Elon Musk: ‘Saving money for the future is meaningless’

“Saving money for the distant future is meaningless when super intelligence brings abundance,” the world’s richest billionaire shared on social network X on October 29, attracting more than 2.8 million views and 4,000 comments after one day.

Musk made the comment in response to a user who said they weren’t too worried about their own “questionable financial decisions”, because they believe the world is moving towards a prosperous future, making it “almost unimportant”.

However, Musk’s article received many mixed opinions. “He said that because he had money. People without money cannot say that,” the account said The Data Lens comment.

“As a former high school teacher, I hope you stop talking about this. All the kids will hear is I don’t need to work hard or put in any effort“, account Wendy complain.

Theo ForbesMusk currently owns a fortune of $916.8 billion. Futurism It is estimated that if he burned 100 million USD every day for the next 20 years, he still wouldn’t be able to spend all the money.

This is not the first time the American billionaire has expressed his views on money. In podcasts The Builders broadcast on October 20, he commented: “Traditional currencies still exist, but are no longer important. Value will be measured by volume and capacity or energy.”

When talking with Peter Diamandis, President of the XPrize Foundation, in June, Musk said AI and robots will produce so many goods and provide so many services that there will be excess, exceeding the money supply, leading to deflation. With cheap automated labor and a stagnant money supply due to work being done by robots instead of humans, money is no longer needed.

Previously, in the podcast Moonshots with Peter Diamandis In January, the billionaire also gave advice: “Don’t worry about saving money for retirement in about 10 or 20 years. That’s not important. You won’t need to save for retirement.”

Last week, Nate Soares, a former Google engineer and current President of the Machine Intelligence Research Institute (MIRI), said he was no longer saving to prepare for retirement. “I had a retirement savings account when I worked at Google, but I stopped adding to it for a decade,” Soares shared on the podcast. The Most Interesting Thing in AI.

However, instead of believing that AI will bring an era of abundance like Musk, Soares stopped saving because he believes there is a more than 50% chance that humanity will no longer exist in 10 years. “I’m not really someone who worries that AI will wipe out jobs. In fact, I think AI will destroy all of humanity,” he said.

Soares’ concerns echo those of some tech leaders and researchers over the past few months. In September, Jacob Coxon, a senior researcher at Anthropic and formerly of OpenAI, suddenly resigned because he was worried that AI would grow out of control and “could kill us all by the end of the decade”. Evan Hubinger, Head of the Regulatory Science Group at Anthropic, then agreed: “We really believe AI can destroy humanity. Personally, I think this possibility will reach more than 10% in the next decade.”