider the nature of 'power' in human society.
A house with a view of the ocean. A slot on a trip to Mars. A reliable backup server for mind uploading. A gigalion terabyte for sex adventures. None of those get cheaper when robots build hospitals in East Africa for free or when AI drones operate a surplus food farm faster than millions of Indians.
Money is and will still be the power key that unlocks the twisted, weirdest, and rarest urges of humankind. If the form of money is what worries you, don’t be. No matter what form it takes, money is what rations access to all of these levels of power.
Since Zanny didn't ask him (sadly, she ignored some interesting questions about 2036's post‑money world), I would love to ask Elon the question that bothers me day and night: who will own the robot machines and AI softwares post 2036? Oh, and better than that, I wanted to ask him the most important question that bothers me morning, day, and night: which nations and companies will control the energy system that is supposed to power these novel liberators ushering in the post-money era? Who?
In today's fracked up economy, the global north might enjoy our cyber liberators’ fruit as imagined by Elon, yet the global south will only wake up to a nightmare called ‘how to distribute an abundance’! Production has always been a question of technology, and this is why billionaires like Elon think the world will be a better place with AI. Sadly, production has rarely been the 'root problem' even with primitive technologies, and our real issue, the root of our misery, has always been redistribution.
And 'redistribution' has been a question of anything but technology!
For me, our root problem is the misalignment of our value system and monetary capitalism, and this is addressed as a political decision, not an automation one. If I were Elon, I would have said that with Monetary Capitalism we are summoning the demon. The irony here is that the majority of our thinkers, leaders, and, in short, anyone who matters, think it is impossible to control AGI or ASI, while they completely ignore the fact that humanity wrongly believes it can control Monetary capitalism!
Elon says universal basic income, or as he calls it, "universal high income", is coming. But he admits the transition would be "bumpy". That's billionaire-speak for: a lot of people are going to suffer before this gets better. Sadly, even this is a lie because there is no guarantee that this gets better.
Why?
Let me start with the simplest definition: Monetary Capitalism is the system where money, credit creation, and interest rates are the primary coordinating mechanisms of the economy, instead of classic capitalism, where the supply of goods and services, aka production, directs the economy.
Hence, Monetary capitalism fundamentally contradicts universal basic income or universal high income because the entire system hinges on interest rates as the intertemporal price that equilibrates voluntary savings with productive investment. UBI, by contrast, injects purchasing power that is not preceded by deferred consumption, thereby severing this equilibrium. Sadly, as long us the ruling system of capitalism is the current monetary capitalism, Elon's 'Universal High Income' whether financed by new money creation or taxation, its outcome is equally destructive!
As long us monetary capitalism exists, the injection of universal basic income is a bad monetary expansion which will trigger inflation which in return will force central banks to raise interest rates which eventually will chok the very capital investment the universal basic income relies upon. Let me break down the basic contradicitons
- By 2036, Elon is assuming there are no jobs (or very few) and the issue of "Unemployment" is obsolete.
- Monetary capitalism relies on: (1) Money as a store of value and unit of account, (2) Interest rates as the price of capital to allocate resources between present and future (investment), (3) The transmission mechanism of credit creation which requires repayment via future income flows.
- If there are no jobs, consumers have no wage income. To have effective demand, they need universal high income (state-issued fiat).
- If the state issues fiat for universal high income without an equivalent expansion of debt-based credit (because borrowers have no income to repay), this breaks the fractional reserve/debt-based money creation model. Monetary capitalism requires money to be created through debt (loans that must be repaid with interest). Universal high income is essentially helicopter money (grant-based, no repayment).
- Contradiction: Monetary capitalism's entire mechanism for allocating capital relies on price signals (interest rates) to ration scarce capital. But if robots create unlimited abundance, capital is no longer scarce, so interest rates should theoretically drop to zero (or negative). However, zero interest rates destroy the profit margin of the financial sector (the spread between borrowing and lending) and undermine the store-of-value function. Additionally, if money is given freely as universal high income, the demand for loans (for survival) drops, collapsing the demand side of the credit market.
Unfortunately, I don't know why Elon makes the future less boring; instead of universal high income, he should have declared every freaking thing will be FREE! Again, I do not fathom why Elon didn't declare that monetary capitalism will die. This indeed is the very brave new world we should all aspire to. As a series of unfortunate answers (no pun intended, and I didn't like the movie you are thinking about now), Elon chose the less creative and the most boring path and predicts that, in the age of abundance, humanity will depend on universal high income.
The most boring answer is that, as long as our value system is that of monetary capitalism, money will not be obsolete! If we are in a transition period, we should seriously consider the alternatives to monetary capitalism and retire it ASAP. Leaders like Elon should start waking up to the reality that the age of abundance and our current monetary capitalism are like matter and antimatte, one will cancel the other, and there is no room for both to exist.
The "Enjoy the Ride" Philosophy
How many billionaires have a nightmare where they struggle to pay medical bills? I still remember my first meeting with a billionaire which happened 18 years ago. Despite the fact that we have the same color, the same nationality, and even speak the same language, it was like I was from Earth and he was from Jupiter. We don’t think and see the world in remotely the same manner. It took me a couple of years to understand that it is not your race, culture, language, religion, or nationality that makes who you are; it is your economic class. I am from the middle class or lower-middle class, so an alien from a planet in the Andromeda galaxy who is in the same economic class is closer to me than my fellow country billionaire (I can even imagine how this middle class alien from Andromeda reacts to certain dry jokes). Anyways, what is Elon's overarching message to the world?
"Relax"!
Despite his years of warning about AI risks, he told The Economist that "the most likely outcome is incredible abundance for all". He said his "philosophical conclusion" after fearing for AI's threat to humanity was to "look on the bright side".
"You can just sort of be sad about it or join the club, I suppose," he said of the AI race.
This is the same man who has spent years trying to sound the alarm. The same man who called AI "the greatest existential threat" to humanity. The same man who signed the open letter calling for a pause on LLM development Because he confused it with a conscious AI. Now he's telling us to enjoy the ride.
Do you want to know what has changed? Nothing, but the man is now more powerful. Ehm, for those of you who are slow, what I mean is the man is now richer.
My Two Cents for You: Oh sorry Money won’t matter so My Two Whatevers!
Here's the uncomfortable truth: first, the billionaires building this technology don't fully understand what they're creating and they had never denied this. Second, the more concerning reality is that these people (the billionaires) don't have any clue about the poor folks save Dostoyevsky's novel, and on top of their ignorance, they don't give a rat's ass.
According to Elon, he tried to slow AI down. He then made it faster. According to him, developing AI was the same as summoning the demon; years later, he is telling us we should just relax and embrace the beauty of the unfolding AI acceleration. According to Elon, the world should ban generative AI and he wrote a long petition letter, but he is also selling us Grok.
Elon and billionaires like him are the smartest people on the planet, with the most resources, the best teams, and the biggest ambitions. And they're telling us they don't worry about AI as long as they have control. I am inclined to think they are smart because I am told, even educated, a million times beyond any doubt that monetary capitalism rewards the one who deserves it!
Elon's prediction about money may or may not come true. But a new form of technological enslavement is happening right now, while you're reading this.