"Within ten years, money will no longer have value"
In a massive 90-minute interview at the Tesla factory in Texas, Elon Musk provides chilling predictions: AI that will surpass humanity within 5 years, a safety alliance with Sam Altman, cooperation with China, and a crash of the labor market. Also: what caused the billionaire to admit he "got carried away" in American politics?
"People do not understand that what I am saying will simply happen," declared the controversial billionaire Elon Musk in a comprehensive 90-minute interview with The Economist, while wearing a leather jacket with the logo of his chatbot, Grok, imprinted on the back. Musk describes himself as a "modern Cassandra" - a prophet who predicts the future with accuracy, but is doomed not to be believed.
His predictions this time range from the chilling to the bizarre: from AI surpassing the sum of all human intelligence within five years, to the total disappearance of the value of money within a decade, and a civil war that could break out in the UK within 20 years.
The conversation, held at the giant Tesla factory in Texas, is Musk's first extended interview since the dramatic IPO of SpaceX, which traded at a peak valuation of $2.6 trillion before experiencing a drop to about $1.6 trillion. Despite market fluctuations, the global influence of Musk, who recently became the first trillionaire in history, remains unprecedented.
An alliance of powers and a union with the rival
In the field of artificial intelligence, which he says moves "between excitement and pure anxiety," Musk offers a radical solution to the safety problem. Following the proposal of Demis Hassabis (founder of Google DeepMind), Musk calls not only for self-regulation by American companies, but for the direct inclusion of China in the oversight mechanism.
According to his vision, the world's leading AI labs should receive time to perform "peer review" on their competitors' new models before their release to the public, with the goal of flagging safety risks to governments in Washington and Beijing. "Competitors can keep each other honest," he explained.
To achieve this, Musk stated that he is willing to put aside the bitter conflict with Sam Altman, CEO of OpenAI: "Ultimately, if we need to talk - we will talk. We will both have to put personal differences aside for the good of the world."
Unlike other executives in the industry, Musk is not worried about the rise of Chinese AI labs like Moonshot AI, and warns that attempts by the US administration to block local companies from using Chinese models will not stop Beijing. According to him, China is much closer than commonly thought to solving the lithography problem (independent production of advanced chips), and it holds a huge advantage in electricity supply and robotics manufacturing capabilities.
A world without work and the matrix theory
According to Musk's scenario, robots and AI systems will replace almost all physical and digital jobs, making human labor "optional only." To deal with mass unemployment, he proposes a model of "high universal income" where the government will simply "hand out checks to citizens." Due to the unlimited supply of products and services produced by machines, Musk argues that deflation will be a much bigger problem than inflation, and money itself will lose its value.
Alongside the technological vision, Musk addressed his deep political involvement, which reached its peak in assisting the candidacy of Donald Trump in 2025 and his temporary appointment to cut federal bureaucracy. "I was dragged into it too much, to be honest," he admitted. However, Musk refused to back down from his firm positions on immigration issues in Europe, and accused the media of presenting the far-right in a distorted way: "These are normal people who want safe cities, protected borders, and balanced public spending."
When asked how all these contradictions fit together, Musk admitted that sometimes he himself doubts reality. He returned to his favorite theory, according to which the entire universe is a computer simulation: "The things I do are so absurd that it is hard to believe they are real."
