In Elon Musk’s vision of the future, your paycheck becomes more like a hobby than a lifeline. Within ten to twenty years, he says, most people will choose to work only if they feel like it, while robots and artificial intelligence quietly take care of almost everything the economy needs.
For anyone still worrying about rent, student loans, and the weekly grocery run, that promise can feel very far away.
Speaking at the US Saudi Investment Forum in Washington, the Tesla chief executive compared future jobs to playing sports or video games, something you do because you enjoy it, not because the bills are due. In his analogy, buying food is like working today, and tending a backyard vegetable garden is like working in the future, an effort you take on only if you really want to.
He has also suggested that money itself could become less important in a world where machines generate an abundance of goods and services, drawing inspiration from the Culture science fiction series, which imagines highly-advanced societies with no traditional jobs or cash economy.
To make that kind of system function in real life, some form of guaranteed income would almost certainly be needed.
At a major technology conference in 2024, Musk floated the idea of a “universal high income”, a cousin of the universal basic income that Sam Altman at OpenAI has pushed into the policy debate.
In practical terms, that means using tax systems and new revenue from AI-driven growth to provide regular payments so that basic needs no longer depend on holding a traditional job.
Robots are powerful, but still pricey
Economists who study automation largely agree that artificial intelligence and robotics will keep reshaping work. They are much more cautious about how quickly that will happen. Ioana Marinescu at University of Pennsylvania notes that the digital side of AI is getting cheaper very fast, while physical robots are still expensive and built for narrow tasks.
In one example she highlights, companies reportedly cut the cost of running large language models to roughly $2.5 per million tokens, down from about $10 a year earlier, yet installing robots on factory floors or in hospitals remains a slow, capital-intensive project.
In a recent working paper with co-author Konrad Kording for the Brookings Institution, Marinescu models an economy where gains from intelligence focused automation eventually flatten out.
In their framework, software can scale rapidly, but physical capital and human labor cannot keep up at the same pace, so the benefits of ever more AI saturate over time instead of shooting straight up forever.
Real-world data from the labor market point in the same direction for now. Researchers at the Yale Budget Lab and Brookings tracked how jobs shifted in the United States during the first three years after the public release of ChatGPT.
They found that the overall mix of occupations has not changed in a way that suggests a sudden wave of AI-driven layoffs, even in jobs that look highly exposed to automation. The authors still warn that larger effects may emerge later, but for the moment they describe a labor market defined more by stability than collapse.
Who gets rich in a work-optional world
Even if Musk is right that machines can eventually handle most paid work, another question sits underneath his prediction. Who will own the robots, and who will capture the wealth they generate. At the moment, much of the money created by the AI boom is flowing to a small group of tech giants whose stocks are often labeled the Magnificent Seven.
An analysis by Apollo Global Management chief economist Torsten Slok shows that earnings expectations for those seven firms have climbed sharply, while expectations for the other companies in the S&P 500 index have been revised downward.
That split is not just a line on a chart. It shows up in everyday life when households with large stock portfolios keep spending on travel, restaurants, and new cars, while many workers lower down the income ladder juggle rent, medical costs, and that monthly electric bill.
Slok has described spending by wealthier Americans as a key driver of recent growth, which suggests that the current AI boom is widening gaps rather than closing them.
Meaning in a world where no one has to work
There is also a quieter question that does not fit easily into earnings tables. If work becomes optional, what happens to the sense of purpose and community that many people now get from their jobs? Anton Korinek at University of Virginia points to long-running research from Harvard University, which finds that strong relationships are one of the most reliable sources of well being over a lifetime.
For a lot of adults, those relationships start at work, during quick hallway chats, stressful project sprints, and even those late night video calls that nobody really loves but everyone remembers.
If the economic value of human labor drops sharply, societies will need to find new ways to help people feel useful and connected.
That might mean rethinking education, community spaces, and how we support caregiving and volunteering, not just how we tax robots. The trouble is that culture usually changes more slowly than technology.
In the near term, evidence suggests that AI is changing tasks inside jobs more than it is wiping out entire roles. Office workers are experimenting with chatbots, managers are testing automated decision tools, and many companies are still struggling to turn AI pilots into real productivity gains.
That messy middle period can feel confusing for workers, but it also gives governments and employers time to build better safety nets and training programs before any truly massive wave of automation arrives.
Musk’s prediction captures the direction of travel for automation to a large extent, yet his timeline and the assumption that abundance will be shared fairly remain open questions. For now, work is nowhere near optional for most people, and money is very much part of daily life.
At the end of the day, the most useful part of his bold claim may be that it pushes the public conversation toward who should benefit if that sci-fi-style future ever becomes real.
