Elon Musk predicts money will no longer matter by 2036

Elon Musk gave the end of money a date. “I will make another prediction. Money will no longer matter in 2036.”

The argument

The line comes from a 90-minute interview with Economist editor-in-chief Zanny Minton Beddoes, recorded at Tesla’s Texas Gigafactory and published in late July. Musk’s reasoning is that AI and humanoid robots will make goods and services so abundant that currency loses its point: “You want money for food, housing, transport, entertainment. If that is so abundant, what do you need money for in that case?”

From there he predicts deflation rather than inflation, on the grounds that output outruns the money supply, and suggests governments could simply send citizens checks once production is largely automated.

Where the argument runs into scarcity

The pushback came quickly, and it converged on a single point: not everything people spend money on is manufactured. Economist Tyler Cowen notes that land, energy and attention stay scarce no matter how cheap physical goods get. Those happen to be the categories that dominate household budgets in developed economies, so cheap goods compress the part of spending that is already smallest.

Vinod Khosla put the sharpest version of the objection: abundance works “only if the politics permits” it, otherwise a small elite thrives while everyone else faces instability. That is a distribution argument rather than a production one, and Musk’s own remedy, government checks, concedes it. If the state has to route purchasing power to citizens, money has not stopped mattering; it has changed who issues it and why.

Why the date is the useful part

Musk has made versions of this prediction before, usually in the vaguer register of within a decade. Naming 2036 turns it into something checkable, which is rare for claims in this genre and worth more than the claim itself.

Ten years is also long enough to be safe and short enough to be interesting. Robot production volumes, energy prices and the cost curve for basic goods are all observable well before then.